Jazzed About Her Music

Leni Stern has been going along nicely, nurturing a modest but happy career as one of the few females making waves in the male-dominated world of jazz guitar. The German-born musician started out in theater and film composing, and wound up going to the Berklee School of Music in Boston to study film scoring. Once there, jazz guitar became her obsession. She also wound up marrying a guitarist of note, Mike Stern.

Over the course of a decade, she made a series of subtle recordings for assorted small labels, toured and had almost weekly gigs at the humble spot known as the 55 Bar in Greenwich Village, in New York, close to where she lives. She became known for gentle, ambling phrases and a flair for penning instrumentals over which she would then improvise.

But the Leni Stern who will show up at SohO in Santa Barbara on Tuesday night is a hybrid entity who has emerged in the last couple of years as a guitarist-singer-songwriter.

She’ll be joined on this short West Coast tour by drummer Kenny Wolleson, alto saxophonist Dave Binney and bassist Don Falzone. Binney was last heard in these parts in September, when he played at 66 California with his invigorating group, Lan Xang. The vocal chapter of Stern’s ongoing career was solidified through her collaboration with songwriter Larry John McNally, who had penned tunes covered by Bonnie Raitt, Rod Stewart, Aaron Neville, and Mavis Staples.

McNally had been a fan of her work, and the two finally got together as creative partners. “It was a gas working with a good poet,” Stern said, “and working with words, instead of just music.”

The recorded result was last year’s fine and hard-to-classify album “Black Guitar,” on which pop, poetry, and jazz concepts work toward a common end. The reaction to the album was generally positive, although the mixed bag of idioms confused some. Is it pop or jazz, fish or fowl? Does it matter?

“You know,” she said, “I have never run into this problem on a gig. The audience, thank God, does not think in terms of categories. But I’ve run into this problem with the media. Jazz writers say, ‘It’s not a jazz record,’ and pop people say, ‘It’s jazz.’ ”

Songsmithing, with and without lyrics, has been a way of life for Stern. “I’ve always written songs,” she said. “Since I was very little, I’ve put chords together and made up songs.”

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But it took some time until Stern got around to the lyrics.

“Marilyn Bergman once said, ‘Oh, if it doesn’t have words, it’s not a real song,’ ” Stern said.

“I was a jazz musician and thought, ‘Yeah, right, Marilyn. You’re a lyricist.’ But then I remembered in the movie ‘Round Midnight,’ when Dexter Gordon says, ‘I can’t play that song. I don’t remember the words.’ There is something to the words and the music working together. I’m really fascinated by that now.”

“Black Guitar” and her new album, “Recollection” (a compilation of tracks from her discography) are the first forays on her own label, LSR (Leni Stern Records).

Plunging into the business, Stern admitted, “was scary at first. I’ve done music all my life, since I was 6 years old, but I’ve never been a businesswoman. But then I figured out that running your own band and taking care of music when you’re a bandleader is really most of the work. I’m not doing much more than I was doing, except I don’t have arguments with anybody about what I think is right and what to do.”

Going the do-it-yourself route was, in the end, a natural process. “I think jazz is such an intimate and artistic form. I just got sick of being referred to as the product. I felt like a cow or something. It just seems to go against anything that jazz is about.” And being a woman didn’t help. The gender issue is one that tends to come up, given the lack of many female guitar players who have achieved great success and public visibility. Stern feels that a change is coming.

“I hope women play the guitar more,” she said. “I think Bonnie Raitt has helped a lot. She has even set up a fund. She endorses Fender, and they in turn sponsor a program where girls get free Fender guitars. It becomes a normal thing. It’s a fabulous way of expressing your feelings. It’s the closest thing to a human voice.”

* Leni Stern, Tuesday at 8 and 10 p.m. at SohO, 1221 State St. in Santa Barbara; 962-7776.

Messiah Convention: On Sunday, musical forces from all over the county, and elsewhere, converged in the Fred Kavli Auditorium of the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza for a run through that reliable holiday tradition, Handel’s “Messiah.” This was more than just another, de rigueur “Messiah,” on many counts. For one thing, it represented the first meeting of the county’s three prime classical music organizations: the New West Symphony, the Los Robles Master Chorale and the Ventura County Master Chorale.

Each organization contributed a select group of musicians, adding to a proper, Handel-esque complement of singers and players onstage.

The meeting was not for the sake of musical mass but for optimal aesthetics and a spirit of camaraderie. Impressive soloists were brought in from outside--tenor Robert McNeil, soprano Camille King, baritone Hector Vasquez, and countertenor Alejandro Garri (timely, in this day of the countertenor’s renascence).

A few rough spots notwithstanding, the performance was a dignified and inspiring one, spreading itself out over 2 1/2 hours of baroque splendor.

Handel’s opus may be oft-heard, but it remains one of those pieces, when done live and done well, into which audience members can happily sink and be transported.