Mike Stern: Trip

Heads Up

When jazz-rock guitarist Mike Stern tripped over while hailing a taxi, fracturing both arms and damaging nerves in his right hand, it could have been the end of a stellar career. Several operations on, this album suggests definitively otherwise.

He’s joined by such distinguished collaborators as trumpeter Randy Brecker, saxophonists Bill Evans and Bob Franceschini, bassist Victor Wooten, drummer Dennis Chambers and others, with producer Jim Beard on piano. Listen to them on the rollercoaster ride of Half Crazy, with Evans’s tenor sax shadowing Stern’s jumpy guitar line before both take energetic breaks. Scotch Tape

and Glue refers to Stern’s enforced method of holding a plectrum, although you wouldn’t know from his muscular fluidity. The mellow side to his playing and his mellifluous vocalising – supported by singer Gio Moratti and his wife Leni Stern on ngoni – come into play for the lyrical Amelia .■