Biography

"You're so progressive, but you're so simple. You got jazzy, you got traditional, you got a little bluesy. You went out to left field for just a second to make everybody notice and then brought everybody right back into the song."

Those words, used by legendary New Orleans jazz guitarist, educator and raconteur Danny Barker to describe the playing of his student Harry Sterling, are a perfect summation of Sterling's musical palette. From his early days as Barker's protégé in the Fairview Baptist church band, through his decades-long career as a professional musician, Sterling has embraced a panorama of musical styles. Regardless of whether he is playing contemporary R&B, New Orleans standards and jazz, or down-home blues, his approach to the music stays rooted, direct, and expressive.

This CD is Sterling's debut recording as an artist, and the music contained within is informed by his 30-plus years on the bandstand. While his breadth of experience gives depth to the performances, Sterling chose to go back to the beginning, his beginning: the music he knew and loved during the time that he came into adulthood as a working musician.

"Most of those songs were done in the latter part of the seventies, early eighties. It was during the time that they had composers actually writing good music," attests Sterling. "Some of these were my very favorites, and I've always wanted to do them."

These songs, with their inclination towards smooth sophistication, show a very different side of Sterling than most fans have experienced. For the better part of the last fifteen years, he has performed over two hundred and fifty shows a year as a member of Big Al Carson and the Bluesmasters. In the Bluesmasters, Sterling anchors a lean and tight 3 piece band behind vocal acrobat and master crowd-pleaser Carson, laying down hard-edged blues and old-school R&B classics. The number of people who have seen Sterling tearing into Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Otis Redding's material must push well into the hundreds of thousands, but far fewer have heard him as he is here: playing lush jazzy chords and silky clean lines, singing lead and driving a larger band.

This is Sterling returning to his core. Although his education and career would take him down many musical paths, the music he chose for this project, the music of Quincy Jones, the Brothers Johnson, the Meters, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, is the soundtrack of his life as a young man.

"I was a working musician, student during the daytime, and playing music at night with a group called High Voltage," recalled Sterling. "During that time in New Orleans the music scene was pretty good. I was working every weekend, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then I would do little spots over at the Famous Door."

Playing with that degree of frequency, as well as studying composition at Xavier University and meeting the demands of cover bands that required he learn all the newest hits as they came out, left him with a unique view of how to approach other people's songs:

"Don't analyze it, feel it. Understand the composer for just a second. Why did he do that?"

This gut-level, emotion-first sensibility is evident all over these recordings. Nearly all of the tracks were cut live in the studio, and Sterling gives the players and singers plenty of room to feel and interpret the songs. Nothing is rushed or contrived. His relationship to all of the players in his band stretches back many years, and the album itself was more than a decade in the making.

The first seeds for the recordings were planted in 1996, but the project was derailed first by the death of his mother, and then one of his older brothers, before tracking could begin. When Sterling finally got back in the studio things progressed smoothly until Katrina washed away several years of work. Sterling was left to reconvene his band, which had been scattered around the country by the post–storm diaspora, and start from scratch.

"After the storm, we lost everything in the studio, so we went back in. We went to Audiophile, and it came out so much better."

So here it is, Side 1 of the Four Sides of Sterling. The listener is invited to take a step back in time and understand the artist for just a second. Sterling and his Hoodlum Friends create a soulful time-capsule, a snapshot into the youth of a man, a musical self-portrait enhanced by his well-honed skills and knowledge. Dig this first look at the Four Sides of Sterling, and we'll meet again on Side 2.



- Marc Stone, host of the Soul Serenade WWOZ 90.7-fm, New Orleans. July, 2008