Adrian Belew’s all-star touring celebration of his ’80s work with King Crimson was a runaway success from the moment it was announced last April. Now, guitarist Steve Vai says that Beat, the collective which also features Tool drummer Danny Carey and bassist Tony Levin, may end up working on new music together.
“We touch on it, of course,” he told the UCR Podcast during a recent interview. “Right now, the goal is to honor this King Crimson music the best we can and play anywhere that’ll take us. But that has a shelf life, obviously. Because once you’ve toured the world with it, I wouldn’t want to go back out and tour the whole world again doing the same thing. Because there’s way too many things to do.”
Vai’s schedule alone speaks to just how much there is on their collective plate. Beat will reconvene in May for a short run of dates in Argentina, Chile and Brazil. As we spoke with him, he was reviewing video of the livestream the group did in Los Angeles this past October. “I’m listening through and working on [that] right now,” he shares. “We’re working to make [it] a video [for future release].”
He’s also celebrating the arrival of G3 Reunion Live, the new concert recordings that commemorate the 2024 tour dates which brought him back together with his longtime friends Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson to replicate the original lineup of G3 that first toured in 1996. The most recent live dates segued into further road work for Satriani and Vai, who revealed a new single last year, “The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1” and plans for their first-ever collaborative album (a milestone, considering they had worked together for 50 years without ever teaming up in the studio).
But he was openly enthusiastic, talking about the perspective he’d gained looking at the livestream footage of the Los Angeles performance. “Adrian Belew is a totally unique artist,” Vai explains. “He has really great ears and intonation, but his ability to create unique sounds from a guitar and make them musical and appropriately fit them into a piece of music is quite amazing. I’d just marvel at him every night, you know, because he’s so different than anybody or anything I’ve ever co-created or worked with. Nobody’s like anybody else, really. But there’s nobody even in Adrian Belew’s playground. There’s nobody even trying.”
READ MORE: How Adrian Belew Put Together His ’80s King Crimson Celebration
He has kudos for his other bandmates as well. “Tony, you’ve got to hear those parts. You have to listen to them in solo in order to realize that he’s playing what he’s playing. It’s just fantastic,” he says. “There’s so much personality [the way he plays the Chapman] Stick. All of the phrases, they have an attitude to them. And what a wonderful man, my goodness. It’s the same thing with Danny. I knew Tool and I was aware. I loved the music. There’s something very rich and deep in it. But Danny is a marvel. I mean, he can play all of the complex stuff. But the most remarkable things I would see him do was when he would solo. This is a guy that he just never repeated himself.”
The Challenges of Creating New Music as Beat
Vai is looking forward to what the future might hold, even if it takes a few moments to play out. “Going out there and playing this music was an evolution for us in the first place. So if we do it again, it would be nice to do something additional. So we talk about it. The challenge in my mind is the foundation of the band is a King Crimson kind of attitude,” he explains. “There’s all these accouterments that go into a King Crimson song. Now we’re not King Crimson because, you know, I’m not Robert Fripp and my musical mind works very differently. But I’m a fan. I understand and I know certain parameters of what might work in something that could work for Beat, but also not be too far removed from King Crimson.”
“So it’s a fun challenge. You know, way back years ago when Adrian first asked me [about joining the band], it created an idea in my head. It created an overview of the kind of music I might contribute to something like Beat,” he continues. “I immediately just started playing this riff, grabbed my iPhone and recorded it. It just sat on the shelf until Adrian got here, years later. I picked up my guitar and started playing it and he goes, “Alright, that’s it. Let’s keep that on the shelf.” So things like that work best when they happen organically. We’re hoping that will organically develop — and that’s just one riff that I’m talking about. You know, once you open the can of worms, everything’s going to start flowing. But right now, it’s just flowing in a different direction.”
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