The Atlanta Symphony Hall in midtown Atlanta, Georgia, welcomed legendary guitarists Joe Satriani and Steve Vai to town on Monday night for the latest stop on their SatchVai Band’s Surfing With The Hydra Tour. Established in 1968 and designed by Joe Amisano as a tribute to the 130 Atlanta arts patrons and crew who died in the 1962 plane crash at Orly Airfield in France, this nearly 1,800 capacity venue is part of the broader Woodruff Arts Center campus that also includes the High Museum of Art and Alliance Theatre.
There was a charged stillness before instrumentalists Animals as Leaders hit the stage just after 7:00 p.m. as the opening act, and once Tosin Abasi, Javier Reyes, and birthday boy Matt Garstka began, it was immediate musical immersion — no buildup, just impact. Leaning fully into their signature blend of hyper-technical prog precision and physical intensity, Garstka’s drumming was both impossibly tight and explosively dynamic, while Abasi and Reyes layered 8-string lines that blurred the roles of rhythm, lead, and bass into a single, fluid system. On paper, it reads like a masterclass in polyrhythms and odd-meter composition; in the room, it landed with surprising weight, turning intricate passages into something you felt as much as you analyzed.
Originating in 2007 as a solo project by Abasi (who graduated from the locally based Atlanta Institute of Music and Media), the band’s set pulled from across their catalog, weaving together staples like “Physical Education” and “Tempting Time” with newer material such as “Red Miso” and “Monomyth,” creating a flow that felt continuous rather than segmented. By the time Animals as Leaders closed with the relentless “CAFO,” the effect wasn’t just excitement but a kind of stunned recalibration, as if the band had briefly reset the limits of what a three-piece could sound like in real time.
Animals As Leaders
Tosin Abasi – Lead guitar
Matt Garstka – Drums
Javier Reyes – Rhythm guitar
Setlist:
1.) Gestaltzerfall
2.) Ectogenesis
3.) Micro-Aggressions
4.) Physical Education
5.) Tempting Time
6.) The Woven Web
7.) The Brain Dance
8.) Red Miso
9.) Monomyth
10.) CAFO
Catching the Surfing With The Hydra Tour at Atlanta Symphony Hall added a different kind of electricity to an already over-the-top concept. The room itself, with clean acoustics and seated sightlines, was a space built for amplifying every performance nuance of what Joe Satriani and three-time Grammy Award winner Steve Vai were going to put on display. Instead of getting swallowed up by arena bombast, the musical details could cut through: every harmonic squeal, every whammy-bar dive, every impossibly fluid run would land with surgical clarity.
This tour plays less like a co-headlining showcase and more like watching two architects actively redesign their own blueprints in real time. When Satriani and Vai took the stage as the SatchVai Band shortly after 8:30 p.m. to their latest song release, “Dancing,” the tone was set for the evening. My immediate impression was a simple appreciation for the fluidity between these guitarists; these shared songs don’t sit still. They’re stretched, merged, and reassembled on the fly, with familiar material reshaped into something that felt newly engineered. There was also a visible sense of joy driving it, as their chemistry radiated outward, turning what could have been a purely technical masterclass into something genuinely infectious.
What elevated the show beyond virtuosity was its constant motion. One minute it was a tightly synchronized dual-lead passage; the next, it opened into a full-blown jam, with both players trading blistering solos over a rhythm section that hit with real force. A Satriani melody might start clean and recognizable before Vai bent it into something stranger, more elastic, and then handed it back. It was less about nailing definitive versions of songs and more about watching ideas evolve. Similar to when I caught the Satch/Vai Tour at this venue a little over two years ago, fans were treated to individual tunes by each artist. Satriani performed classics like “Surfing With the Alien” and “Satch Boogie,” while Vai delivered “Little Pretty” and “For the Love of God.”
Not to be overlooked, originals like “I Wanna Play My Guitar” blended with unexpected detours and extended improvisations, often stacking multiple guitar harmonies before breaking into individual spotlights. In seated theaters especially, that dynamic landed differently — less chaos, more collective awe — as the air guitar–playing audience shifted between studying the fretwork and reacting to the sheer physical impact of the sound. The result was an overall performance that rarely paused to reset, functioning more like a continuous surge of musical passages than a traditional setlist.
From the opening moments through the closing chords of a “Born to Be Wild” encore cover, Monday night in Atlanta felt less like a standard concert and more like stepping into a live conversation between two guitarists who’ve spent decades shaping the language they’re now casually rewriting.
The Surfing With The Hydra Tour continues through May, wrapping up at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, on Saturday, May 30th.
SatchVai Band
Joe Satriani – Guitar
Steve Vai – Guitar
Kenny Aronoff – Drums
Marco Mendoza – Bass
Pete Thorn – Rhythm guitar
Setlist:
1.) Dancing
2.) I Wanna Play My Guitar
3.) The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1
4.) Zeus in Chains (Steve Vai song)
5.) Little Pretty (Steve Vai song)
6.) Ice 9 / The Crying Machine
7.) Flying in a Blue Dream (Joe Satriani song)
8.) Surfing With the Alien (Joe Satriani song)
9.) Sahara (Joe Satriani song)
10.) Tender Surrender (Steve Vai song)
11.) Teeth of the Hydra (Steve Vai song)
12.) Satch Boogie (Joe Satriani song)
13.) If I Could Fly (Joe Satriani song)
14.) For the Love of God (Steve Vai song)
15.) Always With Me, Always With You (Joe Satriani song)
Encore
16.) Crowd Chant (Joe Satriani song)
17.) Born to be Wild (Mars Bonfire cover)
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Elliott is a music photographer covering shows in Atlanta, Georgia, and the surrounding area. The highlight of his photography career was back in the early ’90s, when he sold Neil Diamond the rights to his negatives from a show and then purchased a set of tires for his 1979 280ZX during college with the money.