Mike Stern’s Triumphant Recovery

Interview, From the Magazine, Mike Stern

By Josef Woodard I Dec. 3, 2024

“I love doing ballads,” Mike Stern says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes.”
(Photo: Sandrine Lee)

Stories of major shifts and rebirths among musicians during the past five years are common, from weathering the pandemic to dealing with various sea changes in the ways the music industry works — or doesn’t.

For formidable veteran guitarist Mike Stern, the path to his long-awaited new album, Echoes And Other Songs (Mack Avenue), was especially arduous, making the focus, power and positivity of the final result all the more triumphant. The COVID era gave rise to a long period of inaction and inward reflection — along with forced free time for composing and woodshedding. Simultaneously, though, Stern was nursing a serious hand-impairing injury after a fall in the street outside his New York home in 2016. As an added dose of harsh reality, the sudden death of his longtime producer and friend Jim Beard in March of 2024, shortly after working on the album, lent a bittersweet after-effect to the otherwise uplifting project.

Stern is back up to speed, and grace, as a player and musician on the road. He spoke to DownBeat from a tour stop in Shenzhen, China — following a busy stretch on the European summer jazz circuit timed with the release of his new album.

Given the circumstances leading up to this long-awaited return to Stern’s discographic adventures, does this album have a special meaning for him? “Yeah, definitely,” says the affable guitarist. “I wasn’t sure I was gonna be able to do it. I’ve been so nervous since the accident — more about psychological problems from this hand injury.”

One new development in his musical life is the regular presence on the road of his wife, Leni, a respected guitarist and solo artist in her own right. “I’ve been busy,” Stern comments, “and Leni is traveling with me everywhere. She’s playing all the gigs we’re doing now. When we hit 70, we just said, ‘Let’s not be apart so much. Let’s play together and see. It has worked out great. I would’ve done it earlier.”

Back in 2016, as he was getting ready for a tour, Stern tripped over some misplaced construction material in the street by his home in the city, breaking both humerus bones, leaving serious damage done to his picking hand.

“My right hand is the one that got the nerve damage,” notes Stern. “But, you know, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Obviously, I wasn’t gonna give up,” he laughs. “What else am I gonna do? I’ve been playing guitar my whole life. I need it. As much as I still moan still about it, ’cause I’ve lost some finger stuff that I used to do, there’s plenty there that I can work with and get the music out.”

He now is up to his old nimble and fluid plectrum-wielding tricks, thanks to a pick fastened to his finger with wig glue and tape — a method suggested by a similarly afflicted drummer friend, Ray Levier. Medically, Stern has been helped considerably by hand specialist Alton Barron, recommended by fellow guitarist Wayne Krantz.

Dr. Barron, Stern notes, “has this musician’s treatment foundations, which I found out later that he does with Elvis Costello, who also helped out. He helps fund it and some other people, too. They get contributions, and he gets a bunch of doctors to help people, musicians who get injured or need carpal tunnel surgery or whatever and don’t have insurance.”

Boston-born Stern, part of the deeply American-grained Sedgwick dynasty (including lateral relations to actress Kyra Sedgwick), belongs in an elite cadre of highly influential guitarists now in the 70-something zone, who studied at Berklee School of Music in the 1970s and went on to create strong and lasting imprints on the state of modern jazz guitar. Of that legendary cast — which includes Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Bill Frisell — Stern established a signature sound combining blues and bebop lingo and a distinctive blending of clean and warmly distorted tones.

Although a respected player as an up-and-comer in New York, Stern’s star rose sharply when Miles Davis hired him in 1981. But trouble followed the young guitarist, and Davis sent Stern to rehab following a downward spiral into alcohol and heroin abuse. That was a turning point. Following treatment, Stern’s life as a leader started boldly with 1986’s Upside Downside, the initial chapter in a discography now some 17 titles strong.

Echoes And Other Songs, his first solo album since 2017’s Trip (so named partly regarding his accident), continues and slightly broadens the Stern style of a thinking person’s groove and lyrical balladry, established in the late ’80s.

There was one silver lining from the fall. A financial settlement from the accident came just in time to help subsidize Echoes And Other Songs, which Stern — flying without the agency of a record deal or company — wanted to recorded with such stellar players as saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sánchez along with longstanding cohorts Dennis Chambers, bassist/vocalist Richard Bona and saxophonist Bob Franceschini — all in the state-of-the-art Power Station studio. The sessions also included a cameo by Leni on the ngoni, an African string instrument, and percussionist Arto Tunçboyacıyan.

While making the album, Stern says, “I got inspired by all those guys: the way they played, and they were also really supportive of me, just in general. And they just killed. Chris Potter had just played a week at the Vanguard. So he was ready to go. As soon as he put the horn to his mouth, I thought, ‘Oh man, this is canceled,’ laughs. ‘Let me do this in another year or something. I’m gonna go home and practice.’ He was unbelievable, solo after solo. And same with Christian.”

The recording process, Stern reports, “was very live. I gotta have the conversation going on between players, the spontaneous conversation between everybody, and that was what was happening. I had to fix a few notes that I probably didn’t need to, but you use the studio for what it’s for. There’s plenty of live stuff out there nowadays, more than we all want.

“Some people catch a meal before it’s even cooked,” he laughs. “And Richard Bona did the vocals afterwards. It’s amazing what he does, just such a natural thing. He grew up in Cameroon and his mom was a choral teacher. That’s what she did in the church. He’s got all that background.”

African colors have graced Stern’s music more and more over the course of his writing and recording, in part from his collaborative exposure to Bona’s heritage. The African connection came “partly through (Richard). And just as much from Leni. She’s got an African trio, with Mamadou Ba and percussionist Eladji Alioune Faye, a couple of guys from Senegal who are fantastic players. They live in Brooklyn. Leni has so much interest in so much stuff. Her curiosity and her creativity are just phenomenal. I’m always stealing ideas from her and stealing influences from her.”

On the darker side of the album process was the surprising death of Beard — a multi-talented and underappreciated artist, producer and composer and recent member of Steely Dan’s touring band — soon after the recording was finished. Stern calls Beard’s passing a “total tragedy. Everybody was shocked. I’m still so sad about it, ’cause we were good friends. He really had a lot of energy, and then he could get sad and blue, as we used to call it, and me, too. And we’d talk it through. Whatever motivated you or whatever came through in his music was just awesome. He could write some just amazing, amazing pieces.

“It was about to happen more and more for him. He was getting a little looser. He was just too perfectionistic, and he was finally realizing, ‘Let’s just get past that.’ He called me and told me he was off the road with Steely Dan. He was in the hospital with cancer, and they had a plan to deal with it.”

Did Stern have any particular theme or concept for Echoes And Other Songs? “Not really,” he comments. “When I have some tunes and I say, ‘I gotta do a record,’ I have mixed feelings. ‘Oh, I gotta do a record!’ [laughs] I feel like I gotta do it, no matter what, not even for any specific career move. Part of me says, ‘That’s what I do.’ And I’m in a position to do it.

“I’ve always, always had a record deal. I was lucky as hell to get where I got because of playing with Miles and just by accident being in the right place at the right time. I met Bill Evans [the saxophonist], who introduced me to Miles. Miles heard me, I got that gig, and one thing led to another, so then I got a record deal. They actually called me in those days. I lucked out big time. I always felt like if I got the opportunity, no matter how I make it happen, I gotta try to record something — even if I gotta pay for it myself, like in this case. With Leni, we do the same thing with her.”

In a common modern record label transaction, especially in jazz, Stern created the master and aligned with Mack Avenue for distribution.

“I’ll go in to do a record,” Stern says, “with Jim, usually — on probably 10 out of the 17 that I’ve done. We would figure out what I wanted to include and what I didn’t. There isn’t a theme, per se. I felt like if I’m writing all the tunes and playing on everything, then it’ll hang together.

“One of the reasons I call it Echoes is that echoes are like inspirations that you have in your brain, from your own experiences from different people and your own stuff that you come up with over the years. It’s more like a bunch of songs that I wanted to record. I’m particularly happy with this one called ‘Crumbles.’”

Titled after the nickname of late, great guitarist John Abercrombie (another Berklee-trained guitarist of note from his generation), “Crumbles” features a disarmingly swampy/rootsy intro, stellar piano playing by Beard and even a moment of quasi-free-improvisation along the path.

Stern recalls, “We were thinking, ‘How should we do this tune? We didn’t even rehearse this.’ I said, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ I think Christian McBride said, ‘Let’s give Jim something on this.’ He hadn’t played yet. Of course, he took it to the moon.”

From the well-developed ballad artistry aspect of Stern’s songbook — a chapter including his classic “Little Shoes,” from Upside Downside — the new album sports the glowing, aptly named “Gospel Song.”

“I love doing ballads,” he says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes, so those come out. Ballads are close to my heart anyway, in general, just anybody’s ballad, even if it’s a singer or a pop tune — if it’s got a strong melody. Also, when I was little, I was in a church choir, me and Keith Richards from the Rolling Stones. He was in a church choir. Can you imagine?

“I was in there just not for any religious reasons, but because I wanted to sing. My mom knew I wanted to sing or do something musically. I was yelling around the house, and I would kind of sing. It was in grade school. Someone told her, ‘There’s this really good choir that has an amazing choir master.’ It was cool to hear that music, and some of the choral music was gorgeous. I guess some of that is in some of my stuff.”

Through it all, Stern has maintained a strong belief in the importance of live playing, “especially in jazz,” shying away from the recent trend of long-distance tracking or overdubbing, except where necessary. His live mantra includes a remarkable stint of some 40 years holding court in the tiny but mythic 55 Bar on Christopher Street — which sadly closed in 2022 after the landlord demanded back rent for the COVID lockdown time. Hearing Stern burning and ballad-izing in that compact semi-basement space became a unique and intense tradition in jazz for decades.

Stern relays the story, starting with bassist Jeff Andrews’ invitation to play at the 55, “when he heard that the club owner wanted to have music there.”

“I was still playing with Miles back then. We played duo. I was drinking heavily at the time — I’ve been sober for years, but in those days I was not,” he laughs. “I was the opposite. So the club owner would just give me as much as I could drink in [laughs] and then Jeff would get $25, and I think he bought some drugs, and we got higher.

“And then [drummer] Adam Nussbaum started playing there regularly with us and then Victor Lewis and a whole bunch of cats. The first time I ever played with Chris [Potter] was there. Leni played there a lot, too.”

In idiomatic terms, Stern’s hybrid of influences, from rock to bop and with generous doses of blues spirit and worldly spices, extends an appeal to a broad listenership, even as it defies easy categorization in the segmented jazz scene. The Mike Stern sound is about more than neo-fusion.

Tracing his evolution, Stern asserts, “I always respected and dug the way John McLaughlin played. It was amazing, but it wasn’t my favorite kind of jazz. There was something that I always liked about the blues. I heard more of that from the Brecker Brothers, when they were doing Heavy Metal Bebop: It was rocking and swinging and had all those lines that I love, from ’Trane. There’s tons of bebop in there.

“I just kind of fell into that groove where there’s a lot of blues in there, too, and then I guess from Leni and her band and Richard Bona I got into more world music kind of stuff, too. I’ve always been pretty eclectic, when it comes to that. Being a guitar player, especially in the ’60s, I was always listening to Hendrix, Jeff Beck and all the blues players, like the Kings — B.B., Albert, Freddy — and Robert Johnson.

“I guess my music came out of that combination and some classical stuff that my mom used to play. She used to play a lot of classical piano around the house. She was actually going to be a professional classical player, either a teacher or actual performer. And then she had a bunch of kids.” Stern was one of five children.

Through the vicissitudes of experience he has been through, Stern remains philosophical, humble and forward-thinking in his chosen calling. As he says, “It’s a matter of luck, making music a full-time profession. It’s just something I felt like when I was younger … what was I was gonna do? I went to Berklee and then one thing led to another. I just realized I can do this all the time, and I wanna do it. It’s a lot of work.

“You’re just curious and you try to learn as much as you can, never come close to learning even one-tenth of 1% of all there is to know. It’s endless. But it’s a great journey to be on.” DB