Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
In Memoriam: John Hammond Jr., 1942–2026
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
Mike Stern’s latest album, Trip, was released Sept. 8.
(Photo: Sandrine Lee)Mike Stern’s new album Trip is a curiously dissonance-tinted affair—perhaps referencing the fusion guitarist’s difficulty in adjusting to making music with nerve damage in his right arm, suffered from a fall last summer.
But there was nothing dissonant about his quartet performance Sept. 8 at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C.. That’s partly because they didn’t much assay the new tunes; until that week, Stern, trumpeter Randy Brecker, bassist Tom Kennedy and drummer Dennis Chambers hadn’t been in the same place long enough to rehearse them, and stuck to material they knew. But it’s also because these four fusion veterans, long acquainted, relied instead on the twin engines of groove and chemistry.
The former, of course, is impotent without the latter, and Stern knew it from the get-go. Opening on the quasi-swinging “Out Of The Blue,” the guitarist’s solo was so intent on carrying the groove in its first chorus that it spent several bars playing straight four-to-the-bar notes. But then Chambers shifted into standard spang-a-lang, and the tune’s previously downplayed 12-bar-blues frame suddenly became obvious. (Stern knew this, too, making a sudden turn into classic blues licks.)
After Brecker and Kennedy added their solos, Chambers turned the rhythm into an open experiment: He began a series of cross-rhythms between his snare and bass drums, never letting the kick accent fall in the same place against the snare’s insistent vamp; then came a thunderous, speedy solo that might have held its own against any heavy metal drummer.
Chambers continued experimenting on Stern’s “KT,” kicking from steady funk-rock into 7/8 toward the tune’s end while the rest of the band stayed in 4. But he never quite abandoned groove; indeed, he often established it, as when he and Kennedy spontaneously burst into the unmistakable rhythm of “Papa Was A Rolling Stone.” It eventually allowed Kennedy to become the venturesome one, unleashing a sixteenth-note attack with a meaty, melodic trajectory. The glee on the bassist’s face was obvious—and contagious, spreading immediately to Stern, Brecker and Chambers.
The part played by the group’s synergy, however, can’t be understated. For one thing, they erupted at least once into a jam, Stern and Chambers quickly joined by Kennedy and Brecker to charge down a gauntlet of jazz-funk. For another, it allowed them to explore several different rhythmic feels at once: The set’s third song (which Stern didn’t name, but which sounded very much like Trip’s “Emilia”) had a light Caribbean pulse at its core, though Stern, Chambers and Kennedy all played separate variations on it that coalesced into that core.
When Brecker entered, he first challenged all of these—he blew long, syncopated notes against their accents (especially Stern’s). By the time his solo began, though, the trumpeter had joined the fray, and added a bit of a soft-shoe cadence to the rhythmic mix.
Stern, incidentally, never evidenced any loss to his technical ability. If anything, he seemed charged up, finally releasing that energy with high-voltage blues riffs in a short but intense encore of Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House.” The lesson, perhaps, is that if a musician finds a stride with a few close colleagues, the technique takes care of itself. DB
Hammond came to the blues through the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which he experienced firsthand in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
“Cerebral and academic thought is a different way to approach music,” Flea says of his continuing dive into jazz. “I’ve always relied on emotion and intuition and physicality.”
Mar 30, 2026 10:30 PM
In the relatively small pantheon of certifiable rock stars venturing into the intersection of pop music and jazz, the…
Lettuce, from left: Eric Coomes, Adam Deitch, Ryan Zoidis, Eric Bloom, Adam Smirnoff and Nigel Hall
Feb 17, 2026 11:05 AM
They were Berklee misfits. Neither jazzy enough for the straightahead crowd at Boston’s highly prestigious College of…
New Orleans Trad Jazz Camp
Feb 19, 2026 10:39 AM
Jazz camps have exploded around the globe as a summertime tradition for working on your chops and making new friends.…
Blindfold Test proctor Ted Panken, left, with the Grammy-winning Nicole Zuraitis.
Feb 24, 2026 12:00 PM
After earning the 2024 Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy for her seventh album, How Love Begins (La Reserve), comprising 12…
