The guitarist Mike Stern reached peak combustion at an unlikely point in his first set at the Iridium on Thursday night, while cutting a path from one guileless ballad to the next. He enlisted only his tough-minded drummer, Dennis Chambers, for this excursion, issuing no directive beyond a tempo. In no time they achieved a blues-rock bliss state, goading each other toward notions of strenuous metaphysical abandon.
Music Review
Ballads Punctuated by Frenzy
The Mike Stern Band Brings Jazz-Rock to the Iridium
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
The Mike Stern Band From left, Mr. Stern, Dennis Chambers, Anthony Jackson and Randy Brecker at the Iridium.
By NATE CHINEN
Published: December 20, 2013
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The fury lasted no more than a couple of minutes — it probably couldn’t have held much longer — before Mr. Stern eased up on the throttle, rounded his tone and knitted a delicate prelude to “What Might Have Been,” a song as wistful and muted as its title suggests. But an impression had been made. From that moment on, his four-piece band, with Randy Brecker on trumpet and Anthony Jackson on bass guitar, sounded taut and galvanized, as if alert to something vital at stake.
Mr. Stern, 60, has built his aesthetic around that pressurized feeling. Early in his career, working on both sides of the jazz-rock fault line — with Blood, Sweat & Tears, the drummer Billy Cobham and most visibly, the hard-nosed early-’80s Miles Davis band — he struck a balance of fire and logic, with a touch of visionary excess. He’s now much closer to the ground: a guitarist’s guitarist, an eager collaborator, a fixture at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village. The humblebrag title of his 2012 album, “All Over the Place” (Heads Up International), suggests both a stylistic compass and a way of being.
“Out of the Blue,” a frisky, springlike track from that album, served as the opener here, giving each musician a turn in the spotlight. It also established the band’s dynamic exchange, a byproduct of Mr. Chambers’s deep groove pulling against Mr. Jackson’s ropy, ingeniously off-kilter bass lines. Mr. Brecker was the picture of post-bop aplomb, his ideas and tone pinpoint-clear even through a gauze of reverb.
Mr. Stern, meanwhile, was unmistakable at every turn. He played his trademark guitar, patterned after a Telecaster, with the usual light patina of chorus effect and delay. An almost deceptive sort of technician, he fluently picked every note, even at hummingbird speed.
And while his phraseology derives from bebop, he finished a lot of his lines like a blues player, bending pitches to his will. On ballads, he made painterly use of his volume knob, so that his lines seemed to materialize in midair.
Beyond that, he was unflappable, notably during each of several volcanic, perversely cross-rhythmic drum solos by Mr. Chambers. “Chatter,” which closed the set, brought the full band to that level of intensity, straining and fuming. But Mr. Stern kept his cool.
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