Vai prepares to give his Alien Guitar Secrets Master Class seminar at the RockStar Music School in Bolton, Ont.JENNIFER ROBERTS
Instrumental master classes have changed a lot in the half-century or so since touring virtuosi such as Andres Segovia and Yehudi Menuhin would hold sessions with groups of local prodigies in venerable conservatories or concert halls.
A new-millennium variation took place last Tuesday night at the back of a shopping plaza in suburban Bolton, Ont., northwest of Toronto, behind a McDonald's, and across Highway 50 from a Wal-Mart and a Canadian Tire - headquarters for the RockStar Music School & Concert Hall, with a staff of six instructors and a fully equipped mini-theatre. Yes, Jack Black's School of Rock has been institutionalized.
The very special guest guitar instructor tonight is Steven Vai, 49, part of a generation of speed demons such as Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen and John Petrucci who came to prominence in 1970s and 1980s, and who are still revered by boomer and Gen-X-aged hobbyists.
As with a class in Calgary two days earlier, his three-hour session is limited to 100 students. And for $250 a pop, about 50 have shown up - predominantly thirtysomething men, some accompanied by their wives or girlfriends.
Tracy Smith, a 35-year-old graphic designer who's driven all the way from Kane, Pa., one of several participants who's brought the Ibanez electric guitar model that Vai endorses. "It was made to duplicate his completely," Smith says.
Vai, the son of a New York bartender, shot to fame (at least among guitar slingers) when he was hired by Frank Zappa in 1979, first as a musical transcriptionist, then as a band member. Vai is a graduate of Boston's Berklee College of Music, and he toured and recorded with David Lee Roth, has composed orchestral scores and backed Nelly Furtado on solo guitar at the 2002 Grammy Awards. A wonderfully sonorous and melodic player, he's a master of electronic effects and techniques like finger tapping with both hands on the guitar neck.
So why is Vai not touring with a band, like other, um, mature rock acts? In 2007, Vai's tour stop in Toronto was Massey Hall. And he has a new live DVD to promote, Where the Wild Things Are .
Vai started experimenting with the classes about a year ago in Los Angeles, and has since staged dozens, many in Europe and one in Tel Aviv. "I really enjoyed it, and I felt like I had a responsibility to share some of the things I learned," he says. It's also "a nice way to break into certain territories without having to drag a band there and lose money."
He now has a detailed eight-page plan for the class. There are 21 sections, and the early ones cover things like "meditational exercises" and "visualization." But most of it appears to be more practical - scales, ear training, recording your own album, dealing with agents and so on.
It looks promising and challenging to me, a boomer weekend bar-band guitarist in a Top 40/classic-rock outfit. As Vai and I finish the interview, we pick up guitars, and he starts playing rhythm. "D-minor," he says. I noodle around on a pentatonic scale. "So," he says, "you're a player. Yeah, man!" But he then confuses me by changing chords.
Shortly after 6 p.m., Vai walks onstage, plugs in a guitar and declares, "If I'm too loud, too bad!" He keys in a recorded backing track on a laptop computer and starts wailing.
Afterward, he sits down and starts talking about his mental approach. Sometimes when he plays, he says, "It's like being unconscious, but very, very conscious." And so on, and so on - for almost two hours.
Yet the audience is rapt. Vai is generous with questions, but no one is asking about, say, how to play in the Phrygian mode. "Just seeing you, the clarity is way more there now than it ever was," says one audience member.
At about 8 p.m., there's a short intermission. Vai has barely made it through a quarter of the lesson plan. James Rigg, a 39-year-old insurance sales manager from Guelph, Ont., and his wife, Lori, 28, a personal trainer, are standing at the side of the room. Has it been worth $250 so far? "He's my favourite musician," says Rigg. "This is such a rare opportunity."
Vai takes the stage again and opens with an aggressive rocker. He then offers a few more guitar specifics, including how Frank Zappa showed him the importance of groove by making him play a pattern in 13/8 time. But the lesson plan is now pretty much toast, and discussion of things like "the colours of the music" continues well past the advertised three-hour time limit.
Finally, at about 9:45 p.m., Vai calls for volunteers to come onstage and jam. Close to two dozen of them rush to their guitar cases and line up.
Vai keys a drum-and-bass backing track into his laptop. Jammers plug into an amplifier beside him, one at a time, to trade licks for a couple of minutes apiece. Some of them are impressive shredders.
Tracy Smith plays more slowly and melodically than most. Afterward, he tells me his guitar was "in tune back at my room at the Holiday Inn, but way out when I got up there." He then joins the long line waiting to have Vai autograph their CDs and guitars in the lobby and pose for photos.
As I leave just after 11 p.m., Vai is still smiling and meeting and greeting his fans. In its own way, it was all genuinely inspiring.