Crescendo

	An Evening With Joe Satriani October 29, 2004 - House Of Blues New Orleans, LA story by Ritchie Champagne
	Instrumental guitar music produced prior to 1987 was not considered a viable commercial product. Perhaps the most successful predecessors of this form of expression were surf bands like The Ventures in the Sixties and Jeff Beck in the Seventies. The Eighties hard rock scene thrived on guitar virtuosity, inspired largely by Edward Van Halen’s fretboard fireworks. Most of the players who emulated him brought little or nothing original to the field and were more concerned with conveying technique than emotion, with each trying to play with more complexity than the next.
Then Joe Satriani burst onto the music scene in 1987 with his second album, Surfing With The Alien, a composition overflowing with melody, emotion, and killer guitar technique. This opus raised the bar higher than most of these previous guitarists could ever aspire to attain, rendering Satriani an absolute guitar god.

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