STILES BIO
View JL Stiles's EPK for lots of music, including unreleased stuff, as well as high res photos
CD Review--Solo Sessions
Blues Revue
"Jimmy Reed. Mississippi John Hurt. Ted Hawkins...JL Stiles? Well, maybe.
On his all-acoustic second disc for Shoeless Records, the San Francisco based guitarist aims for the generally sunny style of these bluesmen, and hits the mark dead on. While other young guitarists seem intent on proving how fast they can play a lick--an ill that's hardly unique to the blues--Stiles plays with such a quiet, unassuming style that at first you don't realize how good it is. In fact, Stiles who took up the guitar at age 18, downplays his own ability. Still, he's been playing for 14 years now, and he is, in his own words, 'a diligent son bitch'"
Clearly, he's done something right; Solo Sessions is an unmitigated pleasure. In its restraint and modesty, Stiles' music harks back to his New England roots; the Southern inflection comes from a several year stint in New Orleans. The West coast, in contrast, doesn't seem to have made much of an impact. He's a good songwriter, and everything on Solo Sessions is his, except "Trouble I Had All My Days" which closes the album. The Hurt influence is most audible in the sweet melancholy of 'Never To Grow Old" and "Fellow Grove" has a similar emotional intimacy. In fact, all the songs have a deceptive simplicity that recalls an earlier, more innocent age, and even if such an age never existed except in our imaginations, Stiles takes us there, if only for a little while. While his fame is mostly local to Norethern California and his audience is still very much the indie set, it seems likely that will change. He's shared stages with such luiminaries as Keb' Mo' and Corey Harris, and it's easy to predict that Stiles' time in the spotlight--a gently glowing luminescence, to be sure--will come.
Genevieve Williams, Blues Revue
DIY Top 12
Peforming Songwriter
The music created by JL Stiles doesn't sound at all like what one might expect from a white, Jewish singer-songwriter born and raised in Connecticut ... especially one who didn't start playing the guitar until he was 18 years old. His rubbery, expressive baritone sounds closest to the sweet croon of the late bluesman Ted Hawkins, and Stiles lays into his 12-string guitar with the vigor and ambition of a streetwise punk who just discovered Leo Kottke. Add in the winsome harmonica and the carefree, riding-the-rails folk song structure which Stiles employs, and the 12 tracks on Solo Sessions achieve an earthy authenticity?his music emerges, most likely unconsciously, from the hazy notes of forebears like Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker, Richie Havens and the defunct college rock band Miracle Legion.
Simultaneously classic and original, JL Stiles aids his cause by penning personal, personable lyrics taken from his worldview and philosophy. In Nothin' Here for Me, the cocky troubadour surveys the wealth of his new hometown, San Francisco, and confesses that he's most at home hanging out with the hippies at the BART station. In Fellow Grove, he sings about his childhood pastime of rounding up golf balls at a country club and reselling them to the pro shop. Stiles may take his style from the rural side of America, but his sensibility remains true to his real roots.
Noel Murray
Live Review of Stiles at the Knitting Factory, Hollywood
Music Connection
J.L. Stiles The Knitting Factory Hollywood
Armed with only his earthy warm baritone, a guitar and harmonica, JL Stiles is exactly what you expect from a blues singer, a self contained musician who moves his audience. At this show, Stiles played an equal mix of original pieces and traditional blues. This [show] is supposed to be a tribute to Mississippi John Hurt, he told the crowd. No skin off my back, I play him anyway.
While Stiles own songs, like Fellow Grove and Nothin' Here For Me (which narrates a trip to the mall before a friend's wedding to look for something nice and cheap on the gift registry) have a more modern quality to their lyrics, they have old souls. But Stiles also shows a slightly slicker, more polished side on tunes like Land of the Plenty, which is vaguely reminiscent of early Eagles.
Musicianship: If it weren't for his appearance, listening to Stiles' gritty, twangy voice, you'd swear you were hearing an old bluesman like the late Ted Hawkins, to whom he's been compared. In a time where it seems rare to find a singer who sounds extraordinary, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, Stiles is completely satisfying as a solo artist. He uses finger-picking to great effect to add texture to his music, and with a 12-string guitar can recreate the sound of a piano in an Old West saloon.
Performance: Sporting an understated maroon silk shirt and black slacks, it's clear that Stiles is just about the music. As Stiles blows on his harmonica, both his feet start stomping in time, and his eyes focus in a wide-eyed stare-those of a man obsessed with the blues. During the show, Stiles seems to fully engage the room with his music and humorous chatter. He closed the show with an impressive display that wowed the crowd, playing his six-string by tapping the frets with both hands to produce a dulcimer-like sound.
BIO (performance history)
Math
& Blues
JL
Stiles is a unique animal who for the first time is bringing two totally different fields of truth-seeking
together: Ragtime blues and
higher mathematics. Both of these disparate strands filtered through a
lifetime on the run, searching for a universal truth from psychedelic
Brazilian forests to US college campuses and further into his own unique
vision. JL Stiles has a mind that sees music in a similar way to how J.S. Bach
saw music. However, Bach never played the blues.
Fact
# 1: JL Stiles is the John Nash of
music.
JL
Stiles was born with hardwiring most only dream about, a brain that could look
at the most basic picture and convert it to it's numerical basics. All through
school in rural Connecticut it was clear where he was going to be, working at
the cutting edge of mathematics, as he took to the abstract shapes and numbers
as a duck would take to proverbial water, until, that is, a band wearing grease
paint, Cuban heels, questionable body hair and several pints of fake blood
rolled into JL's particular little town: Kiss. A 12 year old JL was hooked by
the devils fishing rod that was rock and/or roll and when his brother brought
home a terrible guitar from college and left it when he went back, JL had the
tools to begin his assault on the world.
He began
fashioning songs using the simple chunking and melody of Jimmy Reed and sub-Rush lyrics about the challenging political
world as seen by a 13-year old kid.
Quick introductions to the lyrics of Bob Dylan, the power and message of
The Who and the space-age ass funk of Parliament, shaped his musical balloon in
new ways and JL, taking his John Nash brain and applying it to the one piece of
equipment he had at his disposal, a useless dime store guitar, realized pretty
quickly that he better maximize the algorithmic potential of the pathetic
instrument by learning to pick each and every string independently and
simultaneously with the dexterity of a perfect machine and the re-incarnated
soul of a genius blind bluesman who strangely disappeared in the early
1930's. That blind genius would be
the little known 20's & 30's virtuoso, Blind Blake, who JL heard by
accident, floating in from the radio of his father while studying late one
night on a mathematical problem involving fourier transformations. He rushed to the transistor just
quickly enough to catch the name and his future was born. (He also finished the
problem that night in case you wondered).
Fact #2: JL Stiles is the freakiest white fingerpicking guitarist in this great
country right now.
Stiles carried on in his
twin disciplines, learning Banach spaces and homology at college by day and wearing out his Blind
Blake records at night, studying under the tutelage of the great Laszlo Fuchs,
pioneer of abelian group theory, whilst writing hundreds of songs, each one
getting gradually better than the last. Both strands were equal to him as he
searched for the big picture in whatever way he could.
But
something began to happen; as the songs got better and began to get attention,
especially from the ladies, and JL realized that, Fuchs aside, a lot of
academicians can be big dicks with fragile egos, he began to drift toward the
more standard methods of soul searching for a young guy in late 20th century
America: LSD, pot and anything other.
Hanging
out in the blazing heat studying with Chinese Mathematicians, drifting into
oblivion on opium and psychedelics, JL knew the music was more than a sideshow
to a brilliant career in the outer reaches of theoretical math. It was, in fact, his calling, and one
where he could teach the beauty of what is so perfect about math and blues, the
abstract.
Imagine a
wild-eyed, half-crazed math prodigy with the most dexterous fingers on earth,
channeling the spirit of a mysterious blind blues genius who unexplainably
vanished, and you are approaching where JL found himself at this juncture in
his life.
Fact
#3: The search for
the fundamentals is the same in music as it is in math: The fingerpicking
guitar opens up infinite possibilities
But what
would he do with this burden? He wasn't just a singer-songwriter with a cute
heartbreak song and a big white smile; he was the walking soul of mathematical
fundamental principles driven into the ground by the spirit of the blues. Where
could a young boy like this go? To the home of voodoo, New Orleans.
In an out
of the coffee houses and clubs of New Orleans and Mississippi, JL spooked the
audiences up and down and left and right, he cut a solo set of songs, just him
and a guitar, that rang as clear and true as Blind Blake had 80 years earlier
and he knew he had to get out there and spread the theory around.
He
traveled to Mexico and Brazil, Amsterdam and Scandinavia, he lived in the woods
for weeks at a time, writing new songs and trying to define a unifying
mathematical and musical theory in homological algebra, he went to the brink
and stared at the abyss and then he came back with songs in hand to deliver the
message back to us dear souls who hadn't made the journey.
He found
a spiritual home in san Francisco and immediately picked up on the musical
community there. He played with Etta James in front of 6,000 in front of the
courthouse in Riverside, he opened for the great Keb Mo, Leon Redbone, JJ Cale,
John Hammond, he knew he was in the right place at the right time, and so, here
he is.
Fact
#4: What JL Stiles
is writing now is the best he's ever written and is closer to the fundamental
truth of bringing the past together with the future into a musical singularity
than he's ever gotten.
Fact
#5: JL Stiles
believes he has come up with the algorithm for the pure heart of music.
JL Stiles
is a unique animal (as we have stated before), he believes that the soul of
1920's blues, c.400 BC Greek mathematicians and 21st century artists like
Animal Collective (get ready for JL's incendiary cover of AC's "No More
Runnin") can all be unified into his singular vision. Can he do it? With
his head for numbers, I certainly wouldn't bet against him.
Performance History
**Bimbo's San Francisco (opened for JJ Cale April 09)
**Villa Montalvo Garden Ampitheater, Saratoga, CA (opened for Keb' Mo')
**Courthouse Concert, Riverside, CA (opening for Etta James)
**Mystic Theater, Petaluma,CA (several shows from 2000 to the present with Jimmie Vaughan, Tommy Castro, Taj Mahal, Leon Redbone, Joe Louis Walker, Tower of Power, Dan Hicks)
**Cafe du Nord, San Francisco (headlined Oct 08 and Jan 09)
**Hopmonk Tavern, Sebastopol, CA-opening for Leon Russell ( Dec 08)
**Oaksong Summer Concert Series, Oak Run, CA
**Villa Montalvo Carriage House
**Swallow Hill, Denver (show with Guy Davis)
**Little Fox Theater, Redwood City (with John Hammond)
**Knitting Factory, LA (tribute to Mississippi John Hurt link here to see review in Music Connection Magazine)
**Freight and Salvage, Berkeley, CA (On West Coast Live Radio)
**Islands Folk Festival, Vancouver Island
**John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom Room, San Francisco (many shows including with Magic Slim and the Teardrops)
**Knitting Factory, New York
**Biscuits and Blues, San Francisco (frequent performances)
**Tractor Tavern, Seattle, WA(Double bill with Ruthie Foster)
**Rancho Nicasio, Point Reyes, CA
**Rockford Mendelssohn Hall, Rockford, IL (Charlotte's Web production Stiles headlined)
**San Diego Street Scene
