With the NCAA tournament starting up again, the blogosphere has been lit up with brackets of all sorts and our corner of the music world is not immune. I was intrigued with the drama and thrilling upsets last year's tournaments, but there's even more this March. Here's five jamband brackets, some thoughts on how last years tourneys shaped up, and a look into what's up in 2013.
1. Not the most informative bracket, but easily the prettiest. The folks at dead.net offered a matchup of the 22 shows of the celebrated Europe '72 tour featuring an interactive graphic of Scott McDougall's beautiful cover art for the expanded box set. You can pick your own favorites and submit a completed bracket, but no results were ever tallied to my knowledge.
2. Online Phish Tour ran a clever bracket in 2012, pitting the best Phish "runs" of all time against each other in four regions nicknamed Boy, Man, God & Shit. I had a blast picking some of underdogs along the way. Their seedings were spot on and I can't argue with how the Final Four shaped up and even the winner (since I've been a vocal supporter of the unpopular opinion that the music from Big Cypress does not hold up well). Long live Island Tour!
That said, the folks at OPT are back with another round in 2013. This time, they are focussing only on 3.0, with each of the four years in this era representing a a region of 16 competitors. I have no doubt that a 2012 jam will prevail, but watching the matchups evolve is quite a treat.
3. And that's not the only meticulously researched Phish bracket available this year. The Phish podcast TypeIICast and phish.net are offering what they call The Ultimate Phish Nerdgasm. A bracket which forces a showdown among the best versions of songs whose selection was governed by a list of elaborate rules. The selection itself sounds grueling and apparently you can listen to these geeks talk about it for nearly two hours (I consider myself a total nerd and that even sounds unbearable to me) on their podcast. Still, very hard to dispute the "best jams" list that they arrived at with phish.net backing their effort, there should be a ton of participation before we ultimately end up with a winner.
4. Panic Stream is at the center of an incredible Widespread Panic community and provide a valuable resource for fans of a variety of bands. In 2012 they packaged 64 songs into a bracket to determine the best Panic song, regardless of indvidual performance or version. With over 1500 votes received, "Diner" edged out "Chilly Water" in competition for the top spot, but real fireworks came watching #1 seed "Space Wrangler" not advance to the Sweet Sixteen and #9 seed "Bowlegged Woman" make an underdog run only to be quashed by "Fishwater".
This year, they up the ante by constructing a bracket consisting of specific versions of songs and having a streamable playlist on each voting page to get voters more familiar with the performances in question. Nice work!
5. The fine Umphrey's McGee blog Umplugged Musings.com has gotten into the action in 2013 as well. Using the web tournament platform Brackateers, they were able to attach YouTube clips of their field of 64. Voting is now open, so go out and pick some winners.
