Mike Stern / Heavy Metal @ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Photo by Kannan Palanisamy
Once again the marvelous Mike Stern was as part of our JAZZ/TAKEs series but now at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. It was a very special experience to see a very different audience to this JAZZ/TAKE on Heavy Metal and it was great to see some bumping heads and raised hands at a jazz show. Alongside Mike Stern was Gabor Bolla (HU) on tenor saxophone, and the French twin brothers and virtuosos on their instruments, François Moutin on bass and Louis Moutin on drums. They performed jazz interpretations of Heavy Metal with the music of Iron Maiden, Metallica, Slayer, Black Sabbath, and Judas Priest.
The quartet performed a captivating set of the following songs:
Run To The Hills (Iron Maiden)
Breaking The Law (Judas Priest)
South Of Heaven (Slayer)
Sad But True (Metallica)
Solo bass interlude: Smoke On The Water (Deep Purple)
Who Knows (Mike Stern)
Number Of The Beast (Iron Maiden)
As encore: Lady Evil (Black Sabbath)
It was amazing to once again have Mike Stern as a part of our musical endeavor. If you missed the show you can enjoy a selection of photos from the concert below taken by the talented photographer, Kannan Palanisamy.
American jazz/fusion guitarist Mike Stern is widely acclaimed as one of the most innovative, influential and original guitarists of his generation. When first exposed to a larger audience as a member of Miles Davis' celebrated comeback band of the early 1980s, Stern’s personal and refreshing blend of rock, blues and jazz influences didn’t sound like anything anyone had ever heard before and his performances on Miles Davis albums such as “Man With The Horn” and “We Want Miles” sent shock waves through the jazz community worldwide. He subsequently released 18 albums of his own and collaborated with all the greatest artists of the jazz/fusion movement, including Billy Cobham, the Brecker Brothers, Jaco Pastorius, Steps Ahead, David Sanborn, Blood, Sweat & Tears, to name but a few. Known for being almost exclusively devoted to his own original material in recent decades, Stern has previously accepted doing two rare and privileged concerts for the Niels Lan Doky International Jazz Collective, one where he performed Jimi Hendrix material (2018) and another where he did a Jazz/Take on 1960s psychedelic rock (2019). This brand new 2021 project was a natural extension of the previous ones, with the challenge of jazz/takes on Heavy Metal - a genre that goes beyond but can trace its roots back to Hendrix and psychedelic rock. All of these genres are predominantly guitar driven and became widely popular up through the 1970s. As a result, all of the jazz/fusion music that emerged in that decade was heavily rock-influenced and also to a large extent guitar driven, with groups like Return To Forever and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra among the prime beacons of new guitar-driven jazz styles. Mike Stern is of a generation that came of age in the late 1960s and 1970s when Heavy Metal emerged - and it is hard to imagine that it would not have had an impact on his musical development.
