By: Matt Warnock
Photos: Courtesy of Tom Couture
Moving between the Metal and Jazz worlds throughout his long and successful career, guitarist Alex Skolnick is one of the few musicians on today’s scene who can claim to have played Thrash Metal shows and appeared at the Rochester International Jazz Festival. After graduating from the New School in New York, where he studied jazz, Skolnick has been blazing a new trail with his music as he and his trio brings Metal, Rock and Jazz together in highly personal and effective combination. All of these influences can be heard on the band’s latest album, Veritas.
The new album finds Skolnick and his talented trio stepping away from the cover songs that they were known for earlier in their careers and moving into a more original direction, with engaging and entertaining results. The album features nine originals, one cover (Metallica’s Metal anthem “Fade to Black), and one remix. Each song is creatively conceived and carefully arranged, reaching beyond genres and classification to produce a sound that is neither Jazz nor Metal, it is purely Skolnick.
Guitar International recently sat down with Alex Skolnick to talk about his new record, his performances at this year’s NAMM show and what he thinks about his music being labeled as Jazz.
Alex Skolnick Trio
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Matt Warnock: On your latest record Veritas
Alex Skolnick: Absolutely. In fact, we almost did all originals on this album, but we figured that we should go out with a bang. Just one more cover before we go to all originals, and what better band to cover than Metallica and what better song to cover than “Fade to Black?”
That song introduced so many people to Heavy Metal, and it was a huge influence on me when I first heard it back in high school. I’ve actually had that arrangement on the back burner for a few years now, just thinking about it and trying to find the right time to record it. I do think that this album represents the direction that we’re going to be moving in with future recordings.
Matt: Was this a choice that you made as a band, to do more originals, or did it grow out of feedback from your fans?
Alex Skolnick: Honestly, it was a little of both. It was a matter of being honest, which gets into the title of the album, Veritas
It’s like learning to speak a new language. With each new album I felt more comfortable with what I wanted to say instrumentally. I listen to a lot of different kinds of instrumental music, not just guitarists, and I wanted this album to reflect all of the different musical influences I have in my playing and writing. On the other hand, people tell us that the covers we do come across as originals because we arrange them so differently from the original recordings. So even when we do covers, they tend to sound original because of our approach to those tunes.
Matt: Your music has been labeled as jazz, even though you have a Metal background and cover, at least on previous albums, a lot of Metal songs in an instrumental style. How do you feel when your music is put in the jazz category?
Alex Skolnick: I’m still figuring that out. I have a lot of issues with musical labels in general. I don’t really understand why everything has to be labeled. I used to read these interviews with Miles Davis, and he said he hated being called a jazz musician. He didn’t feel that his music should be called jazz, which is funny, because if you look up jazz in the dictionary there’s a picture of Miles and his horn. I understand where he was coming from.
Sometimes when you search for our albums online you’ll find them listed under Neo-Prog and Shred, which are terms that have nothing to do with our music. I’m thinking, “Do these people even listen to the music?” When you listen to the harmonic choices and the melodic choices we make, a lot of that comes from jazz. But, when you look at the genres that we delve into, we aren’t limited to just the jazz genre.
We’re not afraid to bring a lot of other styles into our songs. A recent article said that we’re vintage jazz guitar with modern melodic overtones. Another one said that we’re a modern jazz group that freely mixes in other genres. Both of those make sense to me, but I think that people need to listen to the music and make up their minds as to what they think about our music.
Alex Skolnick
Matt: When you’re working on a new tune, do you tend to get together as a group and jam things out, or do you like to write the skeleton yourself and then bring it to the band to build up from there?
Alex Skolnick: It works both ways. It used to be me bringing in charts of the tunes. When I moved to New York and studied music, I met Matt the drummer at the New School. One of the skills I learned there was how to write a chart and so I would bring in fully-written charts to the band to rehearse and then perform and record. I used those as a jumping off point for our tunes.
For this album, I had the idea to try the Bollywood thing, but the song “99/09” was just a groove that we were jamming on to warm up with. Then I started playing the guitar part over top of it, hit record and got us on tape jamming to it. After that we arranged it and added the B section and it became a full tune. For the tune, “Song of the Open Road,” I had done a demo of that before bringing it to the guys to work out from there. It was a combination of all these different approaches, so we didn’t have a set way to write any one of the tunes, just whatever seemed to work for any given tune.
Matt: I caught your concert at this year’s NAMM show, where you played to a packed crowd of people who seemed to be more fans of rock than jazz. Is that normal for you? That your crowds are more on the rock side and then you expose them to jazz with your music?
Alex Skolnick: It’s depends where we play. I remember one of our early gigs was at the Rochester International Jazz Festival. We were playing right after Dave Brubeck played, and the people who saw Brubeck stayed for our show. All age ranges because Brubeck has fans that are my grandparent’s age, and they loved it. It’s interesting because some people know me from Testament and others that know me from the guitar magazines more than anything else.
We definitely play rock venues for rock crowds, but also jazz venues full of people that want to hear jazz. That’s one of the fun things, is that it’s a different type of musical experience for fans that wouldn’t necessarily seek out this kind of music, but recognize my name, show up and have a good time. The people at NAMM might not be a crowd that would go out and hear Pat Metheny, but they recognize my name and they’ll check it out. I don’t compare myself to my favorite jazz players, and I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, I’m just trying to do my thing and hopefully people from many backgrounds will like it.
I do speak a lot about my favorite players, sort of like “If you like this then you should check out these other guys.” I’ve heard from a lot of people that have checked out Pat Metheny, Wes Montgomery and John Scofield because they heard us play and then got more into the jazz thing. So the crowds are mixed and that seems to be a good thing for us so far.
Alex Skolnick Trio
Matt: I also caught you playing a solo set at the Heritage booth during the NAMM show, which sounded great. Have you ever thought about doing a solo guitar record in that free-flowing, highly improvised style that you played that day?
Alex Skolnick: Yeah, you know I would love to. Absolutely. I guess I want to do it at some point in the future, but I think that I don’t want to try to do too much at once. Having done this trio record, I’m really focused on this music for the near term, but, down the road sure. I’d also like to do more acoustic stuff.
The song “Alone in Brooklyn” was something I was planning for a future acoustic album, but it fit well on this record. It started as just guitar, but then we added bass and drums and it really sounded great. So, I’m thinking about this stuff for the future, but don’t want to get ahead of myself, so the trio is where my focus is for right now.
Matt: When you get this music out on the road this year, are you focusing on playing clubs, concert halls or more jazz festivals?
Alex Skolnick: That’s what we want, to play more jazz festivals and concert halls. In all honesty it’s tough. When some promoters see my name they get scared a bit. They think, “A guy from a thrash band at a jazz festival?” No way. But things are changing.
If you check iTunes right now, the new album is right between Esperanza Spalding and Dave Brubeck, so people are coming around. We’re starting to see interest now. Some doors are opening that were previously closed to us. So people from the jazz community are starting to take us seriously and hopefully that will continue down the road as we move forward with the band and our music.
Matt Warnock is the owner of mattwarnockguitar.com, a free website that provides hundreds of lessons and resources designed to help guitarists of all experience levels meet their practice and performance goals, and is the author of the widely popular “30 Days to Better Jazz Guitar” series. Matt lives in the UK, where he is a lecturer in Popular Music Performance at the University of Chester and an examiner for the London College of Music (Registry of Guitar Tutors).
