Mike Stern Band

• Reduced mobility
• Magnetic loop

The boisterous guitar of Mike Stern is back again. This musician’s visit to a jazz festival still has the audacity to overshadow any of the rock acts that often grace our stages. The professional career of this musician is marked by his research into and the study of a powerful and courageous line of arrangements for his creations. Jazz from which he carves out grooves far removed from stereotypes. Passionate music that seeks and finds affinities with forms close to those of Jimi Hendrix, Pat Metheny and Jeff Beck. An electrifying vitality in which the blues also thrives.

Born in chilly Boston 70 years ago, Stern joined the band of trumpeter Miles Davis when he was just thirty years old, but he did so with an already perfectly defined style all his own. But this militancy at Davis’ side in the early 1980s was the doctorate that turned him into a soloist and a star in his own right. Before joining Davis, he had been a student of Pat Metheny at the Berklee School, and he was a friend of another inventive guitarist, none other than Bill Frisell. He found his professional niche in jazz-rock, becoming a member of the mighty Blood, Sweat & Tears, or joining bands led by bassist Jaco Pastorius or Billy Cobham and David Sanborn, before ending up in the Steps Ahead and with the brothers Michael and Randy Brecker. A logical start for a musician who, as a child, had spurned the piano in favour of playing the guitar like B.B. King and Jimi Hendrix, his two musical heroes.

Stern played at JAZZMADRID in 2019, offering up a resounding concert at the Fernán Gómez, the kind of concert that has the audience on their feet and calling for more at the end of the show. As was the case then, this new concert will once again demonstrate that every time he appears on stage, people immediately fall in love with jazz. And one thing’s for sure: the audience will also enjoy the blistering bursts of energy from the instrumentalists who have been touring with the guitarist in recent years: drummer Dennis Chambers and electric bassist Jimmy Haslip, the latter a specialist in marvellous, fast-paced, cramped soliloquies. And supporting each of these professionals’ initiatives, the robust, emphatic sound of Jeff Lorber’s keyboards.