*****Surfing with the Alien by Joe Satriani – Weep Techno Engineers, Satch Is Better than Machinery

If you are looking for a fan of Joe Satriani, I am not.  I like this Satch disk.  That is it.  Yes, it is true; I didn’t much care for his more recent work with Chicken Foot much too.  (Though I reviewed Chicken Foot first, I have been more familiar with Surfing with the Alien, since high school c. 1996, which I got after liking The Extremist.  However, I no longer like The Extremist).  I have never heard anything else of Satch’s, other than Surfing with the Alien that I liked or didn’t bore me.

I am positive that he is a phenomenal guitarist, but it is just that I never seem to like the music he solos over.  When Satch is king, he spoils the stew.  He usually sets it up so that he is the star, and the other instruments just support him.  He is a hog of the good music on his albums and usually I hate that, but this album despite being the guitar virtuoso at the center of attention, as if he is only person at the show is any good, this album is really good, really.  This is Joe’s best work so far as I know.  I do know a Satch fan who thinks Surfing with the Alien isn’t his swansong though, but as far as I know this is his best.

My favorite song on the album is track 4, “Always with Me, Always with You.”  Usually, I am not a fan of slow music, but this song is great.  Think Tears of Sahara if you are a Tony MacAlpine fan, oh yeah I forgot Tony MacAlpine has consistently put out better music than Satch, and suffers from obscurity.  This is a problem for many musicians, but I digress.  Track 4 is so lyrical, and Joe leaves nothing aside in the song that could hide his anything but perfect playing.  No computer techno beats could touch a song like this one.  It takes a human musician’s touch to make music like this.  You can’t program something as good as this for programming can’t account for the inflections of one’s touch on their instrument (provided that you are a good musician).

Just like a 5 star album should be, every track is awesome.  No second on Surfing with the Alien is wasted, start to finish, well almost, track 6, “Circles” is terrible.  That one almost got by me because my 100 disc shuffler usually never plays track 6 on any cds.  I have to wonder if the engineers where paranoid about the number 6.  666 the number of the beast or even the number 6 on its own sometimes creeps people out.  As I write my reviews, I usually have the disc in player while writing.  Oddly enough, at this point in the review track 6 came on, just as I was musing over how this disc is flawless.  Lol!  I have had this disc in the player for probably more than a year and never heard track 6 once, as usual, due to the weird engineering of whoever made my (actually, my wife’s) disc changer contraption.

***** Hotel Spendido by Al Di Meola – A Masterpiece: Buy This Album, It Is Not A Waste of Money

From start to finish this album is nothing but classic song after classic song. The mainstream really missed out on this album. Just as Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson made a short stint of radio airplay, I believe that this album could offer something to anyone in the way those two were a part of music even to a lowly pop music fan. Asides from that, as pop music is usually the worst kind of music, Al Di Meola could appeal to anyone, from the fan of Miles Davis to the fan of Metallica, or even a fan of Eric Clapton. In fact, Al Di Meola often borders on heavy metal shred, at the same time while never losing his jazz roots.

When I rate this album 5 stars, it is that I want to say that Hotel Splendido is one of the best albums ever! Really, Hotel Splendido is impossible to beat value as an album. It is one of my cherished classics, something that I could never really grow tired of. I use my 5/5 star rating very sparingly, and the reason for it is so that I can share with someone, anyone, that there is something magical about this album. There is something about this album that I could pull it out 50 years, 100 years, or even 1,000 years from now and sing the same songs of praise about the greatness of Hotel Splendido.

***** Maximum Security by Tony MacAlpine - Possibly the Best Shred Album Ever

Move over Joe Satriani.  There is someone who has fewer fans than you and is far more gifted.  Maximum Security is one of Tony MacAlpine’s better albums, and it is far better than anything the far more popular Satch has released.  What makes this album so awesome is the control MacAlpine exhibits over his guitar playing.  He isn’t just playing the notes; he is feeling the notes, such that the subtleties of this album that make it so awesome are probably measured better with microns rather than the larger unit of measurement, the millimeter.  This is a achieved because Maximum Security has a lot of bends and whammy bar work that is exceptionally tonally precise.  If you know anything about music, then you know that there can be more than 12 tones before reaching an octave.  For example, one can bend a note a quarter of a note, which is different than a quarter note of time.  What I am referring to his a quarter of a tone, not a quarter note, which refers to the length of time that the note plays for in notation.  The subtleties of this album probably make such that it would be impossible to tab it or use musical notation to describe the song unless one has heard one of the songs on this album first.  Sit back and listen, and stop guess exactly how much MacAlpine bent the note, and just appreciate the tremendous song writing and virtuosity on this album, which is great from start to finish.

Review of GHS 3 by Frank Gambale, Stuart Hamm, Steve Smith ****

An Often Overlooked Treasure.

This album is a summit of lesser known virtuosos from my parents generation.  That is, these names probably aren’t common knowledge to most folk.  I can totally see GHS 3 appealing to a wider audience than it was actually marketed to.  That is, if it was marketed at all.  This is jazz fusion, but comes across like a really good jam band.  There is quite a bit of instrument jamming that I think most hippies would appreciate.  If I remember correctly, Frank Gambale got started with Chick Corea’s jazz fusion effort, “Return to Forever.”  That was also the starting point for Al di Meola’s career, who is probably the most popular jazz guitarist today.  Back then, this sort of sound was visionary.  The sad thing is, a lot of it has gotten lost in the shuffle of good music.  Many may have heard of Weather Report or that Miles Davis played jazz fusion late in his career, and that was controversial among musicians, but most probably do not remember efforts like Return to Forever or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which were also important and influential bands in the movement toward fusion of jazz and rock.  Everyone who is younger and unearths this old music that was cutting edge in my parents’ generation, unearths a treasure.  Stuart Hamm has been the bass player for Satch, where when he played in that band he was asked to play the part of the rather boring background music while Satriani, the guitarist, went crazy.  I like Satch’s band ChickenFoot better than his solo career because in ChickenFoot it doesn’t seem like he tries to be the only center of attention.  I remember several times people telling me not to listen to the Satch if I wanted to listen to Stuart Hamm’s better work, and they were correct.  I was surprised that the Satch band formula worked, as it is seems very calculated.  However, to keep the rhythm section simple was probably the secret to Satriani’s success, as if he offered a greater slab of music, it may not have been palatable to a wide audience.