Halfway down the Danube

Goodbye to Romance, the Alex Skolnick Trio

I first heard the Alex Skolnick Trio playing in the background of a Brooklyn cafe. Jazz electric guitar was being played with talent and intelligence, the melody at the knife-edge of familiarity. And I listened to it with pleasure, because there is so much bad extruded jazz product out there, playing in the background of too many places, when I had a small mental jolt as I realized what song the arrangement was based on. It was "No One Like You", by the Scorpions, the 80s German metal band. I can't wait for the nights with you. You know the one.

The guitarist was Alex Skolnick, and yes, the album Goodbye to Romance: Standards for a New Generation is mainly jazz arrangements of hard rock and metal classics. I am going to guess that most readers of this blog have not heard of Testament, so I won't bring up Skolnick's past career in metal. But, as a rule, an ironic cross-genre cover is artistically rather easy. It's much harder to get deep into the soul of a song and rework it from the inside out. And it takes a special sort of sympathy to do that to Kiss's "Detroit Rock City".

The Alex Skolnick Trio has that sympathy. Goodbye to Romance is a very winning album. Certainly it won me over.

(Coincidentally enough, they have a new CD coming out this week, called Transformation, with more original compositions, and you know, Judas Priest. Can't wait.)

Posted by coyu at September 13, 2004 03:58 PM