Unlike a lot of the thrashing guitarists out there who have made their names with earsplitting, note-sputtering riffs plucked one string at a time, Jorma is a finger-picker.

In finger-picking, each finger is responsible for one string, and the guitarist uses the fingers to play a melody while the thumb picks its own melody on the guitar’s bass strings. The best guitarists can create a duet between the two. Jorma’s Rev.-Gary-Davis-inspired picking is an eloquent conversation between six strings.

It made for an innovative lead electric guitar for Jefferson Airplane, a sound that was intricate and hard and loud. And when the Airplane broke up in 1973 — and Jorma and the bassist Casady started touring exclusively with the more bluesy, more musical, and less political band Hot Tuna — his guitar got even louder and more intricate.

But when Jorma goes acoustic, as he often did with Hot Tuna and on his own, that conversation between strings becomes exquisite.

Watching Jorma as he performed the last stop of month-long tour with New Jersey mandolin player Barry Mitterhoff for a sold-out crowd of several hundred admirers at Teaneck’s Mexicali Blues Sunday night, it’s easy to see that he is at the top of his game.

The thumb moves liquidly in quarter-inch lightning steps between the top three strings of his Gibson; his other fingers mambo a melody beneath their sound. Though the waify, tattooed rocker with outrageous red locks who helped Jefferson Airplane take off is replaced by a loafer-wearing incarnation with gray, slicked-back hair, the guitar player is still there, in his prime as a musician.

But he says that he is playing better than he ever has only because he is clear-headed, and he is learning, and because he was able to get clean.

While Airplane vocalists Slick, Balin, and Kantner were the band’s most identifiable members, it was Jorma who was the musician’s musician, routinely playing with the likes of David Crosby and Jerry Garcia, and it was Jorma who was Janis Joplin’s close friend and first guitar player.

Those affiliations, and the affiliations a touring musician tends to make, led him to a pattern of substance abuse that should have killed him.

Jorma does not like to give "drug- or drunk-a-logues," but abuse was a big part of his life from his late teens until he got sober nine years ago. "It’s really a miracle on many levels that I survived it. A lot of my friends on the same path aren’t here today," he said.

He’s also more in tune with himself these days, as his developing Judaism has given him a balance and a center.

But while many recovering addicts use God and spirituality as a means to get clean, for him it took getting clean to pave the way for God and spirituality.

"Back in the crazy days, when I was abusing stuff, there was no room for spirituality," he said. "I never saw God on LSD or any of that stuff. At some point, when I got clean, I was able to look for my contact with my higher power. When the haze started to clear, I felt I needed that."