Ned Evett @ Palais des Congrès, Paris - June 22nd, 2025

Guitar heroes are a dime a dozen. Toss a rock on any moderately crowded street in Nashville, Los Angeles, or New York, and odds are you’ll smack a shredder mid-solo. Tonight’s SatchVai audience was likely packed with virtuosos, players fluent in string skipping, sweeping, two-handed tapping, dive-bombs, and blistering 17/32 mixolydian runs at 290 bpm. But how many guitarists do you know who:
a) play a fretless, glass-necked guitar of their own invention, and b) play it so well that they’re personally tapped by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani to open every night of their joint tour? Meet Ned Evett, the man who not only ticks all those boxes, but also does it with enough humor and showmanship to make a glass neck seem like the most natural extension of the human spine since the Stratocaster.

Evett’s slot was extremely short even by support act standards, clocking in at just over twenty minutes. He had to make it count, and he certainly did, drawing from both his breakthrough album Treehouse and his most recent release, Strange Kind of Freedom and delivering a compact set that showcased his singular style. Not only is the man a guitar virtuoso with a unique touch and inventive phrasing, he's also an excellent singer and his songs are catchy as hell. A veritable triple threat and a perfect starter for the spectacular entrée that was about to follow.