She found her groove in Africa

Staging benefit concerts and adopting babies are great, but musician Leni Stern has her own way of spreading the vibration of Africa: She has become an African. The people of Mali have even given the Bavarian-born guitarist and singer-songwriter a little piece of land, because they want her to stay. She’s lived there about half-time for more than two years, and she wants everybody to know she’s not suffering.

“We all come from Africa; it’s the birthplace of humankind,” Stern says by phone from the New York City apartment she shares with her husband, guitarist Michael Stern. “When you go there, you feel like you’re coming home.”

Consequently, she says, “we have a lot of things that we owe Africa, so we try to raise money, and our televisions are filled with images of terrible things.

“Get rid of malaria, for crying out loud, and get some cheap medicine out there,” she adds. That’s all well and good, “but we have created an impression of Africa, that it’s a dangerous place filled with hardship, everybody there is miserable and crying all the time. You have to be vaccinated to the max, you can’t drink the water, and you better not step on the ground. Well, you know what? None of that is true.

“It doesn’t mean that we have to stop sending money for medicine,” she says, “but Africa is beautiful. Africa is fascinating. You have never been among a nicer people. They really make it your quest that you should be happy. The food -- oh my God, the only thing that’s a disaster is that I keep gaining pounds.”

Stern allied herself with another white person in her new home. Only this one happened to be black.

That would be the renegade Afro-pop singer Salif Keita, an African albino. The blond Stern, who plays at Cafe Metropol downtown tonight, met Keita in Mali while using his studio and soon found herself splitting time between her own music -- influenced by the many months she’s spent among Mali’s Tuareg tribe -- and Keita’s band.

In October, when Stern played on Keita’s recording of U2’s “One,” the odd juxtaposition looked like an alliance of exiles.

Stern left a German acting career in 1977 to become a jazz fusion player in the U.S., later leaving fusion too (and America, really). Keita, born into the aristocracy, bucked tradition to become a lowly musician.

Malians aren’t sure how to regard Keita. “They all say he’s a sorcerer and has special powers, because they have this belief that albinos are different,” Stern says. “And they act around him with a mixture of devotion and hatred. It’s a strange situation I have gotten myself into.”

It’s not the first time. Stern has traveled to such disparate destinations as India, Kenya and New Orleans -- not just as a tourist, but also as a seeker who wanted to steep herself in the local musical cultures, each of which has influenced her own work.

Asked about the source of her wandering spirit, Stern wonders if a childhood admonition didn’t contain some truth. “Whenever I was misbehaving, my grandmother used to say, ‘Young lady, when the Gypsies ran through town, out of the kindness of my heart I took you into the house. If you don’t stop, I will give you back to them!’ ”

Stern’s Malian residencies have run the longest of her post-New York affiliations. She’s been living among the Tuareg, whose nomadic ways, following their camels, sheep and goats as they graze, have butted up against the ever tighter restrictions of modern sprawl. She has learned to play North African instruments such as the skin-stretched n’goni (guitar or banjo) and the pole-necked guimbri, a kind of bass.

Most important to Stern, she’s made friends. There’s smiling Ami Sacko, the woman whose warm, sliding incantation, rather than Stern’s intimate, vibrating soprano, is the first voice heard on Stern’s new album, “Africa.” There’s Bassekou Kouyate, Sacko’s husband, whom Stern describes as the only musician his peers allow to break harmonic rules with his aggressive, full-toned n’goni plucking. There’s Keita, challenger of convention, who enjoys offsetting his own distinctive onstage image with a band that may include a white woman or a dwarf.

The interpersonal roots add a lot to the richness of Stern’s “Africa,” which sounds like anything but the standard cut-and-paste “world” collab. The feel is light -- in the auditory, emotional and even visual senses -- but serious observations on genocide (“Childsoldier”) and drought (“Aman Iman”) drift through like dust. And spirits hover, as two of Stern’s old friends, saxist Michael Brecker (who played on the album) and percussionist Don Alias, were alive when she started recording “Africa” about two years ago but not when she finished.

Stern has wrought a work of variety and complexity that could nevertheless be mistaken for background music because of its surface beauty.

It requires little concentration, though, to reveal the depth of its art: the guitar droplets and bass pond-plunks of “Aman Iman,” the inviting clay-drum rhythms of “Dakkan (What Is Written),” the bent Howlin’ Wolf Afro blues of “Forest Song.”

Many strands twist together into a flexible rope, lent a singular identity by the long, flowing lines of Stern’s silvery electric guitar. A song’s beginning often supplies little hint of where it will end. We’re traveling here.

Least obvious and most impressive is the way Stern has locked into and condensed the mystery of Malian groove, especially on “Keita,” whose title is its tribute. Shoulders shake; drums pop up all over; the rhythm and momentum grow big, bigger and biggest, despite the urgent sense of something . . . disappearing.

Stern hasn’t spent her whole life flying over desert in a dune buggy, sponsoring a sheep sacrifice, losing her credit card at a Timbuktu river crossing and playing Strat under the appraising gaze of local imams. (“The real religious leaders are unbelievably charming and open-minded,” she says with a laugh.)

Her journey has taken many turns, including a severe smackdown with breast cancer two decades back.

“Through the skill of my oncologist and my doctor, and several witches and wizards from all over the world, I’m here to talk to you,” says Stern, who’ll be backed tonight by oud and doumbek player Brahim Fribgane, saxophonist George Brooks and percussionist Mamadou Makane Kouyate.

“I had chemotherapy, cosmetic surgery and then intensive rebuilding of the immune system with Ayurvedic medicine, with Western medicine, with Chinese medicine. I went to Tibet -- and yes, I got a mantra from Buddha!”

Stern began to reconsider her path, evolving away from respected fusion work with the likes of drummer Paul Motian, guitarist Bill Frisell and guitarist Wayne Krantz. She got involved with promoting cancer awareness and decided she wanted to start her own label and sing her own songs.

Although Stern is capable of making a universal connection, the commercial part of that universe doesn’t know it yet. She’s not religious; she says her music is her prayer.

But maybe there’s a hint of her potential in her song “Finally the Rain Has Come.”

Every time she played the song, “it would rain, and I would get soaked, and my amp would malfunction,” she says. “I played it in San Diego, and the guy said, ‘Don’t play any earthquake songs.’ ”

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Leni Stern Quartet

Where: Cafe Metropol, 923 E. 3rd St., No. 101, Los Angeles

When: 8 tonight

Price: $10

Contact: (213) 613-1537