A & E

Joe Satriani fans have had to be patient in waiting for the guitarist extraordinaire and songwriter to begin an American tour behind his current CD, "Professor Satchafunkilus and the Musterion of Rock."

The CD came out in April, and Satriani and his band have spent the past five months touring in South America, Europe and other countries. But American fans will get one major benefit by having to wait for these shows. They'll get a live show that has been tested, explored and refined into a tight, yet appropriately diverse, presentation.

That's because Satriani doesn't let himself get locked into any certain sequence of songs, especially at the outset of a tour.

"We started off doing just about every (new) song when we started the tour back in April in Portugal," Satriani says. "Then we learned every week out there through Europe which of the songs really took off live and which ones were better left on the CD, as like a personal listening experience. We also had to find out which of the songs on the new record hit on similar themes that songs from the catalog were already doing. You don't want to have too many duplications live in a show like mine.

"So the music actually has to be quite different," he says. "Each song has to represent some kind of a new direction, so that after two hours and 15 minutes you feel like you've really played a variety of music for the audience."

One reason Satriani feels he can be adventurous in his shows is because his fans seem to encourage him to go out on a creative limb -- not only onstage, but on albums.

And over the course of a career that began in the mid-1980s and now includes more than 10 million albums sold, Satriani has covered plenty of stylistic ground, while also proving to be one of the most accomplished guitarists in rock history.

Early CDs such as "Surfing With the Alien" (1987), "The Extremist" (1992) and "Satriani" (1995) established the Satriani signature of instrumental hard rock that was defined as much by striking melodies and well-developed song structures as by the smooth fleet-fingered guitar playing that peppered many of his songs.

Satriani's sense of musical adventure also was obvious in the otherworldly tones he found in his guitar and his willingness to experiment with styles that stretched him beyond his core hard-rock sound.

The late 1990s, in particular, found Satriani in a restless mode as he explored how to combine electronica with rock. With 1997's "Crystal Planet" and especially his 2000 CD, "Engines of Creation," Satriani dove fully into the electronic realm, mixing electric guitar with electronica, techno, trip hop and other computer-generated styles.

But after that foray, Satriani shifted back toward his signature guitar-bass-drum sound and made three of his most guitar-centric CDs, "Strange Beautiful Music (2002), "Is There Love In Space?" (2004) and "Super Colossal" (2006).

"Professor Satchafunkilus" is once again centered around the melodic electric guitar-based rock of the previous CDs. But Satriani also continues the process of exploring different types of songs and different ways to express himself on guitar.

To be sure, several songs, including the hard-hitting "Overdriver" and the fluidly rocking "Revelation," keep the latest CD grounded in familiar territory.

On several other songs on "Professor Satchafunkilus," though, Satriani pushes rather hard on the artistic envelope. The appropriately funky title track is full of wacky tones and has a signature guitar hook that practically winks and smiles through the speakers. "Out of the Sunrise" is a jazzy track with sleek lead guitar lines, a graceful signature piano part and a reggae-tinged middle section. "Diddle-Y-A-Doo-Dat" has a decidedly playful personality, as Satriani weaves a grooving melody between a pair of avant-jazz guitar bits that bookend the track.

In an overall sense, Satriani says he wanted to put himself in a bit more lean and spacious musical environment on "Professor Satchafunkilus," and he frequently pared his sound down to just his guitar, the bass line of Matt Bissonette and the drumming of Jeff Campitelli.

"I wanted instrumentation to be more sparse, which is why there are quite a few tracks where it sounds like there are only three instruments, or three or four, tops," he says. "So instead of having layers and layers of guitars, I was really thinking how many songs can I have just one guitar and how many times can I break it down so that during the solo there are no rhythm guitars.

"Sparseness, I think, was important in the rhythm section so the guitar would have more room to kind of veer around, like driving a huge Cadillac down a big, empty highway, and you can take up as much room as you want," Satriani says. "That was important to me, I thought, because I hadn't really covered that on other records. So that was something that sort of inspired me."

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