He can really stretch out,” Stern says-high praise from a man whose Miles Davis nickname “Fat Time” refers to his ability to “let a solo fly.” This week, Stern comes to Santa Cruz on the heels of his second album since the accident, Eleven, a collaborative work with fusion keyboardist (and recent Grammy winner) Jeff Lorber. Opening with a title track that sounds half-mad as it swirls feverishly into a spiral-staircase chorus, Stern plays with as much searching melodicism and fretboard shredding exactitude as ever. In 2017, just a year and a half after the accident, he released Trip, a dizzying fusion album that finds the guitarist continuing to push himself to the limit. Stern crawled out of the wreckage and back to the top of his game. “Certain things are difficult, but I’m able to play, thank god.” “It’s not like gorilla glue, or anything that’s bad for your skin,” Stern says. The solution came from an unexpected source: that provenance of debutantes and drag queens, wig glue. “He’s a great drummer, but he’s got really bad injuries on his hands. He thought of his friend Ray LeVier, a New Orleans drummer who had been seriously injured in a fire. “I was playing with a glove for a while, using Velcro, but that didn’t work.” “I was struggling to find something that would work, because the pick kept sliding around,” he says.

While many would have tossed in the towel, in the months after the accident, Stern fought through, looking for ways to adapt to his new situation. He was left with permanent nerve damage in his right hand-he could no longer hold a guitar pick. In addition, he had to have his right shoulder replaced entirely. He broke both of his humerus bones, which connect the shoulder to the elbow.

It looked like a line in the middle of the road, but in fact it was elevated.

“There was some construction that was not supposed to be where it was,” Stern says. Jazz magazine Down Beat dubbed him one of the 75 Great Jazz Guitarists of All Time.īut in 2015, while crossing a New York street, a freak accident threatened to take him out of music permanently.

From there, Stern played with Jaco Pastorius and the Yellowjackets and received Grammy nods for his solo work. After a few years, he caught the ear of another New Yorker, a trumpeter named Miles Davis who tapped Stern for his band, and even named a song after him: “Fat Time” from The Man With the Horn. A bona fide shredder schooled in both jazz and rock, Stern was just a fresh-faced kid out of college when he was recommended to Blood Sweat & Tears by Pat Metheny.

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