FEEDING THE WHEEL

Everybody intrested in prog music knows who is Jordan Rudess, so I will skip the brief bio about him. Since 1993 he has a solo career under his name releasing over the years I guess 10 albums. Feeding the wheel from 2001 issued at Magna carta is , at least for me the best album he ever done under his name. Helped by a bunch of well known musicins like Steve Morse, Terry Bozzio, John Petrucci his mate from DT and the great bassist Billy Sheehan he manage to come with a solid jazz fuison album of the lighter kind in some parts but aswell fueld with some edgy moments eswell. The pieces goes from more uptempo with blisterning keybords like on Quantum soup and inventive solos to a more relaxed atmosphere as on Shifting sands, what a great and smooth piece. The album explores a wide variety of keybords layers, where Rudess feels free to show what he can do with this instrument. I personaly thinks that this is quite a diffrent affair face what he does in DT, here he can and succeded to combine very well the fusion side of prog with keybords wizardy, something as LTE for instance. This is no prog metal like I used to hear him in DT, this album offers a great prog/jazz fusion with symphonic passages well performed with some awesome ideas overall. 4 stars