
In high cotton: Charlie Musselwhite is thoroughly content with his return to the Delta. “We love living here,” he says. “It just makes sense, and it feels like the blues is alive and well in the Delta and you can just feel it rising up from the earth, it’s so present.”
On his new album, Mississippi Son, the harmonica giant steps out on guitar, evoking the legends of country blues 6-string and earning his place among them.
For Charlie Musselwhite, the blues isn’t just a style of music. It’s a sacrament. And Musselwhite is one of its high priests. With a palmful of bent notes on the harmonica—the instrument on which he’s been an acknowledged master for more than a half-century—or the fat snap of a guitar string, he has the power to summon not only the blues’ great spirits, but the places they rose from. If you listen closely, you can envision the Mississippi Delta’s plantation lands, where the summer sun forms a shimmering belt on the low horizon and even a slight breeze can paint your face red with clay dust. It’s a place both old and eternal—full of mystery and history and magic. And the music from that place, as Musselwhite sings in his new song “Blues Gave Me a Ride,” “tells the truth in a world full of lies.”
“Blues is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to play,” says Musselwhite, who is 78. “It’s more than just another kind of music. Whatever life throws at you, blues is there for you. It’s your buddy when you’re up and your comforter when you’re down, and it’s got this depth and substance that a lot of other music just doesn’t have. So, in that way, it has a sort of spiritual quality, and it really can be your partner in life. It gives you a way to go.”
Although Musselwhite’s parents moved him to Memphis from his native Kosciusko, Mississippi, when he was 3, the blues has, indeed, seemed to be his guiding hand ever since. Most recently, it’s led him to record Mississippi Son, the first of his more than 40 albums that is built around his guitar playing—spare as a skeleton’s rib cage, but as beautiful as a fresh magnolia blossom with hints of dust on its petals.
Charlie Musselwhite - Mississippi Son (Full Album) 2022
Slowly, over the past few decades, Musselwhite has been incorporating guitar into his live performances—sometimes in duets with his longtime compadre Elvin Bishop, who he met in Chicago in the early ’60s, just before integrated blues bands like those they would join and form began making mainstream albums. “Charlie’s guitar playing is way good,” says Bishop. “I really love the way he nails the old deep blues, the country blues. He only plays what’s necessary, and every note has nuance. His tone is dark and deep. He can play slide like Robert Nighthawk, and what Charlie does on the guitar has a good emotional effect on his music. It’s perfect for his singing and harp playing.”
Musselwhite’s life with the guitar and harmonica began when he was around 13. With an acoustic Supertone in hand, he discovered the E7 chord and the old-school Delta sound and began to learn songs like Mississippi Son’s “Pea Vine Blues.” With lyrics that illuminate how the lonesome sound of a distant train whistle can torture the brokenhearted, the song is prime country blues, first recorded by Charley Patton in 1929.
“At some point I remember coming to the realization that every culture probably has its music of lament.”
Luckily, Musselwhite had more than old shellac 78s to learn from. During his teenage and young adult years in Memphis, legendary artists like Furry Lewis, who by then swept Beale Street for a living, and Will Shade, the leader of the Memphis Jug Band, became mentors, cementing his love of the rural blues sound.
“I learned more about slide and open tunings from Furry, and regular tuning and harmonica from Will Shade,” Musselwhite says. He also met harmonica legend Big Walter Horton—a fellow acolyte of Shade’s—in Memphis, and Musselwhite would continue to be under Horton’s sway when he moved to Chicago in the late 1950s. Lesser-known artists like Willie Borum and Earl Bell were also part of Musselwhite’s education in the Bluff City. “I had no idea I was preparing myself for a career,” he says, chuckling. “I would have paid a lot more attention. I was just having fun. And I loved the blues and had to play it, but I didn’t know it was going to become my life and put me on the road.”
Out in front of Clarksdale, Mississippi’s Shack Up Inn, Charlie Musselwhite displays his Harmony Bobkat and steel slide, worn tight on his pinky.
Photo by Rory Doyle
Musselwhite left Memphis for practical reasons. “I’d been working around Memphis, doing construction work and different factory jobs and stuff, and the pay was so low, so I had done a little moonshining on the side, and one day I noticed the police were following me. I thought that was a bad sign. I’d been thinking about going to Chicago, because friends of mine had gone up and gotten jobs in these factories, and they’d come back to visit driving brand new cars ’cause they got paid so much better—and they had benefits. I’d never even heard of benefits before, so that’s why I went to Chicago—just like thousands of other people getting out of the South because it was economically depressed. I was looking for a better life.”
He found that, and a lot more. “I knew nothing about the blues scene there,” he continues. “I’d been told that anybody in the entertainment field either lived in Hollywood or New York City, and even though I had all these records that had Chicago written on ’em, with Vee-Jay and Chess labels, I thought, ‘Well, that’s just where they manufacture the records.’ I didn’t know that’s where all these guys lived. But lucky for me the first job I got in Chicago was as a driver for an exterminator, and I drove him all over Chicago, so I learned the city really well, really fast. Driving around, I started seeing posters and signs for guys like Muddy Waters and Elmore James, and I couldn’t believe it! All my heroes were right here in Chicago! So, I’d make a note of where these clubs were and at night I’d be hanging out listening to live blues right in front of my heroes that I only had records of before.”
For a spell, he lived in the basement of the now-historic Jazz Record Mart music shop, where he also occasionally worked, with the irascible 9-string-playing bluesman Big Joe Williams as his roommate. “Oh boy, you never knew what was going to happen,” Musselwhite offers. “We had a great time. I really wish I’d written down the stories that he told me. We’d go around town visiting friends and relatives, just like I did with Shakey—which is what they called Big Walter in Chicago—always looking for a little taste. That was kind of a common hobby among many of the older blues guys, and often we’d sit up late at night just drinking beer and Joe would be playing guitar and I would be playing harmonica with him, and he just seemed to enjoy doing that, so it was awful encouraging. I picked up little tips on his playing. Occasionally I’d pick up his guitar to try to play it, but, man, the strings were like cables. It was hard to even fret it, but he would play it like it was butter.”
Musselwhite and his manager and wife, Henrietta, have lived and learned in the court of blues royalty. The other gents in this photo are Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.
Photo courtesy of Charlie Musselwhite
Williams’ guitar—albeit reduced to its original 6-string setup—makes a cameo on Mississippi Son, on “Remembering Big Joe,” an instrumental reflecting the savvy gutbucket style of the bluesman noted for the first recordings of “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “Crawling King Snake.”
“I just played off the top of my head, thinking about Big Joe, and that’s what came out,” says Musselwhite. “That’s what I remember him sounding like.”
In Chicago, Mussselwhite also had access to the canonical harmonica players of electric blues: Horton, Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and his fellow young trailblazer, Paul Butterfield. And by the mid-’60s, Musselwhite’s own mojo was working. In 1965, he met producer Samuel Charters, who was making his influential Chicago/The Blues/Today! trilogy of recordings. Billed as Memphis Charlie, Musselwhite appeared with the Big Walter Blues Harp Band on the third volume. Later that year, Musselwhite played on John Hammond Jr.’s So Many Roads album, and a session of his own with Charters yielded 1967’s Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s Southside Band.
Charlie Musselwhite’s Gear on 'Mississippi Son':
Back home in the Delta, Charlie Musselwhite plucks a Harmony Bobkat as he sits on the porch of a former sharecropper’s residence at a Clarksdale, Mississippi, hotel compound called the Shack Up Inn, where his live 2012 Juke Joint Chapel album was recorded.
Photo by Rory Doyle
Guitars
- Vintage Gibson L-4
- Harmony Bobkat
- 1967 Silvertone solidbody
- 1954 Gibson J-45
- Vintage Gibson L-7
Amps
- Laney A3012
Strings & Slide
- .011-gauge sets
- Steel slide
As luck, or, perhaps, the blues’ guiding hand, had it, the album arrived when freeform FM radio was an emergent force in American music and Musselwhite’s reputation spread throughout the country. Riding this acclaim, he relocated to San Francisco, where his bona fide sound was embraced by the rock counterculture scene anchored at the Fillmore West.
Since then, Musselwhite’s star has burned. At times more brightly than others, but he has consistently toured and recorded and remained not only in the eyes and ears of blues fans, but in the general music loving public’s. It’s not just a matter of his excellence—his ability to blow pure soul through his main axe’s tiny reeds. Musselwhite, despite his devotion to bone-deep blues, is no purist. Over the decades he’s collaborated and made albums with Bonnie Raitt, Flaco Jiménez, the Blind Boys of Alabama, John Lee Hooker, and Ben Harper, exploring jazz, gospel, Tex-Mex, Cuban, and other world musics.
“I discovered that a lot of music—flamenco, Greek, Arabic—has a sound or feel that reminds me of blues,” Musselwhite observes. “It’s got the same kind of heart— especially flamenco. If it ain’t blues, I don’t know what it is. It has that spirit, that same energy. At some point I remember coming to the realization that every culture probably has its music of lament. And there’s a guy on the corner singing about ‘my baby left me’ wherever you go in the world.”
“Every now and then I’d sneak in a track on an album where I was playing guitar. A lot of people never even realized it was me.”
Musselwhite has also hosted a series of world-class guitar players in his bands, from Harvey Mandel and Robben Ford in the ’60s, to Matthew Stubbs and Kirk Fletcher in recent years. “Every now and then I’d sneak in a track on an album where I was playing guitar,” Musselwhite says. “A lot of people never even realized it was me.”
Now, with Mississippi Son, the feline is out of the flour sack. And Musselwhite is back in his native state. He and his wife and manager, Henrietta, purchased a home in the blues mecca of Clarksdale, Mississippi, some years ago, but in 2021 they departed the West Coast to take up permanent residence in the small Delta burg with a downtown that looks frozen in 1966. In Clarksdale, Musselwhite befriended guitarist, songwriter, and producer Gary Vincent, and in 2012 Vincent produced Musselwhite’s live Juke Joint Chapel, at the hip local venue bearing that name.
This time, they regrouped in Vincent’s downtown studio, Clarksdale Soundstage. “With the pandemic, I had all this time on my hands, and Gary’s studio is three blocks from me. He’s got a ton of guitars, so I spent a lot of time over there playing them. At one point, he said, ‘Ya know, we should tape some of these.’ I said, ‘Yeah, go ahead.’ So, the album started spontaneously. We were just recording tunes for posterity.”
With a borrowed white Stratocaster, Musselwhite evokes the old school onstage at the Blues Cazorla Festival on July 22, 2011, in Cazorla, Spain.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
Posterity should be pleased. Mississippi Son’s 14 songs add up to one of the best new albums of country blues recorded in decades—since the early ’90s titles cut by Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside for the Fat Possum label. But Musselwhite’s proclivity for acoustic and clean but lightly hairy electric guitars takes the sound back even earlier, to the days when Chess, Vee-Jay, and Sun were cutting records by artists straight out of the cotton fields. His repeated sliding chords and up-picking on the tunes “Hobo Blues” and “Crawling King Snake” evoke the spirit of John Lee Hooker, who cut their most famous versions. But many of the songs are Musselwhite originals with lyrics that also conjure visions of the Delta of yore, alluding to the ’Frisco (the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway), the itinerant bluesman’s life (the semi-autobiographical “Drifting from Town to Town”), and the endless flow of the Mississippi River.
Musselwhite is joined on five songs by drummer Ricky Martin and upright bassist Barry Bays, and he overdubbed his own harmonica. But some of the album’s most profound performances are just Musselwhite and his guitar. The heart-squeezer “The Dark,” a Guy Clark number, is especially hypnotic. As he lays out lightly surging riffs on the Gibson L-4 acoustic archtop that’s one of the album’s MVP 6-strings, he gently intones the lyrics in a way that transforms the small elements of a fading day—a June bug on a window screen, a dripping kitchen faucet, the Earth turning its back on the sun—into something existential. “One way or another,” Musselwhite observes in the third verse, “we’re all in the dark.”
The album’s other guitars were a 1967 Silvertone solidbody electric borrowed from the Clarksdale guitar shop Bluestown Music, a 1954 Gibson J-45, and the Gibson L-7 that belonged to Big Joe Williams. A tube-driven Laney A3012 was the amp Vincent used for Musselwhite’s guitar and harmonica. This model amplifier was made in the ’80s and ’90s and has four 12AX7 preamp tubes and two 6V6 power tubes, but in Musselwhite’s control it sounds like a vintage tweed Fender or a Valco Sears special—an old man of a soundbox with more than a hint of experience in its voice. Vincent recorded the amp with a Neumann U 87.
"I really love the way he nails the old deep blues, the country blues. He only plays what’s necessary, and every note has nuance.”—Elvin Bishop
Musselwhite’s tunings, besides standard, were textbook Delta blues. “Furry Lewis taught me Spanish and Vestapol,” he says, using the terms typically used to describe the open G (Spanish, or cross-tuning for minor-key variations á la Skip James) and open D/E families of tunings. After he plugs in, “I turn the treble all the way off and the bass all the way up, the mids about half-way, and I’m ready to go.” Pedals? Of course not.
When we spoke, Musselwhite had some dates on his schedule with Elvin Bishop, and both artists were looking forward to playing country blues—and especially some country blues guitar—together again, as they have intermittently since meeting in the music’s ultra-fertile ’60s Chicago scene.
“I loved the sound of Chicago blues and where it took the electric guitar, but I’ve always been a big fan of country blues guitar,” says Musselwhite. “There are so many subtleties in it. That’s where the real beauty of the blues is—in those subtleties … just listening to the way those guys accompanied themselves. One guy with a guitar: whether it’s John Lee Hooker or Lightnin’ Hopkins or Charley Patton. I love that stuff and so I guess that’s why I play like I do. I also knew a lot of the old-timers, and they weren’t shredders by any stretch of the imagination. That sound captivated me when I was a kid, and it still does.”
Charlie Musselwhite - Blues Up The River
Charlie Musselwhite plays his song “Blues Up the River,” from Mississippi Son, on a new Epiphone John Lee Hooker model Zephyr.
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Once a musician, always a musician. At 71, jazz guitarist Mike Stern is still jetsetting to perform around the world.
The jazz-guitar virtuoso’s new record Echoes and Other Songs shines bright amidst some major—and challenging—turning points in his life.
It was around 8 p.m. and, after enduring a severely delayed flight from Europe, Mike Stern had finally arrived home to New York City. He was overseas for a run of marathon three-and-a-half-hour shows in Munich and Budapest, where he shared the stage with fellow guitar virtuoso Al Di Meola on the Mandoki Soulmates’ A Memory of Our Future album release concert.
Even though Stern had to leave the next day for a week-long stint at the Alternative Guitar Summit camp—where he would do clinics and perform alongside giants of the modern jazz world including John Scofield and Kurt Rosenwinkel—he invited me over that night to his Gramercy Park apartment to discuss his debut Mack Avenue Records release, Echoes and Other Songs.
As I set up my recording equipment, Stern was also busy setting up. He opened his Boss BCB-60 pedalboard case and connected his pedals to his well-worn Yamaha SPX90II, then routed the setup into a pair of Fender Twin Reverb reissues. “I just want to set my stuff up so I can practice later,” explains Stern. He was very generous with his time, and our interview concluded around midnight. As I headed out, Stern was just beginning his hours-long, late-night shedding session.
This relentless drive and obsessive discipline are the keys to Stern’s “chops of doom,” his nearly half-century reign as one of the world’s most celebrated jazz-fusion guitarists, and his remarkable road to recovery from a horrific accident that happened eight years ago.
Mike Stern - "Echoes"
In the Aftermath
In the summer of 2016, Stern tripped and fell over improperly stowed construction equipment while crossing the street, and broke his humeri (both of the arm bones that extend from the shoulder to the elbow). His right hand suffered permanent nerve damage, which caused it to become bent like a claw, making it so that he can no longer do some things like fingerpick and pinch harmonics. Stern’s legendary fluid picking style also became choppy, and he’s had to work extremely hard over the years to get it to flow smoothly again. “It’s still frustrating as hell,” admits Stern. “You didn’t have to think about the technique so much because you’ve been doing it for years, and then all of a sudden, now you have to spend energy and brain power on it. But it’s getting more natural as I keep doing it.”
“You didn’t have to think about the technique so much because you’ve been doing it for years, and then all of a sudden, you have to spend energy and brain power on it.”
Equally devastating is the mental toll from the accident, which Stern is still coping with. “I was really nervous to do the record at all. I was trying to give myself every excuse to get out of it. I thought, ‘Oh my hands are gonna cramp up because I’ll be nervous.’ My hands cramp up because of this injury,” says Stern. “It’s more in my mind. But that’s what I’m going through sometimes because of this. It’s really serious. I’m the only guitar player in the world that’s using glue—wig glue—to hold a pick. Everybody says they can’t hear the difference [in my playing] but I really feel it.”
Despite his initial, anxiety-driven apprehension, Echoes and Other Songs might be Stern’s best studio album yet. “I thought all the solos sucked and I’d have to go back and do everything again,” confesses Stern. “Then I listened back and, first of all, I can’t change it because it was all recorded live with the band, and then I said, ‘Thank God I don’t need to.’”Stern’s new record features a slate of impressive collaborators, who gathered to cut the album in New York City.
Hitting with the Heavyweights
As typical for a Mike Stern record, Echoes and Other Songs features a star-studded lineup of musicians. The luxury of recording with some of the world’s best musicians comes at a price. “The problem was getting those guys to rehearse because everyone’s so busy,” says Stern. “We got one rehearsal with Jim [Beard, producer], myself, Antonio [Sanchez, drummer], and Chris Potter [saxophonist]. No Christian McBride [bassist]—so we ran the tunes without bass,” says Stern. “We finally got Christian to do it the very night before. He had some time and drove all the way in [from New Jersey], and there was a ton of traffic because there was a baseball game or something, and he was late, but he still made it. We got together for like an hour-and-a-half that night and went over everything. He already had it together.”
The next day at BerkleeNYC’s Power Station Studios, they recorded straight through without listening back. It was mostly one to three takes of a tune—maybe four at most, if something was tricky. Stern explains, “We didn’t have that much time—we only had two days to do eight tunes! That’s kind of a lot, especially because it’s very live and we had never played together.”
“I’m the only guitar player in the world that’s using glue—wig glue—to hold a pick.”
Stern did two days with that rhythm section, and the second session had Beard, Richard Bona on bass and vocals, Dennis Chambers on drums, and Bob Franceschini on sax. This was also intended to be a two-day session, but they finished the three tunes in one day, and were wise enough to leave it alone. (Later overdubs included Mike’s wife, Leni, on ngoni, a West African stringed instrument, and Arto Tunçboyacıyan on percussion.)
Over the years, Stern had worked with all of the musicians on the album, with the exception of Sanchez, who entered the picture at Beard’s suggestion. He had just played a session with Sanchez, and Stern recalls, “Jim said, ‘Wow, that cat is playing his ass off.’ I was like, ‘No shit, of course.’ I’m aware of him but we never played. Beard said, ‘It would be a really good hookup because Antonio’s such a great jazz player; he really follows you.’ And he did exactly that, he really followed me, especially on the first tune ‘Connections.’ All of it. He was right there for all the soloists.”
Mike Stern's Gear
Improvising isn’t just for the fretboard: A 2016 accident permanently damaged Stern’s right hand, forcing him to relearn how to play the instrument—a process that’s still ongoing.
Photo by Sandrine Lee
Guitar
- Yamaha Pacifica 1511MS Mike Stern
Amp
- Fender ’65 Twin Reverb reissue
Effects
- Yamaha SPX90II
- Boss SD-1 (as boost with level all the way up, drive all the way off, and tone at 11:00)
- Boss SD-1W (as drive with level at 11:00, drive at 1:00, tone at 2:00, and mode switch set to C)
- Boss DD-3T
- Boss MO-2
- Boss TU-3
- Vemuram Jan Ray
- Truetone power supply with daisy chain cables
- Boss BCB-60 pedalboard
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario (.011–.013–.015–.026–.032–.038)
- D’Addario heavy picks
Beauty in Simplicity
Like most accomplished jazz musicians, Stern has spent countless hours shedding complex tunes. He’ll regularly practice John Coltrane’s “26-2” with Leni at home, and has recorded Coltrane’s challenging “Moment’s Notice” on several jazz-oriented CDs. But unless Stern is specifically recording an acoustic-jazz album like his 1992 release, Standards (and Other Songs), he generally prefers to keep it simple for his studio albums.
“I like to write so you don’t have to have a slide ruler to figure it out. That’s just my take,” says Stern. “I mean, some of the stuff that I hear that’s more complex, it’s gorgeous. I’m not taking that away. But when you have a limited amount of time for a band, you have to kind of keep it realistic. You have to make it kind of simple because most of the time they’re not going to have time to really learn some hard shit. I like to do that anyway because it’s more fun for me and for everybody else to play. It’s not so fun to show up and have to play ‘Giant Steps’ backwards and in three different keys.”
“I like to write so you don’t have to have a slide ruler to figure it out.”
You’ll often hear common forms like blues and minor blues disguised with the Stern touch on his albums. “Could Be,” the closing track on Echoes and Other Songs, is a quirky contrafact on the very familiar jazz standard “It Could Happen to You.”
“Connections,” another song in the collection, “has a blowing section that’s easy so people can take off on it,” says Stern. “It’s almost got a McCoy Tyner vibe; I always think of ‘Passion Dance’ in a way.” Since “Connections” didn’t require extraneous brain power to calculate unexpected chord changes or odd meters, the musicians were a lot freer and more relaxed, and the results are astounding. Stern says, “Man, Chris Potter, whew—he just tore it up on that track.”
Stern’s signature Yamaha electric has been his go-to for decades. Combined with a pair of Twin Reverbs, it takes him wherever he needs to go.
Photo by Chris Marroquin
“Gospel Song,” the second single from Echoes, is a ballad inspired by the down-to-earth music Stern heard growing up in Washington, D.C. “All you heard there was soul music, basically. It was so cool to live there and hear that music and it got me right away,” says Stern. “I used to listen to a lot of Motown and some church-y kind of stuff is in Motown or soul music.”
“Curtis,” which features Bona singing and Stern making an appearance on backing vocals, pays homage to a soul-music legend. “It’s got the vibe of a Curtis Mayfield tune in a kind of loose way. He’s one of my favorite composers,” says Stern. “You didn’t have to think too hard. It would just get into your heart.”
Fitting Farewell
Sadly, producer Jim Beard passed away in March 2024, several months before the album’s release. In addition to working with the likes of Steely Dan and Pat Metheny, among others, Beard had played an enormous role in Stern’s studio albums over the past several decades. “He played on ‘Chromazone,’” recalls Stern, referencing his most famous tune from the 1988 album Time in Place. Beard also produced numerous Stern albums, starting with 1991’s Odds or Evens. “He produced and mixed the stuff too, even though we had engineers. He’s amazing and had such an incredible ear. It was a shock to lose him,” says Stern.
Fittingly, “Crumbles,” Stern’s most adventurous studio track to date, features Beard, who adds a hauntingly introspective touch to the song’s mood. “The tune is a little quirky and has some humor in it. I like some of the things I was trying to do writing-wise and Christian really dug it. We were in the studio and we said, ‘Everybody’s been playing here and there but Jim hasn’t really gotten any features, so let’s just do that with him.’ He played this spacey thing and everybody just kind of played along, but we kind of knew we were going to go back in time and rock out in the end,” says Stern, who pulled out his synth-like Boss MO-2 for the guitar solo. “It just happened. I hadn’t used it for the whole record, so I said, ‘Let me use this with distortion.’”
Stern and his wife, musician Leni Stern, have always practiced as a duo at home, but they only started performing together recently. In this live shot, Leni presides in the background.
Photo by Chris Marroquin
The 55 Bar
Since roughly 1984, NYC’s 55 Bar was Stern’s home away from home. He had a weekly residency there for decades, playing every Monday and Wednesday when he was back in town. In stark contrast to a formal concert at a big-money venue, gigs at the 55 Bar—lovingly nicknamed “The Dump”—were casual, low-key situations. For guitar geeks, it was the best deal around, especially in the early days when the $12 cover charge also included two drinks and popcorn.
At his 55 Bar gigs, Stern would tweak new compositions and arrangements, and stretch out on jazz standards. It wouldn’t be uncommon at the 55 Bar to hear Stern burn for 20 minutes on a very uptempo blues, exploring esoteric ideas that you might not hear him do on a more listener-friendly studio album. Or, he could morph a jazz standard into an endlessly building, extended-outro vamp where he would play ear-twisting lines.
“Playing [at 55 Bar], sometimes I would come back that night and be inspired to try to write something.”
Musicians as diverse as Hiromi Uehara, Paul Shaffer, and the late Roy Hargrove would often randomly show up and sit in with Stern. Countless magic moments happened at the 55 Bar, very often sparking new ideas for Stern. “Playing there, sometimes I would come back that night and be inspired to try to write something,” says Stern, who made his first public appearance after the accident at 55 Bar on October 10, 2016, and used subsequent gigs there as a rehab of sorts as he began relearning the instrument.
At the club, Stern created a culture that defined a New York movement in jazz guitar, and gave players like Wayne Krantz and Adam Rogers, among others, an opportunity to showcase their abilities and develop their craft.
Sadly, however, in 2022, the 55 Bar closed, striking a devastating blow to the Big Apple’s creative community. “That place was one in a million,” says Stern.
“It’s a total drag,” he continues. “You have to look around and hustle gigs. It’s a challenge for younger players to find clubs to play and keep going. Even as discouraging as it is, I tell people, whatever you do, just try to find time to practice. Find a couple of hours every day. It’s a corny phrase but just ‘water the flowers.’ Otherwise, you got nothing.”
YouTube It
After decades of gigging separately, Mike Stern and his wife Leni Stern decided to start performing together. Leni’s ngoni playing can be heard on Echoes and Other Songs, and in this clip, the duo jam at home on one of Leni’s West African-inspired songs.
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warmaudio.com
PRS announces two new limited-edition models in the CE Family: the PRS CE 24-08 Black Limba Limited Edition and the PRS CE 24-08 Swamp Ash Limited Edition.
An eye-catching feature of these limited-edition guitars is their body wood. The black limba body offers rich, natural color and powerful but warm voice, while the swamp ash model has more pronounced grain and is known for its balanced tonal spectrum, with bright, articulate highs and a warm, defined low end.
“Every once in a while, we choose woods from our stock to create special instruments, and these guitars are great examples of just that,” said Paul Reed Smith, Founder and Managing General Partner, PRS Guitars. “The CE has been with us since the very early days of PRS. I love celebrating this model with new woods and by adding the ‘08’ switching system to it for the first time. These are real players’ guitars.”
Both the PRS CE 24-08 Black Limba and Swamp Ash Limited Edition guitars come with a 24 fret, 25” scale length maple neck and rosewood fretboard. Both models also feature PRS 85/15 pickups – made by PRS in Stevensville, Maryland. These pickups deliver exceptional clarity with extended high and low end.
Paired with PRS's intuitive 24-08 switching system, these CE 24-08 models offer a wide array of tonal possibilities with eight different pickup configurations that effortlessly transition between humbucking tones to crisp single-coil sounds. This is the first instance of this switching system on PRS’s CE model platform. The PRS patented tremolo bridge adds even more versatility to the sound.
These PRS CE 24-08 Limited Edition instruments were designed with players in mind. For complete specifications, video, and more, please visit https://prsguitars.com/ and follow PRS Guitars @prsguitars on Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok to stay in the conversation.