No Tuxedo Required

If you happen to have a musically talented son, who spends his days practising Bach and Beethoven on the living room baby grand, preparing for Julliard, what could your greatest dream be? To see him one day seated in a tuxedo in front of a symphonic orchestra, performing Grieg’s Piano Concerto? And what if this son of yours rebelled in his late teens, grew long hair, exchanged Bach for Hendrix and a Steinway for a Mini Moog and eventually ended up touring worldwide with an indecently popular, indecently loud ROCK BAND? Sounds like the worst nightmare, doesn’t it? Fear not, Dear Parent. It could be a most beautiful dream come true...

Post-Julliard rock rebel Jordan Rudess, still long-haired at forty-five, is not very likely to perform Grieg with a symphonic orchestra in the nearest future. “Growing up and doing a lot of classical concerts, I know the kind of dedication that’s needed to do it effectively and I’m very hesitant to do it half-way”, says Jordan. “And I know that these days I’m so busy with my... career, making records and going on tours with Dream Theater that, at this stage of my life, I literally don’t have the time to devote to a classical programme. Whenever I do have time, I’ll always go back to the piano and pull out some Rachmaninov piece – I really enjoy doing that.” “I would like to see myself do a concerto for a solo synthesist and an orchestra. That would really turn me on – to go around the world and perform that! It would interest me – to have all my different synthesiser sounds along with an orchestra – I could easily picture myself getting into that mode!” Fancy a casually dressed inspired musician standing behind a small, handy keyboard rather than tuxedoed and seated beside a heavy grand piano, evoking from his magical instrument not only the most beautiful, extraordinary sounds, but also a load of fantastic images projected on a screen behind the orchestra. Sounds splendid, doesn’t it? Well, we’ll have to wait for that for a little while. These days Jordan, Dream Theater’s newest revelation, is not only preparing for a worldwide tour with the band, but also promoting his new solo album.

“Feeding the Wheel”, Jordan’s fourth solo project, although (almost) fully instrumental, seems to be built around a very poetical and somewhat mystical concept...

At the moment of your birth you took your place upon the great wheel, a deep male voice speaks gently to the listener’s ear. Thus a cycle of eleven magical incantations begins. The mottoes given to all the songs invoke the creative power of a human being. This power – our will, determination and the courage to dream – allows us to approach our visions, seize them and turn them into Reality. Allows us to become one with the Universe and spin with it, fuelling the process of ever-lasting creation. We all are merely “tiny cogs in the cosmic clock”. Yet we are NOT insignificant. Each one of us is the most important part of the Universe, “the center of the sphere”. For it is us, who dream dreams, make choices, struggle with obstacles and, finally, reach goals. WE feed the Reality’s Wheel. And thus, we take part in the shaping of the World. The album’s intriguing artwork reflects the idea behind the music. A luminous globe “sucking in” a sea of human faces, a faetus enclosed in a spherical bubble, a revolving quasar, human brain set aflame and... Buddha playing the keyboard. All this and a few powerful photographs of Jordan – looking you earnestly in the eye, extending his hand towards you – a man, who dreamed a dream, made it come true and is now inviting you to join him in the great journey of Life. With Jordan being a restless traveller in the world of Music, “Feeding the Wheel” is a journey to some far-out parts of it. “One of the sounds that has caught my ear recently” Jordan says “is this very electronic kind of techno music some people are doing. I don’t like a lot of it – I don’t like the stuff that’s very beat-oriented. But I do like the things that are more experimental and almost futuristic. These people are pushing the envelope of what you can do on a record as far as sounds go. They’re so conscious of the types of timbres and sounds and they’re so skilled at putting it together... They’re spending so much time preparing this whole sonic event! As a musician who is interested in pushing the style and the evolution of music forward, I think we need to be conscious of this type of thing.”

“Even though I am involved with a genre called ‘progressive rock’ – which has gotten a bad name – I think it is still a very important genre. And not because of the people who try to sound like old Genesis records or old Pink Floyd! ‘Progressive’ means moving forward!” “If you listen to my records, you might say ‘Oh, that sounds a little bit like Yes or Genesis’ – that’s fine! These are good foundations for me! But I’m interested in including in my music the new sonic elements that are around us.

Even the elements that are within the fashionable music of our times! There are some great minds at work, using some great tools and the productions that come out are really high level!”

“I’m gonna listen and absorb what’s happening. And understand the tools, and understand the technology and understand what they’re trying to do... even though my result is very different. On ‘Feeding the Wheel’ I had a good chance to say something about that musically, to put some of those influences down and, hopefully, push the progressive limits a little bit. “On his new album Jordan’s also pushing his own limits as an instrumentalist.

Being a fascinatingly skilled keyboardist, he also decided to play the guitar in one of the songs, “Shifting Sands”. However, having such splendid guitarists as Steve Morse and John Petrucci to accompany him in the studio, he took his own, very “Rudessy” approach towards this instrument.

“I’ve played the guitar for a long time. As a matter of fact, when I was very little, even before I played the piano, my older brother was taking guitar lessons and I used to be very fascinated with this. I would sit on the steps of my house and watch his lessons. One day he was trying to play through one of them. I said ‘Let me try it’, I picked up the guitar and I could play a little bit of what he was trying to do, ‘cause I’d watched!”

“When I was eighteen or nineteen, when I was leaving Julliard, getting into a spacier kind of life, I bought myself a guitar and I would play along with some records... it is something that I’ve always enjoyed doing, but I’ve never really practised.”

“Upon the completion of the Dream Theater tour last time I had asked John Petrucci if I could borrow one of his guitars. He was nice enough to loan me one, so I took it home, got myself a guitar processor and I started to play. But then I realised that on ‘Feeding the Wheel’ I was going to have some amazing guests: Steve Morse, John Petrucci – the greatest guitar players in the world! So I thought ‘what am I doing messing around with this guitar?!’ But since I’d bought this equipment, I had John’s guitar and I do like to play, I thought I’d do something completely different, that they wouldn’t normally do. So I played the guitar, recorded it into my Kurzweil sampler, reversed it and laid it into the track that way!” A Kurzweil-processed guitar? Sounds curious. But it’s only one of the many stories from Jordan Rudess’s home studio...

“What I do is I have a room full of synthesisers. I set up a pallet of sounds that I use. If I get an idea for a song – even if I just play something on the piano – I get a feel for it: what it might involve, if it’s gonna be heavy, if it’s gonna have some brassy sounds in it, or really airy, spacey sounds... and I’ll certainly need some kind of a bass sound. So I put all the sounds up, so I can access them at any point. They’re all in the synthesisers, just ready to go! And then I start laying in parts that I might play.

Sometimes what I do is I play a foundation piano part for the music – the piano is such a great tool to represent the harmony and the base line! So I might just play eight bars of the music, and then I’ll start orchestrating, and eventually the piano can go away! Now that I think of it, it’s kind of like an artist taking a pencil and drawing the picture. Eventually you never see the pencil, but that’s how it started! Other times it won’t be like that – I won’t use the piano. The piece will be more textural and it will be the sound itself that inspires it.”

“And the music that I write comes to me in lots of different ways as well. I can literally be on a walk and the music will just start to flow and I’ll have to run home and grab a pencil or just sit at a keyboard and play it into a sequencer!

A lot of the new Dream Theater album was written by my awaking in the morning and discovering ‘Wow! I got some ideas!’ and not even getting out of bed – just grabbing same paper and a pencil and writing music! I just have to remain open to all the possibilities!”

“With some the ideas that I get I call myself on my machine from my cell-phone! Out and about with my phone, I go ‘Oh my God, I got something!’, so I ring my studio number and sing it into the machine!” And how was “Feeding the Wheel” created? Was it a series of cellular phone calls to the studio, a sudden flash of inspiration early in the morning, or a few months’ worth of planning? “I had come from the year-long tour with Dream Theater the end of last October. And I got a call from Pete Morticelli, the owner of Magna Carta Records, and he asked me if I wanted to do a solo album for his label.

He literally called the week that I got home and I was really tired, so I said ‘I don’t know, it’s a great offer, but I thought I was going to take some time off, hang around with my family...’ I told him that I’d call him back.

I had a conversation with my wife about it a little later that day, and she basically said ‘You’re crazy if you don’t do it! It’s a great time to do it! You just went around the world, turned everybody up with your music and now it would be perfect!’ I’d though she would say ‘Please, stay home, be with your kids, be with me’, but I didn’t hear that at all! So I called Pete back and said ‘Well, I guess I’m going to make a solo album.’ So instead of relaxing and taking time off I just walked into the studio and started writing music, going crazy! And I wrote it for about two months or so – I was recording it and writing it all at the same time. And I did my part of feeding the wheel in those couple of months...!” Once again, like many times before in the history, it was the loving, caring wife who came up with the right suggestion, showed all the support needed and thus inspired the fantastic process of artistic creation! Definitely, great credit has to be given to Mrs. Rudess for encouraging her husband to work on what finally became “Feeding the Wheel”...Taking for account the bad fame rock-and-roll has gained over the years, some people might find it hard to believe that a rock keyboardist with a head full of the craziest musical ideas could actually be a respectable husband AND father, caring so much about his family. However, Jordan’s quite different than most of the American dads. “I definitely don’t fit into the normal nine-to-five kind of picture. I’m just a very arts-conscious person. In my spare time I like to work with things like computer graphics...” And if he wasn’t a musician, HOW would he make his living? “I would have to be involved with something creative... be a sculptor or something...”

Would he ever consider taking to sculpture when he has some time off music? “Yes, I might”, he says. Well, if there’s ever a Jordan Rudess exhibition anywhere in the world – I just hope to be there and see the sculptures. And, who knows, maybe even buy one... a truly valuable purchase it would be, I am sure! An outstanding keyboardist, a guitarist, a part-time computer artist and a possible future sculptor, Jordan also seems to be a man of great eloquence and a witty writer. However, although all the other Dream Theater members occupy themselves with lyric-writing, he hasn’t contributed any lyrics to the band’s albums so far. “I’ve written lyrics in the past. I wrote lyrics for my first solo album, ‘Listen’ – I enjoyed it very much. Even as a kid I loved to write poetry. As a matter of fact in school, I think it was in ninth grade, I wrote a poem and I got in trouble, because the teacher sent it home with a note telling my parents that they thought I had stolen it from a book somewhere! But I didn’t! It was my original poem!”

“I haven’t written many words in recent years, because I’ve been so involved with the music and my synthesisers, and it’s always a major job to do all the programming that I do and all the sound effects... Being a keyboardist this day and age, especially the kind of keyboardist that I am, is almost like extra work. When I’m playing, I could switch through twenty, thirty, forty sounds in a piece, especially live. I tend to spend so much time on that, that I’m almost not looking to fill my plate with anything else, at least now. That’s why I haven’t pushed the idea of singing in the group, even though I can sing – again, I sang on my ‘Listen’ album. “Even without his lyrical and vocal contributions, however, Jordan’s presence in the band still has had a strong influence on its music. He is fully aware of that, but at the same time makes sure to stem the tide of his creativity to conform to the characteristic Dream Theater sound. “I’m definitely looked upon in the group to provide material to stretch the style – those guys have been in the band so long, that I think part of the reason why they wanted me in it was because I came in with all these other musical influences and different kind of musical knowledge.” “But I come into the band understanding very well, that it has a long history creating music, and that there are certain parameters and even limitations that make up the Dream Theater sound. Any style has limitations – and Dream Theater is no different!”

“There are some things that I think of musically, that will never enter the Dream Theater picture. But there are also many styles going around my head that as a group we can draw from. On the ‘Scenes from a Memory’ album, for instance, there were certain things that we decided to go for. Some ideas I came in with got thrown away. But there were some things that I put forward to the guys and they said ‘Wow, that’s really strange, but we love that!’ Like the honky-tonk section in ‘The Dance of Eternity’ – it was so weird for them, but they all liked it and they laughed!” Having joined Dream Theater and toured with the band, Jordan’s surely gained enough recognition worldwide to attempt a “Feeding The Wheel” solo tour. Would he ever consider doing that? “It would be really fun! Right now, because of the Dream Theater world tour, there is no time to do it. But it is something that would be of real interest.

It would be logistically really hard, because, as much as I can play at once, I don’t think I can play at one time a lot of the stuff that I played on that record! I’d probably have to use my nose and my feet to do it, so it would take some time to work out!”

There you go! A new challenge for the ever-searching, ever creative musician! Give Jordan a few years’ time, and we’ll probably be able to see him perform a Sythesiser Concerto for Two Hands, Two Feet, a Nose AND a Symphonic Orchestra! And still, no tuxedo required!