John Petrucci & Jordan Rudess
An Evening With John Petrucci & Jordan Rudess

News number 1: Petrucci (as we know) is the guitarist of Dream Theater, and is hopelessly in love with experimentation (which is sometimes pushed to the point of being self-serving), a friend to the greatest contemporary virtuoso guitarists (in the last G3 it's him along with Vai and Satriani).

News number 2: Jordan Rudess is the keyboardist of Theater, where he took over the legacy of Kevin Moore, having grown up enchanted by King Crimson, Chopin, Hendrix, Genesis, Bach, Pink Floyd, Yes: from this handful of data, you can already imagine how gifted and perhaps eccentric the musician might be...

News number 3: The two have a penchant for embarking on thrilling joint-ventures with musicians from vastly different musical approaches. DT fans and those of Tony Levin (amazing!!!) will surely know the two Liquid Tension Experiment, fabulous projects in which we find the participation of the two subjects at hand (how delightful to say "projects-subjects at hand").

News number 4: You won't find this disc in your little shop (still rhymes): you had to buy it online from Petrucci's site when it was available! Now “this CD is currently not available but will soon be re-released with bonus tracks” so just drool as you wait for the new edition to be released containing the full concert and the duo’s dialogues. Or find a copy here and there, but you’ll have to work a bit to track it down not in a bootleg version.

News number 5: This is a little masterpiece of semi-acoustic prog-rock: two demons who, while enriching each other and mutually exalting, tune moments of excitement and tension interspersed with reflective "tantric" pauses.

"An Evening With John Petrucci & Jordan Rudess" was released in December 2000 in memory of an epic show in June 2000 at the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center, precisely in Nyack, New York. It contains seven tracks in which various different musical fields are explored. It ranges from pure piano fantasies (“Truth”), very Schumann-like, to improvisation with a semi-distorted guitar sound reminiscent of Ritchie Kotzen in Electric Joy, to the pseudo-Celtic music sketched in “Fife & Drum,” a lovely melody where accent variations highlight the frequent rhythm changes. Impeccably precise unisons, musical jokes, dangerous crossovers of scales, chords, and arpeggios played with elegance and sophistication: there’s a bit of everything to catch your interest. Petrucci proves to be completely at ease with the acoustic guitar and even with Spanish-influenced rhythms. Sometimes he manages to echo the feeling of legendary figures like Paco de Lucia (for the interpretation of the Spanish guitar) and the blender-hand of Al di Meola in Latin jazz. Jordan Rudess has a classical background (I believe not symphonic but concert) and his advanced piano studies are evident. It’s a record that’s never banal, full of pleasant passages, although it tends toward arrogance and conceit when it becomes pure academia (Petrucci’s digression at the beginning of Black Ice being an example). I recommend it to you. Or maybe not, I can’t afford to with virtuosos. You might argue that being an astounding instrumentalist automatically implies not knowing how to offer emotions. So don’t seek it out. In fact, do this, forget the contents read in this review, leave to me alone the delight granted by listening to two fellows who know how to play their instruments...