Testament guitarist Alex Skolnick brings jazz trio to Allen Theatre on Sunday

Plenty of people are busy. Few, however, are Alex Skolnick-level busy, especially in 2025.

The guitarist released the latest album, “Para Bellum,” by his main band, Bay Area thrash metal legends Testament, in October and just completed a European tour with them. 

He released the latest album, “Prove You’re Not a Robot,” by his long-time jazz ensemble, the Alex Skolnick Trio, this month. His tour supporting that record stops at the Allen Theatre Sunday.

AND he wrote the score for the horror film “Traction Park Massacre” which just debuted at ComicCon.

“That was actually one of my most time-consuming projects this year,” Skolnick, 57, said of the score in a phone interview.

“It’s been a crazy year between that and finishing up the Trio album and tracking the Testament record. And they all came out right around the same time.”

That’s not the extent of his packed year, but first, a little on Skolnick himself.

He joined Testament while still a teenage student of guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani. He left the band in the early ’90s to attend The New School in New York and earn a bachelor’s degree in jazz. He put together AST – himself, Nathan Peck on upright and electric bass, and Matt Zebrokski on drums – back in 2001 as a student ensemble at The New School. He came back to Testament in the 2000s, during which he also played with Trans-Siberian Orchestra.

“Prove You’re Not a Robot” comes seven years after the last AST album, “Conundrum,” and there have tended to be long breaks between them. Remember that thing about being busy?

“We would definitely do more if we could – it’s definitely a matter of scheduling,” Skolnick said. “I don’t know if we would do one a year, but maybe every two or three years would be ideal.

“It’s great to be very busy, but that’s just a side effect. I’d rather put the time and effort into each album that I feel it needs.”

Skolnick talked about the tracks on “Prove You’re Not a Robot,” including the album’s title, which we’ve all had to do almost every time we go online. Interestingly enough, Testament has a song on its latest album, “Infanticide A.I.,” that has a similar theme. Skolnick called that “a coincidence.”

“I actually had the title floating around for a while, and I decided to use it when we had the title track – it seemed to fit somehow,” he said. “It has a lot of time signatures that are changing. The drum solo especially has this rhythm that’s a bit herky-jerky and almost reminds me of the movements of a robot. 

“We’ve gotten so dependent on this technology for so many aspects of our lives. And when you get locked out of one of your accounts, it’s just such a silly ritual that you have to prove you’re human,” he said with a chuckle. 

Speaking of Zebrowski’s drum solo in the title track, it’s an insane blast of raw energy – it’s downright metal-worthy. Skolnick talked about what the fellow New School alum and fellow “oddball” brings to the table.

“I clicked with him early on,” he said. “He was one of the best jazz players hands down, but he also liked rock ’n’ roll and had been through a metal phase. He even had owned one of my records, which is totally surreal. 

“He just always had this openness. … He brings that diverse taste. And I can throw anything at him. He’s just got an amazing vocabulary,” he said.

He spoke about how he moves seamlessly between the ridiculously heavy thrash metal of Testament – with all its detuning and distortion – and the improvisational, experimental music of AST.

“It’s a little bit like putting on a new outfit,” he surmised. “Instead of physical clothing, it’s musical equipment, it’s the musicians you’re playing with and the types of styles they specialize in, and it’s the tones that are generated from the musical equipment. It’s the songs. 

“The same way a different outfit can almost make you feel like a different person at times, the same is true for these musical situations.”  

He also spoke about the writing process for the songs, most of which were composed on piano. Yes, on piano.

“I have my own podcast, and somehow struck gold and scored an interview with Pat Metheny, one of my all-time heroes,” he said. “He talked about how much writing he does on the piano, more so than guitar. That really got me inspired.”

“I had upped my piano skills a little bit during the pandemic, instead of learning how to bake bread. So in this case, a lot of it was songs and musical ideas that had come up on piano (and were) transferred to guitar,” he said.

For the song “Breakdown,” he said, he was “thinking about how would the Dave Brubeck quartet approach” the Tom Petty classic of the same name. 

“It starts in 5/4 and the solo section is in 5/4, which is a nod to Brubeck in ‘Take Five,’” he said. “I’ve always loved playing that song, but playing (it) is like playing ‘Little Wing’ or ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ This is a way to tap into what I enjoy about playing a song like that, except in a different situation. And it pays tribute to the late, great Tom Petty.”

Skolnick finds inspiration for titles in the most interesting of places – take “Infinite Hotel,” for example.

“It’s a nod to a theory by a mathematician (called Hilbert’s paradox) – I heard about it on a documentary about the concept of infinity” (called ‘A Trip to Infinity’) he said. “The idea is it’s a hotel that expands and continues to expand and never ends.”

Musically, its source material is varied, as only Skolnick can be. John Scofield inspired the beginning of the song and some of the solo, he said. The feel of its melody – where Skolnick is playing a chord and a bass line at the same time – comes from another place entirely.

“(It’s) a little bit of a nod to Van Halen, which is a bit odd,” he admitted. “Van Halen would have these boogie-woogie songs – ‘I’m the One,’ ‘Ice Cream Man,’ ‘Hot for Teacher’ – and the swinging there is so intense. They swing like a big band, and it’s not easy to do.

“And then there’s I guess what you might call the chorus. I already had the title and I wanted a part that felt like it was just going around in an infinite loop.”

The Latin-flavored “Armando’s Mood” is a similar mashup of influences.

“The source material is ‘Armando’s Rumba’ by Chick Corea,” he said. “The original is much faster. I thought it would be fun to slow it down and give it an acoustic feel and give it an odd time signature.

“(Then) I started thinking about this tune by Yes, a solo guitar piece by Steve Howe, called ‘Mood for a Day.’ I realized that at a much slower tempo, ‘Armando’s Rumba’ has a little bit in common with ‘Mood for a Day.’ It’s a crazy idea but we tried it and it was really fun.”

Skolnick touches on an old-school traditional jazz sound in “The Polish Goodbye.” The title refers to the so-called “Irish goodbye” – that is, leaving a social event without saying goodbye – but adapted it to his, and the band’s, heritage.

“Everybody in the group has roots in Poland,” he said. “I’m Polish/Jewish, (and) both Matt and Nathan are from Pittsburgh and have Polish roots.” 

The piece itself came out of an assignment Skolnick had been given by a songwriter’s circle he participated in during the pandemic – “writing blues with a bridge.”

“When I played it with the band, it sounded like the type of tune that we don’t have. We’ve been playing it live too and it’s a lot of fun to play – and just have a normal jazz guitar moment in between all our other crazy stuff.

“After having done this for so many years, I feel a lot freer. So I’m experimenting with different tones and different rhythms and different types of interpretations of what is jazz guitar. But at the same time, we haven’t had a song that is just an all-out, pure jazz guitar song. So we wanted to do that.”

The album softens in tone midway through with acoustic-heavy tracks like “Asking for a Friend” and “Parallel Universe.” The first of those came from what Skolnick called his desire to write “a very singable melody” by dabbling in learning piano parts from pop songs.

“I heard this part and I (wanted to learn it),” he said. “I kept getting it wrong, but by playing it wrong, it was something different. And I was like, oh this is actually nice, what would this sound like on guitar?”

To record it, he chose to play it on a 1935 parlor guitar.

“It’s just one of the best-sounding instruments that I’ve heard – it’s very hard to pick it up and not compose something,” he said. “(It) ended up sounding so much better than the other acoustics I brought in, and it ended up being one of the main acoustics on the record.”

The second was inspired by the melodies of the late David Crosby, he said.

“I really like how he always created these great atmospheres with his melodies,” he said. “The last few records he did later in his life are amazing. That certainly helped inspire what I was doing.” 

The title of the closing track, “Guiding Ethos,” posed the obvious question: what’s his? He mulled a little before answering.

“I guess I try to see the positive sides of things and I try to do what feels meaningful,” he said. “Music feels very meaningful to me, even though I’m not doing the most popular type of music in the world in either musical side, whether it’s heavy metal or jazz. But that doesn’t matter – I’m doing music that I feel a connection to.

“In order to live that kind of life, you have to be very committed. You have to accept a lot of challenges. I guess if I have a guiding ethos, it’s that this is all in the service of the art. It’s the art that matters.”

Skolnick is active in several other musical projects besides AST and Testament, several of which were busy this year. He caught us up on those:

• The Stu Hamm Band (Stuart Hamm is the extremely talented bassist best known for his work with Joe Satriani; he was the first non-metal artist Skolnick played with):
  • “I played on Stu’s most recent album, (2023’s) ‘Hold Fast,’” he said. “We play several times a year … he regularly plays The Baked Potato, which is a legendary club in Los Angeles, and we had a couple shows there this year. And we’re booked next year right around the time of the annual NAMM convention.”
  • “It’s always great to play with Stu, we always have really fun shows. … It was a huge honor to be able to play with him (before), and it’s great to be able to play with him today,” he added.

• PAKT (with fretless bass legend Percy Jones from the ’70s band Brand X, Kenny Grohowski, and Tim Motzer):
  • “It’s so much fun to play with (Jones),” he said. “We cover a lot of bases. It’s mostly improvised; we have influences ranging from early live Miles Davis to Brian Eno. We record most of the shows, so despite only being a band for a few years, we have about a half dozen records.
  • “We had a short tour, but (there’s) another tour coming up next month,” he said.

• The Ron Jackson Duo (Jackson is a seven-string jazz guitarist):
  • “We did a short West Coast tour early this year with our friend George Cole,” he said. “He’s much more of a straight-ahead jazz guitarist, but he’s very open minded – he listens to a lot of different styles of music, appreciates what I do outside of the jazz world. When we play together, it makes a very nice duo, (and) we’re planning some more activity.”

• The Jane Getter Premonition (Getter is a jazz rock/pop guitarist and singer):
  • “I’m on her last couple records,” he said. “We played the Cruise to the Edge (progressive rock cruise) together; we’ve done a few prog music festivals.”
  • Her keyboardist, Adam Holzman, played with Miles Davis and taught a course at The New School. Skolnick played in his ensemble as a student there.
  • “It’s crazy to be playing with Adam all these years later,” he said.

Skolnick is also a photographer, a podcaster, a writer (he has a newsletter on Substack containing essays on everything from Thomas Pynchon to Jeff Beck), and an educator (he’s taught guitar master classes and was a featured artist at Satriani’s G4 Experience music camps; he also does online lessons and has accounts on Patreon and Truefire). 

And by the way, this is the trio’s first time at the Allen Theatre.

“We have a booking agent who’s based in Europe, although he’s American,” he said. “And he occasionally finds us a new place that we’ve never been and this is one such example. I saw photos – it looks like a great place.”

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