The Heart Is A
The workshop at Stubblebine LutherieAndrew Stern debuts record at Stubblebine Lutherie on Sunday, 29 October 2023.
The guitarist about town plays most of Lonely Hunter, and a few extras, within walls of instruments in states of (dis)repair.
Carson McCullers was a mid-20th century American writer. Her first novel was the breakout success The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter.
Carson McCullers (1959)The novel quickly established her brand as a leading light of a young new wave following in the footsteps of other American authors making waves on the international scene. Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner were major influences, as they were with so many others of her generation.
She sometimes thrived and mostly survived during a career spent in the second-tier of American literature. But the second-tier is not half bad; spotting her a few distinguished awards, appointments, and enough freedom to follow up her breakthrough novel with strong additions to her body of work: Reflections In A Golden Eye (got made into a movie with Marlon Brando), The Member of the Wedding (got turned into a stageplay), The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (turned into a play again), and more.
Chief among her fixations: alienation, the desire to belong, isolation. A real 20th century suite of themes.
She also shaded off into queer literature avant la lettre.
She struggled with alcoholism all her life. No writing session was complete without a thermos full of tea & liquor besides the typewriter. Mostly liquor, and often delivered by her mother.
The end of her life was spent battling illness, some of it attributable to alcoholism and some of it not.
One of her biographers reported that late in life she expected the phone would ring with a call from the Nobel committee.
Given her body of work, it wasn’t a ludicrous notion. Unlikely though. Few critics doubted her art, but the output was a touch too small. And despite a string of successful novels and plays, she never had the kind of sustained celebrity that other American literary superstars enjoyed. Can we also speculate that the world might not have been ready for a mainstream female literary celebrity in the first half of the 20th century?
Andrew Stern
The guitarist-with-a-thousand-bands, Andrew Stern. Or maybe a few less than 1,000. Looks like he trimmed the list a bit at his website, retaining AS3 and Crystal Lizard, among others.
On the eve of his record release, the local rock/jazz fusionnaire found himself and a cozy group of music lovers at the Stubblebine Lutherie.
Andrew SternWhat’s a ‘lutherie’? If you don’t know, we won’t tell you (sticks out tongue).
But seriously, it’s a shop for stringed instruments. Building them. Repairing them. Dis-repairing them, as the customer likes, to add such strange hooks, bells, and whistles as the customer deems beneficial and the art of the luthier can offer.
It’s a perfect spot for the release of Andrew Stern’s solo record Lonely Hunter. He’s a musician who constructs and desconstructs sound to skate along the edge of what we all recognize as the lexical vernacular of jazz, and rock, and a few other things.
A consummate technical talent, Stern refuses to mail in a saccharine phrase. He could make slick guitar sounds all day long, sure, but prefers roughhewn versus cloying silky smoothness, the abrupt versus the gradual, the boxy versus the round, the succinct versus the interminable.
In a string of ten songs, he walked the audience through his wide-ranging record. Often diving into the next song before you realized the last one finished. The instrumentals included nuggets by a galaxy of influences, from Miles Davis, to Neil Young, to Ira Gershwin, and more.
The encore closer might have been a steamed, broiled, and baked version of Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” Or it might not.
Extra points for the cooler of beer at stage right. It’s a rawk show at the end of the day.
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