Uli Jon Roth celebrating 50th anniversary with tour

Acclaimed guitarist Uli Jon Roth will celebrate 50 years in rock with an extensive tour beginning this spring. The two hour-plus show will consist of carefully selected highlights from his entire musical career.

In recent years, Jon Roth has successfully revisited the early music of his celebrated Scorpions days, which resulted in the superb “Scorpions Revisited” double CD and “Tokyo Tapes Revisited” DVD/Blu-Ray releases. The 50^th Anniversary set will include the best of that material, including “The Sails of Charon,” “In Trance,” “Fly to the Rainbow” and more. Jon Roth will also play excerpts from his stunning “Metamorphosis of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Concerto” as well as several pieces which feature him on classical, acoustic and flamenco guitar.

As a logical continuation of Jon Roth’s journey into his own musical past, he will also be reconnecting with the second very important part of his unique musical journey – that of his ground breaking Electric Sun period during which he took the art of electric guitar playing to a completely new and unprecedented level. In those days, Jon Roth was already forging the path and laying the ground work for later virtuosos such as Malmsteen, Eddie van Halen, Vai, Satriani, Jason Becker and a generation of younger players who came after him, with his novel use of highly melodic, classically-inspired arpeggios and scales.

Thanks to Jon Roth’s innovative and ground-breaking guitar playing and interesting compositions, Electric Sun became artistically influential and presented a unique blend, which was sometimes likened to a strange mixture, located somewhere between Beethoven and Hendrix. Electric Sun had many fans in the UK and on both sides of the Atlantic, but Uli decided to move on, and the year 1985 saw the end of Electric Sun as a band concept.