Venue: City Winery, Chicago, USA

Date: 08/07/2022

Dream Theater keyboard player Jordan Rudess has kept busy this summer. As his main band takes a brief pause from touring, he’s hit the road with a series of solo live dates. An evening with Rudess proves to be intimate and enjoyably diverse.

In tonight’s Chicago show the musician takes the crowd on a journey, sharing stories from his days as a youth becoming classically trained but having an urge to improvise and play the blues. Rudess says his musical trajectory evolved as a teenager when he was exposed to progressive rock, a lifechanging genre that blew his mind.

To illustrate, the show starts with an impressive classical improvisation. Rudess then displays how intertwined progressive rock and classical music are when playing Bach’s ‘Partita No.5 In G Major’, a fast-paced Baroque exhibition. One portion of the show is devoted to piano duets with isolated vocal tracks of Greg Lake on King Crimson’s ‘Moonchild’, Jon Anderson on Yes’ ‘Soon’, and Elton John’s big hit ‘Your Song’. The accompaniment of Rudess’ piano adds a nice touch to the duets with fast and eloquent razzle-dazzle mixed, and hearing the late Greg Lake’s voice on a big sound system is serene.

Rudess doesn’t just play the piano during his solo set, he also sings two songs, performing Dream Theater’s ‘Beneath The Surface’ and David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. Rudess says he’s been on a guitar journey the past year and even performs a song on the axe from a project he’s working on for Universal Music. He also shows off GeoShred, an iPad app with a plethora of great sounds; he turns it into an instrument on which he plays an incredible blues improvisation that goes off the rails in the best of ways. The sounds from this furious improv can be best described as a mix between a bitey synthesiser and tough guitar.

He saves the most anticipated part of the show for the final portion, an intense and long Dream Theater piano medley that features a string of songs from their catalogue, including ‘The Dance Of Eternity’, ‘Overture 1928’, ‘Illumination Theory’ and ‘Octavarium’. The stellar medley is beautifully constructed and is a clear representation of how great of a composer Rudess is as well as how technically gifted he is.

The night with Jordan Rudess has sophistication and sincerity. The experience is insightful and with a vibe that felt like the audience was hanging out at Jordan’s house while he goes on about his business being one of the best keyboardists of all time. He is a humble person who meets with all his fans at the end of the show, and seeing Rudess solo is a special treat for not only Dream Theater fans but any lover of progressive rock and classical music.

—Trevor Woods