James Brown is often called the “Hardest Working Man in Show Business.” But now with Brown gone, a strong contender for the title should be five-time Grammy nominated jazz-rock virtuoso Mike Stern. Stern is perpetually on tour or recording, and when he is back home in NYC, he performs at the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village on what should be a day off. When he’s not on a gig he practices like a fiend, sometimes for up to 10 hours a day. Currently he is doing double duty both out on a world tour in support of his newest release Big Neighborhood, which features head-cutting duels with guitar icons Steve Vai and Eric Johnson, and on the road with the Yellowjackets. On a recent pit stop home between a date in Honduras and a tour of Japan, Stern squeezed in a private lesson exclusively for Guitar Edge, offering insight into some of his concepts for playing “out,” for playing horn lines on the guitar, for improvising with triads, and for developing monster chops.

Obscuring the Obvious
Stern can make the simplest concepts sound “hip.” In Fig. 1, he juggles back and forth between the C minor pentatonic and B minor pentatonic scales. Your initial reaction might be, “Well that’s pretty easy, I’ll just move back and forth between the eighth- and seventh-fret box patterns.” But to do it well is something altogether different. One thing that Stern strongly emphasizes is to try to make the move not too obvious. “The trick to playing out is to not be so symmetrical, ” explains Stern. “For example, have it change keys in the middle of the bar.”

In the video, note how Stern changes scales in the middle of what sounds like a sequential pattern creating an ear twister. Also note that the C minor pentatonic is employed for five beats, followed by seven beats of B minor pentatonic—this asymmetric against-the-bar-line phrasing keeps things sounding unpredictable. One critical component of playing “out” is that the line has to be definitively resolved and come back “in,” concluding in a strong place metrically. Otherwise it may end up sounding random—and not in a good way. Here, the resolution back to C minor pentatonic occurs clearly on the downbeat of measure 4.

Figure 1:

Transcribing Tenor Sax Lines
It’s pretty much universally accepted in the jazz world that horn players play the hippest lines, and Stern’s playing is thoroughly informed by decades of transcribing the most incendiary solos by the likes of John Coltrane and Michael Brecker. In fact, on the floor of his practice studio, he has a three-foot-high stack of manuscript books completely filled with hand-written transcriptions. Here he takes us through a lick copped by monster tenor player Jerry Bergonzi, with whom he has played and recorded on a few occasions. (Check out Bergonzi’s Vertical Reality or drummer Alex Riels’ Rielatin’, which features Stern and Bergonzi).

This lick is played over G7altered, which implies a b9, #9, b5, and b13. Most often when a jazz musician sees G7alt, they go for the Super Locrian mode (G–Ab¬–Bb–B–Db–Eb–F), which is the seventh mode of melodic minor and yields the root–b9–#9–3–b5–b13–b7. However, this lick is not specifically scale-based and goes back and forth between the altered notes and the natural 9 and 13 (A and E, respectively), among other things, perhaps implying a superimposed progression or some type of chord-on-chord thinking. Stern offers sound advice: “You can analyze it in so many different ways, but sometimes it’s good to just transcribe it, and then let it come out in your playing. I could ask them what they were thinking, but most of them would just say, ‘I don’t know what I was doing.’ They’re just hearing it.”

Figure 2:

Twisted Triads
One improvisational device favored by modern jazz players is the use of triad pairs; that is, taking two triads derived from a scale or mode and using the notes as a resource for melodies. Stern learned this tactic from his teacher, piano guru Charlie Banacos, and employs it quite often. Here he gives us a quick overview of how it’s done.

Over F7, rather than opting for the F Mixolydian mode (F–G–A–Bb–C–D–Eb), which is the correct chord scale, Stern employs two triads derived from F Mixolydian—Eb and F—and cycles them through all the possible shapes (root-position and inversions). The Eb triad yields the b7th (Eb), 9th (G), and the 11th (Bb) to create an open, suspended-type sound. The F triad yields the fundamental chord tones, root (F), 3rd (A), and the 5th (C).

Figure 3a:

Another possibility is to take a non-tertial triad (a triad not created exclusively from consecutive 3rds) and maneuver that through its inversions. Any three-note fragment from a scale can function as a non-tertial triad. Here, Stern creates two non-tertial triads (Ebmaj7sus2: Eb–F–D; and Gsus2/4: G–A–C) and alternates between each shape, sequencing them through their inversions:

Figure 3b:

Precision Picking
Stern is revered for his envy-inducing chops. However, rather than sit around and practice picking exercises all day long, he developed his chops by practicing tunes with a metronome, very gradually upping the speed. To demonstrate, he has the metronome st to half note=144, clicking on beats 2 and 4 to simulate a swing feel, and takes us through several choruses of a blazing F blues.

If you don’t have a big vocabulary of lines yet, try transcribing some easier jazz solos and then practice the lines you’ve copped along with the metronome on 2 and 4. You can also try to work some of the lines from the examples in this lesson into your playing. It’s a good idea at first to try practicing primarily eighth notes, as most uptempo jazz is eighth-note based, and to always make sure you are playing with rhythmic accuracy.