One-Man
Band | Studio Stu
by Peter Aaron
If you’re out and about at night in the Hudson Valley,
the odds are pretty good that you’ll see him. A hairless,
stocky guy in a sharp suit and a porkpie hat, standing in
the corner behind an old-fashioned square microphone and
softly singing everything from jazz standards to quirky takes
on The Beatles, The Doors, Gorillaz, and the Specials. As
he croons away, a digital sampler that he operates with foot
switches picks up his voice, repeating, looping, and layering
his scatted lyrics and mimicked horn lines until he sounds
like a full band. And there’s something else: As he’s
doing all of this vocalizing and soundscape-building, the
lone player is plucking along on a weird, one-string, bass-like
instrument that looks like a hockey stick mating with an
upturned bass drum. So just who is this musical man of mystery,
and what the heck is that thing he’s playing?
Studio Stu is the name, being a self-contained entertainment
machine is the game. And the offbeat instrument is the Studivarious,
a modern electric update of the traditional washtub bass
invented the player himself.
“I’d worked as a documentary filmmaker and a commercial photographer
for 25 years, shooting ads for Madison Avenue companies and album covers,” recalls
Stu, who was born Stuart Chernoff and grew up in Brooklyn. “But after
I moved up here, in 1988, I found out that it was nearly impossible to make
a living locally as a photographer. So I thought about what else I enjoyed
doing that I could also make money at. I play guitar, too, but that didn’t
seem novel enough.”
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