It's Personal

edit: ksullivan

Learning, learning. Leni Stern wants to know and grow and hoe that row. Her thirst has pulled her all over Africa, India and Asia to absorb the rhythms, the scales, the feelings into her voice and her electric guitar, to make herself into that universal translator in the pink capris. In a way, she’s learned to learn.

“I was always a bad student,” says Stern, brow knit and lips pursed as if remembering rapped knuckles in Catholic school back in her native Bavaria. “I have a really emotional connection with music that makes me hard to teach. Because it’s . . .” She lets go of a laugh, high and piercing. “It’s personal!”

Personal, yeah, but Stern didn’t shut herself up in a cave to plumb her soul; she kicked open all the doors. It seems she can be Leni only by plugging in the many natural connectors that stick out of her, much like her hair — always going in some stray direction. In chemistry, they call that polyvalent bonding. New molecules form every day.

“Wherever you are, the place makes the music sound different,” she thinks. “Because you are the instrument.”

Stern, who’s known mainly as a jazz artist, has reconstituted herself in amazing ways over the past decade. The process has had much to do with breast cancer — surviving it, loving others who did not survive, recognizing that, hey, we’ve got things to do here. Friends in Nepal said confronting her own demise was a blessing.

“They told me, ‘Now you get free of the feel of death. And should you survive, you’ll be a much happier person.’ ”

Having gotten hitched to American fusion-guitar prince Mike Stern after a rather high-profile career on the German stage, the former Magdalena (Leni) Thora earned her oats through most of the ’80s and ’90s stirring up atmospheric, sometimes funky Strat sounds with the likes of Bill Frisell and Paul Motian. Then, spinning outward from her collision with mortality, she rediscovered her voice (literally), adding vocals to her tool kit. “Things need to be spoken about,” she says, “to be in the consciousness of everybody.” Anyway, she ain’t the silent type.

Different thoughts emerged, borne by Stern’s delicately teetering vocal melodies, which cling in the head like burrs, but not as scratchy. There were heart-wringing words of hope after an Italian terrorist explosion, flowing within the extended orchestration of “I See Your Face” (2000’s Kindness of Strangers). There were the polar expressions of “Love Everyone” and “Where Is God?” (2002’s Finally the Rain Has Come). There was a trembling flashback to a former addiction on “Dancin’ With the Devil” (2004’s When Evening Falls). When she sings and when she cuts her guitar loose on untracked mountainsides, the distinction between art and artist gets lost. Music isn’t what she does, it’s what she is.

Which has a lot to do with where she’s been. Asked to draw some lines between her music and her travels, Stern lists a bunch of raga-based songs, and names compositions that came directly out of her knuckles being gently rapped — in Naga, India; in Cambodia and Thailand; among the Samburu tribe of Kenya; and among the Tuareg tribe of West Africa. She picks up languages pretty easily, but the music, she says, is like learning to walk again. Exhilarating effort.

Stern’s insinuating new Love Comes Quietly, the most varied album she’s ever done, wafts a pronounced African aroma amid the sensually inflected strains of her guitar. A hesitation beat that might remind you of its Jamaican descendants prods “10,000 Butterflies,” a prayer in support of refugees; its almost despairing lyrics are balanced by a hopeful musical environment. The dancing casbah chorus of “Inshaallah,” about a woman, her camels, her rifle and the desert, might become your mind’s constant soundtrack. Three colorful instrumentals softly convey a day’s baking heat fading into sunset.

The city also finds its place — the urban madness of Stern’s Manhattan home shadows the menacing “Beauty Queen”; the street jugglers and magicians of “Have Faith in Me” reflect the smile that comes so easily to her face. Further abroad, the way the raga-derived “Love Comes Quietly” tiptoes in and out, sexy and insistent, you’d almost think it was a dream; Stern is at her finest here. That’s one of the things she says, actually: that in the state between waking and sleeping, we come to know ourselves.

Stern’s itinerary this year has included a collaboration in Mali with string player Bassekou Kouyate, and a Gnawa trance-music festival in Morocco. Expect new fruit from these seeds. So much of this “world” music has religious connections, though — doesn’t a German of no particular faith feel uncomfortable sometimes? A previous Moroccan lila (healing jam-ceremony) was one of the few times she can remember, “not because of anything that was actually happening, but because I knew that the participants would eventually use their daggers to cut themselves and go into a trance.”

Obviously I’m a fan, and Stern puts up with my questions, so I catch up with her whenever she’s in L.A. I’ve collected a few mental snapshots.