The Journey of Jazz Guitarist Mike Stern
Wong Notes
Premier Guitar
4.9 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2025
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mike Stern has been around the block. The jazz-guitar virtuoso earned his stripes through the ’70s and ’80s in New York’s jazz scene, playing 6-string with drummer Billy Cobham before tapping in with artists like Miles Davis and Jaco Pastorius—even at a time when guitar wasn’t necessarily a cornerstone piece of a jazz outfit. In this episode of Wong Notes, Stern fills Cory Wong in on the ups and downs of 50 years spent in one of the most complex and underappreciated music genres.
Stern made the leap to New York from Boston when Davis invited him to join his band (back when jazz was the pop music of the day, notes Stern), but it was a rocky ride—Stern says he and many other musicians were “bottoming out” from addiction, until a friend went sober and convinced them to give sobriety a try. Stern talks about Miles’ hidden love for the guitar, and how he succeeded in fitting into non-guitar environments.
Wong and Stern touch on the decline of arts spaces and cultures in America (thanks, Stern says, to misallocated funding), playing gigs where the band outnumbers the audience members, the benefits of running the same rig in every room, and how to pick the right pick—for Stern, that involves a bit of wig glue. Tune in to get the details, and be sure to check out our 2018 Rig Rundown with Stern, too.
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Produced by Jason Shadrick and Cory Wong
Additional Editing by Shawn Persinger
Presented by DistroKid
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's happening? Welcome to Wong Notes podcast. I'm your host, Corey Wong. Today I'm very excited |
| 0:07.3 | because on the show, we have the incredible Mike Stern. Now, Mike Stern is one of those cats who was an |
| 0:13.2 | originator of the rock and jazz thing in one. And I will credit him for being kind of the start of a new era of a type of cat who, |
| 0:24.0 | how do I put it? So to me, when I look back on players who did jazz and rock, you had the jazz |
| 0:32.7 | cats who had all the vocabulary, all the language, but they didn't really have that rock |
| 0:37.2 | energy or tone. |
| 0:39.5 | And then you look at a lot of rock players that had all that energy and angst, and they had the |
| 0:44.1 | tone, but they didn't have the vocabulary, they didn't have the language and the lines. |
| 0:48.9 | Mike Stern to me is one of the first cats that really, really had both. |
| 0:53.4 | The tone, the touch, the energy, had all of the good |
| 0:58.0 | parts of rock music and hard rock music, but he had all the language, the harmonic understanding, |
| 1:03.9 | the voicings, the lines of a jazz player. So really to me, he was a true beginning of an era. And I know somebody's going to fight me |
| 1:14.0 | in the comments or something. Fine, please do. Tell me what you think. But I think really I would credit |
| 1:19.7 | him for being one of the first pillars of that sort of thing. So it is very fun to have him on the show. |
| 1:26.3 | Incredible player, musician, writer, and all |
| 1:28.9 | around just really nice, dude. I dig Mike Stern. I've listened to his music since I was a kid. |
| 1:34.9 | I played compositions of his when I was in high school in college and still really enjoy listening |
| 1:40.4 | to his music. So I'm excited to have him on the show today. As a matter of fact, I was just actually, I was at the George Benson guitar camp and many of us were hanging out one night and we're just raving about Mike Stern, this exact stuff that I'm talking about. That's why it's kind of on the forefront of my mind. But the camp was amazing. If you're into wanting to go to a camp to learn about guitar, to learn about rhythm sections, |
| 2:05.3 | I've actually got a camp coming up in August, the syncopated summer camp. |
| 2:10.4 | And it's going to be four days and nights of master classes, jam sessions in Nashville, Tennessee, |
| 2:16.8 | at the Lowe's Hotel, and it's a rhythm section |
| 2:19.5 | thing. So drums, bass, guitar, keys, other instruments are welcome as well. But we're going to have a |
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