If you asked fans of 63-year-old guitarist Steve Vai (www.vai.com) what he’s best-known for, you might get a variety of answers.
One might be the Long Island, N.Y., native’s recording and touring run within the fusion of styles created by Frank Zappa (1940-1993). Those seeds were sown when Vai — still a student at the Berklee College of Music in Boston — sent him exacting transcriptions of every instrument within the iconic vocalist, guitarist and bandleader’s own complex compositions in the late 1970s. Vai then moved to Los Angeles, where he still lives, to become what Zappa labeled his ensemble’s “stunt guitarist” through 1983.
Another answer might be Vai’s continuing 40-year solo recording career, launched in 1984 with an audio acid trip called Flex-Able. Or his appearance in director Walter Hill’s blues-centric 1986 film Crossroads, in which he portrays the Devil’s guitarist Jack Butler, and enacts a guitar duel with actor Ralph Macchio’s character (with slide guitar parts played by Ry Cooder) for possession of his soul.
Vai was also part of singer David Lee Roth’s famed post-Van Halen band from 1985-1989; played on Whitesnake’s top-selling 1989 album Slip of the Tongue and subsequent tour, designed Ibanez’s JEM and Universe seven-stringed guitars, and founded the Favored Nations recording label with former Guitar Center owner Ray Scherr in 1999.
Then there’s the guitar-themed G3 Tour, started in 1996 by fellow guitarist and Long Island native Joe Satriani, a former Vai instructor. The devilish, scene-stealing Vai has been part of more than two-thirds of those tours since, including the early 2024 West Coast reunion of its original lineup, with Texan Eric Johnson as the third featured guitarist.
Friends for more than 50 years, Satriani and Vai make a stop at the Pompano Beach Ampitheater on their duo “Satch-Vai U.S. Tour” on March 23.
“Joe’s the best,” Vai says by phone from Seattle before a G3 Tour show. “He’s a few years older, but he was always very cool and sharing in his guitar lessons. He was strict, and expected you to do what was required, so I always felt like there was someone pulling me up. I can’t imagine what my playing, career and life would’ve been like without those precious lessons from him in my youth. Joe and I are also writing some new music together, and we’ll have one song, with a video, that’ll be complete before the Satch-Vai Tour to surprise people with live.”
Flex-Able was actually recorded on Vai’s home eight-track recording console, and considered even by him to be too musically A.D.D. for actual release. But its signature tune, the unevenly-timed instrumental rocker “The Attitude Song,” helped make it possible. The song had gotten an overwhelming response from readers of Guitar Player magazine after being inserted as an appropriately flexible disc that could be played on a turntable.
Drummer Chris Frazier (Foreigner, Whitesnake, Edgar Winter, Eddie Money) recorded on that tune along with two other Flex-Able tracks, the instrumental “Viv Woman” and tongue-in-cheek vocal pop number “The Boy/Girl Song.” And he matched Vai beat-for-note in the dizzying, Mahavishnu Orchestra-like runs of “The Attitude Song.”
“I had just moved to Los Angeles a few weeks before,” Frazier says, “and saw an ad in the local ‘Music Connection’ rag that mentioned a guitar player looking for a drummer familiar with odd time signatures. Steve liked the way I played, so we recorded ‘Viv Woman.’ Then he said he had something more challenging, which turned out to be ‘The Attitude Song.’”
“I haven’t played that one in a while,” Vai says with a laugh. “It’s a bit of a beast. I think I started making that album when I was 22 years old, but my innocence and naivete actually enabled me to be pretty free and do whatever my heart intended. I didn’t even know what I was doing in the studio, but was fascinated with the process of recording. Luckily, I had years under my belt with Zappa. He loaned me equipment to record with, and everything I knew had come from just watching him.”
As with Zappa, trying to pinpoint a musical genre that Vai fits into is pointless. There’s every variation of rock, including the metallic offshoots his Ibanez guitars are famous for representing, but also elements of classical music, blues and jazz, plus Middle Eastern and other world music offshoots. Like his musical mentor, Vai might only play guitar on stages during most live performances, but he’s vastly more than a one-dimensional instrumentalist.
“When I was very young, before I started playing guitar, I wanted to be a composer,” Vai says. “So I started writing a variety of music through high school as well as becoming a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player. I have a compositional mind, so even though I can’t play piano or drums, I can see the parts in my head and then transcribe or program them. It’s not uncommon for composers to create parts they can’t necessarily play.”
“Then I discovered how difficult and expensive it is to get your music performed by an orchestra. But a friend of mine in Holland, [Zappa author and enthusiast] Co De Kloet, solicits the government for creative projects to benefit Dutch culture. And he raised enough money for me to put on my first concert with the Metropole Orkest over there in 2003. Within a couple years we’d done a few more concerts, which have come out as the two volumes called ‘Sound Theories,’ the moniker I use to release my orchestral music. And I have about four more hours of music on my shelf that I’ve recorded with them and with the Finnish Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra.”
Vai’s 1996 release Fire Garden is one case in point regarding his compositional and instrumental dexterity. And beyond. On his neo-classical, 10-minute “Fire Garden Suite,” a four-part instrumental opus with heavy rock undertones, Mike Mangini is credited with drums; Vai with “everything else.” Which means he’s not only responsible for a wall of different stringed instruments, but also the programming that surrounds his otherworldly guitar figures. The second half of the album features his lead vocals as well.
Mangini was part of Vai’s quartet for the 1996 and 1997 G3 Tours, along with bassist Philip Bynoe, who sometimes played a double-neck bass in which the second neck was a keyboard. Its fourth component was another Long Island native, former Satriani student, and ex-Zappa band member Mike Keneally, who wowed crowds by playing stereo guitar parts with Vai (a staple of “The Attitude Song”) and adding keyboards and percussion. He even nailed Robert Plant’s vocals by singing Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” on some tour stops from that era. Keneally also recorded and toured with Satriani in the 2010s as a guitarist/keyboardist.
Bynoe remains in Vai’s current quartet lineup, which is rounded out by second guitarist Dante Frisiello and drummer Jeremy Colson.
“Philip’s been in the band for more than 25 years now,” Vai says, “and Jeremy’s been in it for almost that long. My previous other guitarist, Dave Weiner, recently moved on after 23 years. But he found a replacement in Dante, who was one of his students. Dave taught him all the parts, and he really delivers.”
Zappa’s career included featuring versatile singing rhythm guitarists like Jeff Simmons, Ike Willis and Ray White before prostate cancer necessitated the bandleader’s retirement from touring in the late 1980s. But the maestro also had outside-the-box thinkers as alternate lead guitar foils, a role Vai relished. Adrian Belew would go on to find a lasting home with progressive rock titans King Crimson. And Keneally has blended Zappa’s influence with Todd Rundgren’s through his progressive pop solo career, and now tours with all-purpose prog-rock tribute act ProgJect.
Yet Vai might have gone furthest afield in coming out from under Zappa’s long shadow by blending his influence with that of other classically tinged rock guitarists (Brian May, Ritchie Blackmore), plus the hard-to-define fusion styles of Jeff Beck and Allan Holdsworth.
“There’s a rock ‘n’ roll-type energy to my music, but it’s very diverse,” says Vai. “My brain has kind of always mixed together rock with compositional music. And what emerges is something I don’t otherwise know how to classify.”
To say it’s a bridge linking Satriani’s rock instruction with Zappa’s genre-be-damned approach wouldn’t be a stretch. Vai’s latest release is last year’s straight-ahead rocker Vai/Gash, a project from the 1990s with vocalist Johnny “Gash” Sombretto that Vai had shelved after the singer died in a motorcycle accident in 1998. Vai’s previous album, the 2022 instrumental release Inviolate, features Bynoe, Colson, ex-Roth bassist Billy Sheehan and ex-Zappa drummers Terry Bozzio and Vinnie Colaiuta. With Vai on the cover sporting a customized Ibanez triple-necked instrument, it’s where most of his current live material is drawn from.
“I’m still in the mode of promoting the music from ‘Inviolate,’” he says. “I really enjoy playing it, even after touring on it for 194 shows over 19 months in 51 different countries. So there will be a lot of that material, along with a couple back-catalog reaches; whether it’s stuff I’ve never played live before or tunes that’ll get resurrected.”
Of course, Vai will also perform with Satriani’s quartet (rounded out by keyboardist Rai Thistlethwayte, bassist Bryan Beller and drummer Kenny Aronoff) to end the show, a tradition whether on the G3 Tour or otherwise.
“We’ll come out at the end and jam on some classic rock songs,” says Vai. “It’s always nice to get the opportunity to play with other folks like this, because they always help you to up your game. I was going to try to sing ‘Crossroads’ [the Cream cover of the Robert Johnson blues composition that gave Vai’s 1986 film its title]. It was a bit out of my vocal range, but Rai, who’s quite the musical force to be reckoned with, sings it and nails it.”
If You Go
See the “Satch-Vai U.S. Tour” at the Pompano Beach Ampitheater, 1806 Northeast 6th St., Pompano Beach
When: 7:30 p.m. March 23
Tickets: $49.50-$177
Info: 561-223-7231, www.pompanobeacharts.org