Mike Stern
Live Villa Celimontana

THE REVIEW

I was 11 years old when I saw this concert, it was the first one my father took me to see because I really liked jazz fusion when I was young, and he wanted to surprise me. We sat down and were about to witness a concert that I will never forget. After half an hour of leisure to get ourselves something to eat, the background music stopped, and he came in. Modest, without greetings or botched Italian phrases directed at the audience. Silently, he plugged in the guitar, and the whole band (including an excellent saxophonist... whose name I can't remember) began to play. They mostly performed pieces from the latest album "Voices", his distinctive guitar sound... fluid and light, spread everywhere and enveloped the audience, embracing them with this light yet improvised sound, clearly rooted in free jazz (even though the instrumentation is not entirely part of that genre, as it features only a single saxophonist). Not a moment of boredom, it flows easily once you start to admire him while moving his hair and playing improvisations and solos always in line with the music being played, despite Mike doing a guitar interlude at the end of the concert where he also used distortions. While I was focused on watching him and figuring out what he was playing, the audience was relaxed, letting themselves go with their thoughts. Credit is due to the drummer, a great improviser but at the same time technical, lively, and intentionally restrained (he almost never launched into long and fast solos).

An admirable and impressive concert in its simplicity, also because Mike live comes across as an ordinary player, he never showed off throughout the concert, he didn't play for the audience, he played just for the joy of it, perfectly succeeding in the endeavor.