Playing From the Heart

Often in jazz, whatever status an artist has achieved, all roads lead back to humble quarters--after hours sessions in jazz dives where some of the most inspired improvisations are coaxed out.

For guitarist Mike Stern, that casual think tank is the 55 Club on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. When Stern first started playing there four years ago at the behest of his bassist friend Jeff Andrews, the guitarist was coming off the residual high of having played with Miles Davis and Jaco Pastorius.

Now with the acclaim afforded his sideman work, and with three of his own albums on Atlantic Records, Stern, 36, is considered to be one of the hottest guitarists of the current New York scene, alongside John Scofield (with whom he played in Davis’s band) and Steve Khan (who produced Stern’s last two albums).

Along with his longtime collaborator saxist Bob Berg, Stern will be making a West Coast tour following his latest album, “Jigsaw,” with a stop at Santa Monica’s At My Place on Thursday.

But on an unseasonably pleasant November morning in New York, Stern was doing strictly standards, tearing up the tiny subterranean confines of the 55, serving up heated solos to the delight of a dense, wee hour crowd.

Amidst the funky ambience, Stern explored new routes of expression during a 25-minute version of “There Is No Greater Love,” spurred on by bassist Lincoln Goines and drummer Brian Melvin.

Stern is sold on the 55 Club and its therapeutic value. “It’s a great place for me to work out and just play,” says the amiable guitarist. “It’s a seedy little place, a perfect place, where there’s no constraints and no pressure.” There, he says, he works on things “that I haven’t really documented yet on record.”

For the moment, though, Stern’s recording career is more geared towards his own music, an appealing variation on what might be called post-fusion music--jazz melded with rock, R&B; and other idioms.

The guitar is a centerpiece around the Stern apartment: Mike’s wife of 10 years, Leni, is a guitarist in her own right, with a recent release on Enja Records, “Secrets.” While she often collaborates with other guitar players, the two Sterns rarely appear together in public, musically speaking.

“It’s a lot to be married and feel so strongly about our work,” Mike said. “We may do some recording together. I love the way she’s writing. She’s got a really beautiful way of writing--and of playing. It’s great to hear that evolve. Around the apartment, we play a lot together, but we keep it separate.”

One of the hallmarks of Stern’s Atlantic albums is their strength of composition. Stern fashions intelligent songs of both infectious melodiousness and subtle adventurism. Whereas much of the material being released in the rock-inflected jazz sphere tends to be either cover songs or vehicles for soloing, Stern’s writing shows concern for craft and emotion.

“It seems to be getting harder,” Stern notes about the writing process, “because there are more pages that I throw away now. The more I do it, the more I want to grow. I’ll see certain things and think, ‘Well, I’ve repeated myself there, I’ve written that tune already.’ ”

Born in New York City, Stern threw himself himself into jazz at Boston’s Berklee School of Music. A student of guitarist Pat Metheny’s, Stern, on his recommendation, landed a job with Blood, Sweat and Tears in the late 1970s. Miles Davis, coming out of his 5-year hiatus in 1980, liked Stern’s fluency in both jazz and rock and hired him. Stern played on Davis’s “The Man With the Horn,” “We Want Miles” and “Star People” albums. Later gigs have included an ongoing association with saxist Michael Brecker.

Having just returned from a successful European trip with his current touring unit--Berg on sax, Goines on bass and Dennis Chambers on drums--Stern, who tends to be self-effacing, seemed atypically excited about his project. Is he more comfortable these days as a bandleader?

“It’s always up and down. I’m definitely getting a little bit more relaxed with that. I won’t say confident, but a little more relaxed. And it’s great to be co-leading this band with Bob. We really have a good personal relationship. He’s one of my closest friends and, of course, he’s an amazing player. So that makes it more comfortable for me. It feels very natural.

“As far as making records go, that’s always difficult. I’ve actually made four records, but three that I actually showed up for,” Stern laughs.

His official record debut in the early 1980s was “Neesh” (a hard-to-find item on Trio records), recorded at a time when Stern’s chemical indulgences were getting the best of him. He has since cleaned up his act, but the memory of that dark period seems bound up in the memory of the album.

One of Stern’s kindred spirits during the early ‘80s was the late bassist, bandleader Jaco Pastorius--who, in later years, slid into drug excess and suffered a fatal beating outside of a Florida night club two years ago.

“Some people used to say we were like brothers,” Stern recalls, shaking his head. “His death was very painful for me. I went a different route; I cooled out, and he didn’t--and would not. I could see that it was taking a toll. And it took the ultimate toll. It was really tragic.”

Like Pastorius, Stern moves convincingly in different stylistic circles. His solos will often weave together spidery bebop lines with toothy, rock-oriented blues licks. If jazz is his passion, Stern has no aversion to playing the venerable riffs reminiscent of Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix.

“I don’t particularly like being different for different’s sake,” he said. “I’m more into trying to get the emotion across. That’s the bottom line for me in music. I want to have things be interesting on a somewhat more cerebral level. But, much more than that, it’s got to come from the heart as much as possible.

“In terms of attitude, there’s a lot of similarity between Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane--in terms of just raw emotion. Sometimes I try to make music without even thinking about the instrument, but the emotion. That’s one thing I really got a sense of from Miles. He’s always looking for a certain kind of emotion or attitude . . . That’s where he begins and ends. Of course, then you have to think about how to get it, the drums should play like this and the bass like this. But basically, you don’t want to lose that certain feeling you’re trying to communicate.”

Given the vicissitudes in his still-young life, Stern seems to be in a good cycle now, with his checkered past serving as a point of comparison.

“It’s some serious point of contrast,” Stern laughs. “Sometimes (life has) been called a gift, it’s a blessing. But sometimes it doesn’t feel like that--you feel like ‘Who needs this anyway?’ But I can call upon times in my life when things were worse, and it gives me perspective.”