By: Dr. Matt Warnock
Following our hearts can sometimes force us to make difficult, and often life-changing decisions. In 1988, while recording the follow-up album to metal band Testament’s hit debut record, guitarist Alex Skolnick was flicking through the channels one night and came across a concert featuring the Miles Davis’ electric band. Initially intrigued, Skolnick began to further explore the world of jazz, and the genre’s most famous musicians, which led him to make a decision that would change the course of his life. His interest in jazz led him to take an indefinite leave of absence from the metal world, move to New York, pursue a degree in jazz studies from the New School and, in 2001, form the Alex Skolnick Trio. A tough decision to be sure, but one that has left Skolnick without regret.
Skolnick’s jazz trio has recorded three albums to date, including 2004’s Transformation on Magnatude records which featured a guest appearance by eight-string virtuoso Charlie Hunter. Not fully ignoring his metal past in pursuit of his newfound love of jazz, Skolnick’s records are a mixture of rock and metal covers and original tunes that feature both sides of the guitarist’s musical passion. By recording jazz-based interpretations of songs such as “Detroit Rock City,” “War Pigs” and the Scorpions “No One Like You,” Skolnick’s music has come under scrutiny from online jazz critics, while at the same time exposing jazz music to a whole new set of listeners. People who wouldn’t normally check out any jazz record, regardless of what songs were featured on it. This newfound group of listeners is something the jazz world, regardless of what the critics say, could use these days, as it faces shrinking audiences and album sales in reaction to stiff competition from other genres and entertainment options.
Balancing a reunion with his former band Testament, touring with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and gearing up for his trio’s latest release, Skolnick is proving that musicians in the twenty-first century don’t have to fit into one specific genre to be successful. That by following our hearts, and striving to reach the goals we set for ourselves, we can find a unique musical voice and still be successful. In that regard, no matter how some critics may feel about his music, Skolnick has achieved more than many musicians ever will.
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Matt Warnock: After spending many years developing your technique as a metal guitarist you made the jump over to jazz. Were you able to transfer those metal techniques over to your jazz playing, or did you have to start totally from scratch in that regard?
Alex Skolnick: I really had to start fresh. It might be different for others, but for me, I really needed to take an indefinite leave of absence from metal guitar. I didn’t know how long it was going to last, it wasn’t really planned, it was very instinctual. I realized that I liked to improvise more than I liked playing composed solos. I still loved to play songs, but the process of improvisation was really speaking to me. I felt like I needed to develop that further, and at the same time my interest in traditional jazz music grew.
I was first exposed to jazz through electric players like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, the more modern players. In an attempt to understand that music I began checking out more traditional jazz, and in the process I found that that music really spoke to me. I really found a connection to it. That was one of the reasons I decided to go with a hollow-body guitar. I changed my rig, changed my string size, changed everything. It was almost as if I was playing a completely different instrument.
Matt: You’re playing a Heritage right now, as opposed to the Ibanez’s you used to play in metal bands. What gauge strings are you using for your jazz playing, does it differ much from your metal setup?
Alex: I use thirteen’s and I’ve even been using those strings on my electric over the past few years as well. It’s gotten to the point where it now feels strange to play smaller strings. I’m comfortable on thirteen’s or twelve’s, but anything below that feels really strange.
Matt: That’s got to be a big jump up from the string gauge you used back in the ’80s playing metal.
Alex: Oh yeah, a huge jump. I started out playing nine’s and occasionally I would play ten’s. It was a big jump, but I didn’t go straight to thirteen’s, I played twelve’s for a while and then made the switch up. For a number of years I was really focusing on chord melodies and working on building my jazz vocabulary, so bending strings really wasn’t an issue. After a while I just got used to the heavier gauges and now that’s all I play.
Matt: Are you playing Heritage models exclusively now? You recently released the Alex Skolnick Signature model through Heritage, how’s that been going so far?
Alex: Yeah, I’m playing Heritage guitars for all my gigs now, acoustic and electric. The new model is in stores, mostly at Heritage dealers like Wolf Guitars in Florida. It’s an electric guitar, along the lines of the classic Les Paul design. It was designed with a lot of my specs in mind, though I’m not good at describing instruments in technical terms, that’s not one of my strengths. Laughs.
It has a neck that I think will be comfortable for both jazz and rock players. It’s on the thicker side, but it’s not too thick. It has extra heavy wood, a mahogany body, which gives it an extra warm tone. It has Seymour Duncan pickups in it, the ones that I use, and a Tone-Pros bridge, which gives it a little extra sustain.
Matt: Is that the model that you’re going to be playing going forward, or are you going to be switching between the signature solid-body and your hollow-body guitars?
Alex: For the trio I’m mostly using the hollow body. In fact, on the new album I only used the hollow body. The electric is more for the stuff I do with Testament and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, gigs where I need more of an electric sound from my guitar.
Matt: One of the main differences between soloing in a rock setting and soloing in jazz is the amount of chords and keys that are going by. Most rock songs tend to stay in one key, allowing players to think in bigger chunks of the neck when soloing, while jazz tunes move through keys all the time, which forces players to think in smaller sections of the neck and to focus on voice leading in their lines. How big of an issue was this difference in approach when you started to explore jazz improvisation?
Alex: I had to find a whole new system of soloing, which I was able to do over time. I’m going to be talking about my approach to jazz improvisation in a new Rock House DVD that will be coming out shortly. It’s basically a jazz guitar intensive course that talks about how I worked out these systems that I use in my jazz playing.
I couldn’t play jazz using the same patterns and fingerings that I was used to in rock. One of the things I did, in regards to scales, was to take the pentatonic scales, which are used in both rock and jazz, and use them to compliment the diatonic scales and chromatic stuff used in jazz. Rock guitar is basically based around the minor pentatonic shape, but in jazz all of the pentatonic shapes are important.
What I did was take the major pentatonic shape, which fits over a major based chord such as major seventh and seventh chords. I then took the three major modes, Ionian, Lydian and Mixolydian, and worked out those scale fingerings within the context of the major pentatonic shape.
I would work on exercises such as playing up the pentatonic and down the different modes in one position, which made playing across the neck much easier when I put them all together. I also used the same approach for the minor pentatonic scale, only using the Dorian, Phrygian and Aeolian modes in combination with the minor pentatonic shape.
I also kept these fingerings in one octave shapes. In metal there’s time to run up and down a three-octave scale, but in jazz the chords are moving so quickly that it’s hard to think that way. There’s really no time to make those three octave leaps because the chords are moving too fast. By combining the pentatonic scales with their relative modes it really made it much easier for me to sound all of the chords that were going by, more so than if I had stuck to the metal approach to soloing.
Matt: On top of having to change your left-hand approach to playing did you also have to change the way you picked in a jazz context? Both genres use alternate picking and sweeps but in completely different ways. If you listen to Jim Hall and Yngwie Malmsteen “sweeping” across three or more strings the effect is completely different. The same thing can be said for guys like Johnny Smith and Randy Rhoads when they use alternate picking. How different is your right hand approach when playing in those two different genres?
Alex: Some of the faster picking could be translated from metal to jazz, but that’s the exception. Overall I had to readjust my picking style, it had to be more relaxed and less aggressive when playing jazz. There’s almost a sense, when playing jazz guitar, of what I like to think of as bouncing. When changing notes in the left hand my fingers kind of bounce off the strings, and it’s the same thing with my pick. Thinking of it as a bouncing motion, as compared to a digging motion in rock, really helped me develop my jazz feel and sense of phrasing.
Matt: Aside from the technical differences, metal and jazz have completely different approaches to harmony, especially during improvisations. In metal, when the chord symbol says C guys will solo in the key of C, but in jazz that same chord could be interpreted as Am7, Em7 or even Ab7-G7-Cmaj7 etc, depending on the player and time period it came from. How hard was it for you to get these sounds into your ears, and then into your fingers, when it came to the concept of chord substitution and superimposition?
Alex: It was very challenging, and at first I couldn’t really understand why it worked. When I first started looking at these chords and their substitutions I would think, “These are technically wrong but they work, they sound great,” so it was hard to get past that issue when I first started. After a while I began to understand that it had a lot to do with placement, with timing and rhythm. Which is one of the things that isn’t emphasized enough early on in jazz education. It’s not that scales, chords and arpeggios aren’t important, but rhythm is much more important than we can possibly realize when we first start studying jazz.
Matt: Did you practice rhythm and feel like you practiced scales and arpeggios?
Alex: Well, at first I tried to just think about it and do it mentally, but that didn’t really work. So I started listening a lot to players’ time and feel, not just their notes. I would listen to a lick off of an album, on any instrument. It could be Woody Shaw’s trumpet or Bill Evans’ piano, and then figure out why it worked, both melodically and rhythmically. I was also trying to keep things simple. Because I was first attracted to jazz through the more modern players I had to take a step back and check out some of the more traditional players to help make sense of it all.
I can remember checking out Keith Jarrett playing standards, which I thought was amazing, but it was so far beyond my comprehension at that time. So I went back and learned licks by players such as Charlie Christian, which was still a challenge, but I could grasp it better than Keith Jarrett, and I slowly built up from there.
Matt: You mentioned learning licks off records, which is an essential tool in any jazz players learning process. Did you ever transcribe full solos or were you more focused on pulling specific licks that grabbed your attention?
Alex: It started out with more licks and phrases than full solos. I think it’s great to learn full solos, and I’ve definitely done that, but I don’t think it’s good to limit ourselves to just full solos. It can be frustrating because it’s a difficult thing to do, and often we’ll get stuck on one really hard lick and it’s hard to stay motivated when we get stuck like that. But, if we just pick out a few licks and phrases I think it’s a better thing to do, and we can always go back and get those tougher licks later on when we’re further down the road in our development.
Another thing I do, which Kenny Werner talks about in his book Effortless Mastery, is take the most challenging lick from a solo we’re working on and then practice it really slowly, but in time. Slow it down to half speed and don’t play it any faster than you’re comfortable with, even if it’s painfully slow. Even learning a hard lick at half speed can have big benefits in our playing, sometimes more than we can see at the time.
Matt: When you first made the switch over to jazz from metal, did you come across any resistance from the jazz community, or were fans and critics pretty welcoming?
Alex: I did feel like an outsider, but it was something that I felt in metal because of my listening tastes and my background, so I was used to it. I come from an academic, middle-class family, which made me a bit of an outsider on the metal scene. I’ve kind of gotten used to being an outsider, its part of my gig, so it doesn’t bother me to be labeled as such.
I think it makes things more interesting in a way. There are a lot of insiders, in both metal and jazz, that don’t really get heard at all because they tend to blend in too much with what’s going on around them. If you put too much effort into fitting in then you won’t stand out.
When I moved to New York and started taking classes at the New School I felt very welcomed. I think that most of the teachers were flattered by the fact that I would leave a genre where I was selling a lot of records, definitely more than I would later on in jazz, and enroll in a serious, academic study of the genre. I think that commitment really helped people understand why I was doing it and they were welcoming because I was so serious about it.
Most of the negative response I’ve gotten has come online. I think everybody has severe online critics, no matter who they are, so I don’t take it too seriously. I have to have thick skin sometimes. I’ve seen some websites with scathing posts by critics who say that I have no business playing jazz, but for the most part that kind of reaction has remained online. It’s made me realize that I could play jazz for the rest of my life and never fully satisfy the critics.
Matt: You’re on tour now with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and have recently done a reunion tour with Testament, are there plans for a new Alex Skolnick Trio record in the near future?
Alex: Yes, the new album is recorded. We did it in the fall of 2009 and it’s waiting to be mixed, which will be done when I get back from the Orchestra tour. It’s nine tracks, all originals, except for one tune. I don’t want to give that away just yet, but I can guarantee that no one in jazz has ever covered this tune before.
Testament will also be doing a new album coming up. I kind of got caught up in the whole Testament reunion thing because we did this new album that was really well received. I was never planning on going back, I wasn’t dead set against it, but I didn’t want to do it if it felt like a step backwards. But because I can tour with both Testament and my trio it feels good, I can still do both and be happy.
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Links
Last Day in Paradise on Amazon
Goodbye To Romance: Standards For A New Generation on Amazon
