Earlier this week, Trey introduced us to a guitar with a special connection to the legendary Koa 1, and since then he’s been playing this special axe for the opening nights of Phish’s 2025 summer tour.  The guitar, which Trey is calling “Koa 1.5,” was built with the same stock of Koa and around the same time as the venerable Koa 1, making it the closest known relative to that legendary guitar and one of very few known Languedoc Guitars built primarily from Koa.

Describing the guitar, Trey told me: “It was previously owned by Paul Asbell, who was not only my guitar teacher and friend in the 80’s, but he was also Tony Markellis’ closest bandmate and musical brother with Big Joe Burrell and the Unknown Blues Band.” Reflecting on that time in Vermont, Trey said, “We are all part of the Burlington, Vermont musical tapestry, so it’s so deeply gratifying that Paul gave me this guitar,” which Trey described as “the Soul Sister to KOA 1.”

Paul Asbell  is a veteran of the Burlington music scene. He was a founding member of Kilimanjaro, along with Tony Markellis. In 1981, Markellis, Asbell and others formed Big Joe Burrell and the Unknown Blues Band, which enjoyed great success regionally until Big Joe’s passing in 2005. Trey first met Markellis at an Unknown Blues Band gig, and the band played at Trey and Sue’s wedding in August of 1994. Asbell and Trey have also been friends since the 1980s, and Trey was among Asbell’s guitar students in Burlington in those early days. Asbell continues to release music and perform in the northeast.

In his video introducing the guitar, Trey explained that Adam Buchwald at Circle Strings installed a a middle pickup in Koa 1.5 to give it the same feature set as Blonde No 1 (aka Who’s the Mar Mar?): dual humbuckers plus a middle single coil.  

Trey played the guitar when he sat in with the Dezron Douglas Quartet in late March, 2024 at the legendary Village Vanguard in New York, but that was prior to the work done on the guitar by Adam at Circle Strings. So Summer 2025 is effectively the first time Trey is playing the fully configured 1.5.

The back of Koa 1.5.
This photo from 2024 was taken soon after Trey acquired the guitar and before he replaced the dual-stacked silver volume and tone knobs with his standard black metal knobs. The white switch is the coil drop.
Above, Koa 1.5 after Trey removed and filled the coil drop switch and replaced the silver knobs with the black metal knobs that he uses on his other guitars. He also swapped in Rewind Electric humbuckers.
Another photo of the fretboard from 2024.
Above, Trey playing the 1.5 with Dezron in 2024 before the middle coil was added. At this point, the guitar was very hard to distinguish from Koa 1 in photos.