The Alex Skolnick Trio - The more experimental, the better.

To say that Alex Skolnick has traveled a diverse musical path is akin to noting that Donald Trump has enjoyed a little success as a developer. From his Berkeley, California upbringing to his stint as one of the most acclaimed metal guitarists of the '80s and '90s to his myriad musical projects (prog and funk bands, television and video game scoring, dramatically synthesized Christmas songs, a Broadway show) to his current role fronting his own jazz trio — now touring behind its latest album, Last Day in Paradise — and his unlikely return to the metal world that thrust him into the spotlight over a quarter-century ago, Skolnick has displayed a range that most guitarists could barely imagine and certainly never achieve.

"I didn't really have an intent," he says from his New York home. "I just dropped all preconceived notions about what I should do and what my career should be and I just did what I wanted to do."

Skolnick's musical journey began with a Kiss obsession at the tender age of 9, which inspired him to pick up a guitar. At 16, he joined a SoCal thrash band called Legacy, which eventually morphed into the metal juggernaut Testament, where Skolnick remained for nine years, notching five albums, an unending parade of tours and the respect of fans and peers alike.

At the age of 20 and right in the middle of his tenure with Testament, Skolnick was exposed to a television performance of Miles Davis' electric jazz band and was transfixed. Although his playing remained in a metal context for several more years — with Testament and then briefly with Savatage for its 1994 album, Handful of Rain, and a subsequent live album — Skolnick's newfound love of jazz grew exponentially.

"It was the result of a few things," says Skolnick of his jazz conversion. "I was not being entirely fulfilled playing the same thing every night. I wanted to be the type of musician that could get called for any type of recording session or gig. If you play metal, that's all you do and all you are expected to do and you're wrong to want to do anything else."

After his stint with Savatage ended, Skolnick pursued several musical directions, including a funk band called Skol-Patrol and a prog trio called Attention Deficit (both with bassist Michael Manring, the latter featuring Primus drummer Tim Alexander), and tours with bassist Stu Hamm, among others. Eventually, Skolnick elected to move to New York City to earn a music degree from New School University's jazz program (which he completed in 2001) and more fully absorb the jazz scene there.

While at NSU, Skolnick and fellow student/drummer Matt Zebroski began rehearsing and working on homework assignments together. Zebroski was a Testament fan as a teenager and followed a similar musical trail as Skolnick, from metal thrasher to jazz messenger, so it was almost a natural evolution for the two of them to merge their distinct musical passions. Within a few months of their collaboration, Skolnick and Zebroski hatched the concept of reworking the hard rock/metal masterpieces of their youth in a traditional jazz format. They formed the Alex Skolnick Trio (with original stand-up bassist John Davis) and released Goodbye to Romance: Standards for a New Generation, featuring straight jazz arrangements of heavy classics like Black Sabbath's "War Pigs," Kiss' "Detroit Rock City" and the Who's "Pinball Wizard."

"When we did it, it was a pretty radical idea," says Skolnick. "To have somebody like me that came from a completely different musical genre and then disappear for awhile and study jazz and then come out playing jazz, it was very unusual."

Skolnick expected his metal-to-jazz experiment to be greeted with skepticism but the album was praised by a number of jazz and music publications and attracted fans from both musical camps. By the time of the Trio's sophomore album, Transformation, Skolnick had welcomed a new bassist, Nathan Peck, and signed to Magnatude, an imprint of metal indie Magna Carta.

Since then, Skolnick has reordered his musical universe in a number of significant ways. He guested on the title track of Lamb of God's 2004 album, Ashes of the Wake, he joined both the holiday spectacular Trans-Siberian Orchestra and the Broadway production Jekyll and Hyde as guitarist, and he reunited with the classic line-up of Testament for a series of shows/live recordings in 2005. In the midst of all this activity, Skolnick began thinking about his goals for the third Trio album, Last Day in Paradise.

"I felt like we'd already explored traditional jazz on our previous two albums and I wanted to do the same thing, but I wanted it to be more experimental," says Skolnick. "I didn't want it to be fusion. I don't like the term; I don't like what it's become. I do like a lot of the original music that was considered fusion, but I'm much more a fan of acoustic, straightahead jazz. I'm actually more conservative in my jazz listening than most people would think. So I wanted to bring a little of my rock influence without it being a fusion record, and also to have more original compositions."

In order to achieve the goals he had for the new album, Skolnick set a few relatively simple parameters.

"For one thing, there's no electric bass, it's all acoustic bass, and there's no synthesizers," says Skolnick. "The electric guitar does come into it at a couple points, but mostly it's hollow-body jazz guitar. And even when I use electric guitar, most of the songs have clean chord melodies, which are based on traditional jazz playing, whereas a lot of fusion music has melodic lines that are similar to a saxophone but played on a smooth, distorted guitar."

With the mostly original Paradise (the two lone covers this time out are the Trio's versions of Ozzy Osbourne's "Revelation (Mother Earth)" and Rush's "Tom Sawyer"), Skolnick is most pleased about the range that he's injected into his compositions and his arrangements.

"I think it's an accomplishment that there's a lot of variety," says Skolnick. "There are moments that are very straight-ahead; there are also some experimental moments. I like a lot of the jazz that's happening in Europe. There's a lot of jazz that's not really mainstream in the United States, and we have a couple of songs that have more of a European jazz feel. I think the sound quality is our best yet. And compositionally, it's music that I like to listen to."

The fascinating aspect of Skolnick's dual passions is that they seem to intersect with his Trio work and that intersection is reflected in his audience.

"We have people that would be right at home at a jazz show — studious, professional types — and then we'll have people show up in Testament T-shirts," says Skolnick with a laugh. "One of the great things about it is that the people who know me for the metal stuff haven't been to a show like this, where you sit, you enjoy a glass of wine, you listen, you observe the interaction. It's a very different experience than the loud metal show, where the intensity is on 10 the whole time and you're in a big crowd and you're standing and sweaty. That's a great experience, too, but I never saw myself as limited to just one of those experiences as a music fan or as a musician."

For all of the success that Skolnick has found in the studio in his brief jazz career, he makes a point that applies to jazz across the board.

"I think jazz is meant to be experienced live; it doesn't matter who it is," says Skolnick with conviction. "Even on the level of Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans and the masters of jazz, there's just nothing like being there and experiencing that music, as great as the albums are. Between Testament tours many years ago, I saw McCoy Tyner, I saw Herbie Hancock with an acoustic piano trio, I saw John Scofield and Michael Brecker and Sonny Rollins. Experiencing these concerts really did it."