Location: Grado / Diga Nazaro Saurio / Italy
Date: Friday, 04.07.2014
The ultimate musical wizard and one of the most important musical visionaries of the eighties, who helped popularize the term “guitar rock” and whose work helped many other guitar masters bring their unsuspected talents to the masses in the form of original music, is of course the one and only Joe Satriani. Last year the man released the studio album “Unstoppable Momentum”, which is still current this year too. Back in May and June of last year he was on European concert stages, presenting it on 25.05.2013 as well, on his third stop in Slovenia to date. Satriani first played here on 09.07.2004 as part of the G3 tour, back then in the company of his former student Steve Vai and the magnificent Robert Fripp (King Crimson), and the second time on his own solo tour promoting what was then his current studio release, “Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards”. That happened on November 10, 2010. Joe’s popularity, or more precisely, for today’s times, his standing among everyone who puts any stock in guitar-playing mastery, is neither fading nor slipping. His concerts are still packed with older and younger music fans alike, especially those who revel in Satriani’s great knack for combining highly defined melodies, within which this wizard always resourcefully carves out plenty of room to show off his astonishing guitar tricks. Those remain the main attraction and the thrill of his live shows. At the same time, his tracks (in terms of composition) keep a red thread of great compactness running through them, since they don’t allow experimental oddities that would lead to the fragmenting of their motifs. Avant-garde, in other words, is not allowed in. The man remains welcome on every concert stage in 2014 too. Since he’s in such high demand, he likes to extend his tours. And so he extended the tour promoting the album “Unstoppable Momentum”. The summer dates brought him just a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border, to be exact to an Italian seaside resort town near Monfalcone called Grado, where he played as part of the annual festival cycle “Ospiti Di Autore”.
For this leg of the tour too, Joe Satriani kept by his side the crew who had accompanied him on the first leg, when he also played with them in Ljubljana. The most eye-catching name among them belongs to multi-instrumentalist Mike Keneally, who is known, among other things, for working with Frank Zappa and who has played in Ljubljana before, with Steve Vai. That was on 13.04.2000 at the Tivoli hall in Ljubljana. Also still on stage with Satriani is the outstanding rhythm duo of German drum grandmaster Marco Minnemann and brilliant American bassist Bryan Beller, who make up two thirds of the cheekily wild camaraderie of experimental fusion within the trio The Aristocrats.
Even though the clock had long since struck nine, the Diga Nasario Sauro venue was relatively empty. Raven Eye took the stage as the opening act. American retro-sound rockers who dig through the archives of simple riff rhetoric from the old days when rock was still young, and who make up for the usual predictability and trivial design of their expressive figures with the unbridled voltage of eruptive, adrenaline-fueled haste, the kind dictated by the testosterone surplus of young stallions itching to prove themselves! A doom-flavored echo of Sabbath messaging likes to sneak into the stripped-down, charging riffs, and in terms of garage-y liveliness you could slap a label like MC5 on them. Of course. It’s recycling that’s all the rage again. All that’s missing are the tattered lumberjack shirts. Someone heard Wolfmother-style revivalism in them, someone else heard Graveyard, and a third person quickly tossed out a third sensible comparison. This kind of revivalism is booming and current. Garage-y, raw, spiky, with no serious difficulty when it comes to getting into their musical dossier. No special musical philosophy, nothing we haven’t heard before. Still, the band cured the genericness with heart and a lot of commitment! With this unbridled approach, exemplary stage dynamics and delivery of the material, Oli Brown, Sam Weston and Kev Hickman quickly won over the crowd, who sent the band off at the end with some serious applause. As for Raven Eye’s compatibility with the evening’s main star, there’s of course no point wasting any extra thought on that.
About fifteen minutes to ten in the evening, though, the venue was properly packed. The stage goes dark, and to a taped intro the four masters walk out, led by guitar excellence Joe Satriani. The band launches into that beloved, familiar number! Cool #9. The crowd is Satch’s in an instant!
The grandmaster, in fine spirits, who will turn a “round” 58 in a little over a week, even though he looks 30 at most, radiated youthful exuberance, mischief and total relaxation, and what is his great virtue and trademark: a general, all-embracing positivity with which he instantly wins over absolutely everyone. No need to say that Joe played this concert without a single mistake too. If there was one somewhere, probably only he noticed it. With the bandleader in such great spirits, his three buddies didn’t skimp on the high-spirited mood of great performing cheer either. Already the second number in the set, Devil’s Slide (from the album “Engines of Creation”, released in 2000), brought Mike Keneally to the front of the stage, who was basically in charge of keyboards! Compared with the Keneally who played last year in Ljubljana’s Cvetličarna, he has lost a hefty bunch of kilos. The man, who wore an official Mastodon shirt, has for years been the key element in Satriani’s gradual transition from a strict “one man band” culture of approaching music to one that radiates team spirit. Satriani’s latest records sound far more like a team effort than those the master recorded ten or more years ago. Keneally is a master of jazz rock fusion, and realizing his wildest ideas, if not downright experimental avant-garde “pranks”, inherited in part from hanging out with Frank Zappa, is a feather-light matter for him. Like munching hot rolls. Nothing stays hidden from him! and Satriani makes good use of him in every single creative adventure. Keneally, who is fully involved in filling out Satriani’s guitar antics, where he usually keeps up the backdrop with keyboards as well as filling the available motif space of the songs with extra bits of improvisation, often shows up beside Satch shoulder to shoulder, accompanying him on guitar. In those spots he even gets a sliver of room to fire off a solo or two. The chemistry between Satch and Keneally shone more intensely pretty soon. When the new, progressively dynamic Three Sheets to the Wind landed on the setlist.
It would be unfair to overlook Satriani’s rhythm tandem, who seem to be in a trance. If you know the musical reach of the boundless experimentalism of The Aristocrats, and the fact that Minnemann missed by a hair’s breadth ending up in Dream Theater instead of the then “burnt-out” and now “repentant” Portnoy, any further discussion is really pointless. Especially with the new numbers, with which he at times radically edges toward flirting with elements of jazz and rock fusion, Satriani showed that for him there are still musical horizons he wants to discover and mature artistically with. One such outstanding number, which thrilled with exceptional tightness despite its performance difficulty, got its place in the performance of Lies and Truths. The especially softly played Three Sheets to the Wind also sounded excellent, a great blend of blues, jazz and of course rock, in which Satriani’s genius is perfectly topped off by Keneally’s playful improvisations. Therein also lies the answer to why the album “Unstoppable Momentum” is so strongly represented in the tour’s repertoire. Simple. The quartet enjoys the team spirit, and the new album’s tracks give especially lots of room for moments of collective jamming. Satriani started steering more heavily in this direction with his adventure in Chickenfoot, where the band (the team) comes first and where the individual’s ego must first obey the band’s team spirit!
When half of the concert had rolled by, Satriani invited everyone present for a ride in a big Cadillac: “Don’t worry. It’s really large Cadillac and you can all fill in!” Of course he didn’t forget to remark that the day of the Grado concert was, precisely, the American holiday of Independence Day. Well, well… It’s nice to be a patriot (though not at any price, and we’ll leave the rest of the musings on that subject to Slavoj Žižek). The band, namely, tackled the new Shine On American Dreamer, dedicated to the USA. Let me mention that the band was accompanied in the background by a spacious screen filled with film and animation playback, which sensibly enhanced the sensuality and moods of the individual numbers in the repertoire.
Satch of course seasoned his repertoire with the classics that his audience comes for in the first place! First among them is Flying In A Blue Dream, then Ice 9, Satch Boogie, a surprise on the setlist, namely a performance of Time Machine, which replaced the newer Jumpin’ In and Jumpin’ Out in the repertoire, which Satch played on a blue Ibanez JS24PCA guitar bearing the red Chickenfoot logo. After that he grabbed a black Ibanez guitar and played the most recognizable song of his career. The one-of-a-kind instrumental evergreen Always with Me, Always with You, and he poured oil on the fire in a grandiose finish to the regular set with a rendition of the title track of his unforgettable album, in many ways groundbreaking for the world rock scene, “Surfing With the Alien”. The end of the concert was as expected. With the obligatory encores Crowd Chant and Summer Song and a thoroughly stretched-out “fade-out” that included three repeats.
An hour and fifty minutes of walking through exceptional musical and instrumental aesthetics along the perfect middle line between ultra-melodic catchiness and the free-spirited playfulness of improvisation from the one-of-a-kind master of the six-string bible stunned those present with performing brilliance, and they just wouldn’t stop rewarding the quartet with explosive outbursts of enthusiasm. Simple! The guitar wizard delivered, once again, the best of what he does. And in that he remains one of a kind and inimitable.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Cool #9
2. Devil’s Slide
3. Flying in a Blue Dream
4. Unstoppable Momentum
5. The Weight of the World
6. Ice 9
7. The Crush of Love
8. I’ll Put a Stone on Your Cairn
9. A Door into Summer
10. Lies and Truths
11. Satch Boogie
12. Shine On American Dreamer
13. Three Sheets to the Wind
14. Cryin’
15. Drum solo
16. Time Machine
17. Always with Me, Always with You
18. Surfing with the Alien
—encore—
19. Crowd Chant
20. Summer Song
