Steve Vai on Composition and "Where The Wild Things Are"

by Tom Watson.

September 29, 2009, brings the release of Where The Wild Things Are, live concert material recorded before a sold-out audience at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2007 during Steve Vai's Sound Theories World Tour. The performance footage will be released on DVD and Blu-ray with a music-only CD also available.

The 2007 Sound Theories World Tour featured a band Vai called String Theories, comprised of Steve Vai with Bryan Beller (bass), Alex DePue (violin, keyboards), Ann Marie Calhoun (violin, keyboards), Jeremy Colson (drums and percussion), Dave Weiner (guitar and sitar), and Zack Wiesinger (a brief appearance during the show on lap steel and the tour's solo opening act with Zack on electric guitar). Though the tour launched in conjunction with the release of the double-CD Sound Theories I & II, it was a standalone animal featuring a set list of both well known and not so often performed pieces from the Vai catalog, which might account for the upcoming DVD's name, Where The Wild Things Are, that drops the Sound Theories main title connection.

Despite its independence from Sound Theories I & II, Where The Wild Things Are makes an excellent trilogy companion to that release and the 2007 Visual Sound Theories DVD that provides performance footage of material from Sound Theories I & II. The three titles, Sound Theories I & II, Visual Sound Theories, and Where The Wild Things Are, both independently and, more strongly, collectively showcase both Steve Vai the guitarist and Steve Vai the composer, giving added weight to the compositional strength of his catalog and Vai's ability to compose and arrange for instrumentation well beyond the electric guitar.

I caught the Sound Theories World Tour show in Europe in July of 2007, shortly after the release of Sound Theories I & II but before hearing the two CDs. I had read about the release though and knew that it consisted of Steve Vai performing selections from his catalog with the Netherlands Metropole Orchestra (CD I) and the orchestra performing Vai compositions without the guitarist (CD II). Knowing that Sound Theories I & II was recorded with a full orchestra and that the Sound Theories World Tour featured two violinists, I arrived at the venue thinking perhaps the show would be a more sedate, classical-setting Vai a la chamber music. Yes, I should have known better. The Sound Theories World Tour performance was a fiery re-interpretation of an excellent sampling from the Vai catalog, which will be available to those who missed this tour with the release of Where The Wild Things Are.

On August 7, 2009, I spoke to Steve Vai, technically about the upcoming release of Where The Wild Things Are, but having been an avid listener to Sound Theories I & II and viewer of Visual Sound Theories for the last two years, my main interest was how these three works serve as an argument for the Vai-ability of his catalog as composition.

Tom Watson: I caught the Sound Theories World Tour show in Europe shortly after the release of Sound Theories I & II.

Steve Vai: It's a very interesting band and I'm really glad I had the opportunity to capture it and make a DVD that turned out phenomenal - the sound is really good and I was able to get all the nuances of the show because it had really matured by the time I got to the States.

Tom: Where The Wild Things Are will make an excellent companion to Sound Theories I & II and Visual Sound Theories, something along the lines of a trilogy.

Steve: You're right because I had the orchestra project and I wanted to do some kind of a tour but I couldn't tour with an orchestra, that's totally cost prohibitive, so I thought let me get a couple of string players that can really rock out and I'll re-arrange some of the music so that it works with them. The name of the band on Where The Wild Things Are is String Theories.

Tom: Let's talk about Sound Theories I & II for a minute. How did the NPS [a Dutch public broadcasting organization] project come about?

Steve: There's a gentleman who's worked there for many years that I've known since I released Flex-Able. His name is Co de Kloet and he's always been a great supporter. He's a real music lover, a true aficionado, and he's always had a lot of faith in me and has always seen me as more of a composer than anything else. So, he went to the wall and put together this whole event, raised the money from the Dutch government, and gave me the opportunity to compose for the Metropole Orchestra. That's how it came about.

Tom: How much time did you have to prepare for that?

Steve: Oddly enough, there are a lot of things in my career that take a lot of time. Making a record takes a lot of time, editing something takes a lot of time, working on solos, things like this take time. But, when it comes to composing, it goes very quickly for me. There's a piece [on Sound Theories II] called "Frangelica, Part Two." "Frangelica, Part One" I wrote when I was 19 years old. It took me maybe two days to orchestrate it because it was all there, I knew exactly what I wanted it to be, I can write quickly and I'm very at home with the [music notation] staff, so I knew how to make that song sound the way it sounds. Then, I needed something that was more up-tempo to come after that, so I composed "Frangelica, Part Two," and that, surprisingly enough, probably took me five days of composing. Now mind you, those are uninterrupted days, but it goes very quickly for me.

Tom: The orchestration alone would seem to be complex. This was a 60-some piece orchestra.

Steve: From a distance it would. The project was broken into two parts. The first part involved me with the orchestra and was music from my catalog orchestrated for electric guitar and a 65-piece orchestra. This material I didn't orchestrate. It was sort of a no-brainer. I hired some really good orchestrators and said, "Over here do this, over there, do that," and that was relatively easy.

The second disc is more compositional and I don't even perform on it. So, I sat down and composed and orchestrated all of that because that had to be done a certain way.

Tom: But, that's what's impressive. You're orchestrating for horns, reed instruments, et cetera. Had you had a lot of prior experience with those chairs and sections?

Steve: Well, yes and no. I was composing music before I was playing the guitar. When I was 10, 11, 12 years old I was playing around with notes, then when I was 13 I started getting serious about composing and all through high school I studied composition and I was writing for various instruments. I wrote my first orchestra piece for the high school band when I was in 11th or 10th grade. Then, after that, I was working with Frank Zappa and a lot of his music was compositional and I was transcribing a lot of it. Throughout those early years I was doing a lot of composing, but I was never able to hear it because how do you get the material performed?

So, then I went into the rock 'n' roll world, put my head down, and did that for quite a bit of time, but the orchestrational skills were all there.

Through the years though I've worked with various orchestras. Years ago I worked with the Rochester Orchestra and I had to prepare for that so I composed a number of pieces. One of them was "Bledsoe Bluvd.," which turned out to be completed and recorded for Sound Theories. That score took a really long time. I scored that entire piece while I was on the Sex & Religion tour. Every spare moment that I had - hotels, airplanes - I composed. Then, at the end of the day, I had this incredibly complex, beautifully rich score that now needed to be typed into a computer because they don't hand-copy scores anymore, they have to be typed into a computer so they can be extracted for parts and whatnot. That took years, and there were four or five copyists working on it, because it had extremely complex moments; for example, parts where two time signatures were going on with polyrythms that extended over bar lines and the computer software wasn't capable of portraying this properly. So, we had to get computer notation software companies to actually design software to deal with this. It took years and was unbelievably expensive. Every bar of that music cost a fortune, but, there it is, it's done.

Tom: Are these scores available, let's say for study and performance at the university level?

Steve: Thank you for asking. Yes, and no. They're all basically done and I have them in PDF format and we're working on making them available through this website where you can buy TABS for everything that I've done. So yes, they will be available. They can be purchased in score form, they can be purchased with parts, et cetera. The question is, how many people are going to want it?

Tom: That's a lesson to be had from your career and catalog. Pop, rock, and metal are like meat grinders - a constant demand for something new. Compare that to classical or jazz where we expect to hear standards performed by other players adding their unique interpretation and expression. Your catalog has that potential.

Steve: Thanks. I try to carefully extract anything that sounds genre-specific. [Laughs] There's a reward in that because you get a unique body of undiluted, unclassifiable work, but there's also a price to pay in that people are like, "What is that?"

Tom: It seems that with the strong guitar departments in many universities this would be a logical next step for your catalog.

Steve: From your lips to their ears. [Laughs] I'm doing it because I can and hopefully they'll find some value in it.

Tom: Between Sound Theories I & II and Mike Keneally's Piano Reductions, the point of Steve Vai the composer should have been made by now.

Steve: You know, sometimes people surprise me. Once I got a video of a high school marching percussion band playing the entire "Fire Garden Suite." [Laughs] I couldn't believe it. But, it's just very rare that people are interested in performing contemporary compositional things.

Tom: What about other settings like chamber orchestra or guitar-violin duets, have you worked in these areas?

Steve: I have some things like that. Nothing's published in manuscript form where people can buy it and do it. I'd like to and I can. I was just commissioned to compose a ten-minute piece for a saxophone quartet. I'm really looking forward to that. I can write concertos, quartets, you name it. But, it's all about time management. For example, this week was devoted to doing 6-10 hours with press to promote the DVD and before that it was like a year working on the DVD, before that it was working with the band, and on and on.

To do these things takes a tremendous amount of time and effort. Now, I've got this project coming up for a symphony in Holland in 2010 and I need to compose 40-50 minutes of new symphonic music, which means I'll have to block out four undisturbed months and actually leave Los Angeles, go some place, and turn off the phone - and I'll make no money. It will actually cost me. But, being a composer, that's what it's like. Meanwhile, I still love playing the guitar and going on tour. I get offers all the time for me to write for a particular ensemble but I just can't take the time to do it.

Tom: Is the 2010 project again with NPS?

Steve: Not exactly the same situation. It's with the Holland Symphony Orchestra instead of the Metropole, but with Co de Kloet again the creative catalyst who's pulling the whole thing together.

Tom: Getting back to Where The Wild Things Are, or maybe getting to it, you having two violinists in the band is like a blues player on the road with a horn section. Are you going to have withdrawl?

Steve: [Laughs] Well, I'm hoping that my next studio album can involve the string players, but I've got this idea for the evolution of my bands. I was thinking that one day I could do a project with a rock band and two multi-instrument percussionists and then maybe one with a big horn section and then maybe one with the violins, horns and percussion.

Tom: Do you think Where The Wild Things Are gives the audience a hint as to what to expect with Sound Theories I & II and the expanded palette?

Steve: If you're really intuitive you'll be able to believe the same guy did both projects. [Laughs] They're very different, but there's a thread that runs through them, which is my own inner ear and music sensibilities

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