JORDAN RUDESS
“There have been times when I’ve taken the band something that I consider to be a really heavy riff and they’ve given me a sideways look and said, ‘That sounds like Billy Joel to us.’”
To state that music is more than a mere profession for a particular artist is, of course, tantamount to lame journalistic cliché. However, in the case of Jordan Rudess this declaration rings far truer than most. From the age of nine, when the New Yorker was admitted to the Juilliard School Of Music Pre-College Division to take up classical piano, it has dominated his life. Outside of playing and composing with prog metal giants Dream Theater, he also enjoys a solo career, invents technical software and passes on the secrets of his remarkable gifts to a new generation of players.
Rudess became a member of Dream Theater after a stint alongside Deep Purple/Kansas guitarist Steve Morse in jazz rockers Dixie Dregs, followed by two albums with Liquid Tension Experiment, an instrumental ‘supergroup’ that also featured DT’s John Petrucci and Mike Portnoy and bass player extraordinaire Tony Levin. Dream Theater’s ruthless decision to free up a space within their ranks by booting out Derek Sherinian was vindicated when Rudess wrote and performed to quite dazzling effect on their fifth full-length album, 1999’s Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes From A Memory, a watershed moment that the band plan to revisit on their upcoming world tour.
Two decades, nine further studio albums, a pair of Grammy nominations and one replacement drummer later, Rudess is just about indispensable to Dream Theater. Together with guitarist Petrucci, he masterminded their überambitious conceptual double-set over three years of painstaking, meticulous planning. That most of the group’s fans thumbed their noses at its excesses is almost an irrelevance to both Petrucci
