Steve Vai: Inviolate Tour

Rescheduled from January 30th. Tickets from previous show will be honored at the new date.

A virtuoso guitarist, visionary composer, and consummate producer who sculpts musical sound with infinite creativity and technical mastery, Steve Vai has awed fans of all genres with his exceptional guitar skills and musicianship for decades. At age 12, he started taking guitar lessons from Joe Satriani. At 18, he began his professional music career transcribing for, and then playing with, the legendary Frank Zappa. More than three decades, over 15 million in album sales, and three GRAMMY Awards later, Vai has proven himself, in his own right, to be one of music’s true originals.

Vai’s work has been recognized with a long list of awards and honors, including over 15 from Guitar Player magazine alone. His career accomplishments have earned him honorary doctorates from Berklee College of Music and Musicians Institute. The 2016 Long Island Music Hall of Fame inductee was voted the 10th “Greatest Guitarist” by Guitar World magazine and consistently lands among the best in various lists of the top guitarists of all time. In 2012, the TEC Foundation honored him with the prestigious Les Paul Award, created in 1991 to salute those who have set the highest standard of excellence in the creative application of technology. Past winners of the Les Paul Award include Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Herbie Hancock, Steely Dan, and Bob Clearmountain. In bestowing it on Vai, TEC noted, “Steve Vai’s sheer breathtaking facility on the guitar is acclaimed in the rock world and beyond…Vai has dedicated his talents to creatively advance the language of music. While many artists fit easily into a single category, Steve Vai remains unclassifiable. He is a musical alchemist of the highest order.”

During the worldwide pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Vai has been focused on creating new music at The Harmony Hut, his home studio in Encino, California, including recording an acoustic record (a life-long realization) and a new instrumental electric record. He hosted two popular livestreams in a series spanning several weeks: Alien Guitar Secrets Live: Music and You, in which he offered insights into the guitar, music, his career and the music business and Under It All where Vai focused on more esoteric life principals and topics. Ever pushing the envelope, in celebration of his birthday, on June 6, 2020 Vai debuted “Candle Power”—a new song and performance video—which is the first composition to showcase his innovative and acclaimed “Joint Shifting” Technique, where, according to Vai, “you bend a note while fretting another, but I wanted to do this technique with a combination of double and triple stop single note bends while fretting other notes and releasing bends.” On March 12, 2021, while recovering from trigger finger and shoulder surgery Vai offered up a video performance of a new composition called “Knappsack” played with just his fretting hand (his picking hand was firmly fastened in a sling behind his guitar) wielding his Ibanez Onyx Black PIA guitar. Guitar World Magazine called the performance “a scorching playthrough that would be near-impossible for most players with two fully functioning hands.” Vai is gearing up for a far-reaching, 250-date world tour set to begin in 2022. The tour will include a break to record four hours of his orchestral music in Europe with the Metropole Orchestra and the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.