Hellbender debuts its jazz/rock fusion at Lizard Lounge on Wednesday, 12 April 2023.

Andrew Stern adds another notch to his band belt.

There’s a swank music dive called Lizard Lounge, bathed in red light, located at the bottom of a flight of stairs somewhere in Cambridge.

It’s a classy callback to a club atmosphere of a different era. The kind of place where you can take in the music while enjoying a Cobb salad and a string of Manhattans.

And you can! The staff are happy to shuttle in food from the upstairs restaurant Cambridge Common.

A touch of class with a little grunge. It’s uptown girl meets downtown guy. It’s a little bit of heaven.

If you get antsy, abandon the table at any time and circulate through the subterranean regions. The decor is Jazz Goth with ruby and diamond shimmers illuminating a ritual aspect over the walls and ceilings. It’s Lost Boys meets Birth of the Cool.

The space is relatively small, but made for movement. The band sets up near the center of the room so that the crowd can take in the performance from almost any angle like a quirky theater-in-the-round.

The artists are never quite sure where to face and the audience is never quite sure what to look at. Like Bernini’s sculpture “Bacchanal: A Faun Teased By Children,” you’ve got to sleuth around the sides and corners to get the full story.

The circumnavigability of the joint also presents a challenge to the sound tech. In which directions should the amps amplify? How to balance levels for a crowd that could be taking the music from almost any angle? Throughout the set the soundtech migrated to different points in the room with his tablet: listening, watching, fiddling and twiddling.

All in a night’s work at the Lizard Lounge.

Hellbender

Hump day saw the debut of Hellbender, a five-piece jazz/rock ensemble described as a mashup of Miles Davis and Led Zeppelin.

The group consisted of guitar, bass, keys, drums, and a saxophone that was fed through a rat’s nest of pedals. In two sets, with brief intermission, the Hellbenders flexed their fusion muscles.

The first set leaned mostly jazz with one foot in a jambandy door and the other foot in exploratory jazz. The band will walk you up to the edge of a cliff, prepped for an ecstatic high, before dropping you down an experimental rabbit hole.

On the six-string was Andrew Stern, the guitar hero with a thousand faces, who revved up the rock textures in the second set. This guitarist never met a new band opportunity he didn’t like. AS3, Ugly Beauty, Old Soldiers, Fat Little Bastard…the list goes on. He’s got so many bands that the dropdown menu at his website couldn’t accommodate the full roster, so he just made the last entry “Other Bands.”

And guess what? “Other bands” still doesn’t complete the list because who could forget the immortal Crystal Lizard? Gotta bring back Crystal Lizard!

Maybe next time at the Lizard Lounge?

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