The first thing you notice about the electric guitar playing of Leni Stern and Mike Stern is the differences. The second is the similarities.
Mike struts around and shows teeth; Leni lowers her eyes and meditates. Mike gushes notes omnidirectionally; Leni plots distinct paths. Mike springs from rock, Leni from Africa.
But. Both connect with audiences. Both love melody and avoid mindless shredding. His palette has grown from her obsessions with Africa and alternate scales, just as hers was partly shaped by his knowledge of fusion and funk. A few decades of marriage can do that.
Friday's set began on a desert oasis, with Leni picking rhythmic lines on the little n'goni and singing the hushed love story of her "Thief in the Night." Here's where the band -- drummer Dave Weckl, bassist Tom Kennedy, saxist Bob Malach -- showed the most restraint, setting a mood with only the barest support while Mike brushed gauzy colorations via his volume knob or defined occasional high-string commentary. Then Leni bowed off the stage for an hour.
Don Grolnick's hard-charging "Nothing Personal" made us think about the journey of the blues, once the sound of whip on back, boogie in whorehouse and tin cup on prison bars. In the last half-century, since nothing ever stays the same, it became almost anything, including a general framework for unfettered expression. If that allows moderns to cut loose the way Mike Stern did, we shouldn't fixate on history.
Through territories of Cream jam, space loop and Steely reggae, the band showed themselves masters of form and fusion, often breaking down into duo improvisations to highlight the players' personalities. Malach applied his clean, tough tenor tone to bouncy rhythmic interaction and a playful liberality with harmonic options. Kennedy whipped through his solos with such speed and precision that we could hardly believe we were hearing a bass. Mike Stern kept saying Weckl sounded like five drummers -- true not in the sense of mass, but in the way he could hit five different accents of a beat on five different drums and cymbals within a single measure, while still keeping perfect time.
You could say something similar about Mike, never at a loss for ways to vary his improvisations, whether in chromatic chord slips, blazing 16th-note spiels or spontaneous songs-within-songs; everything was available to his mind and fingers within a millisecond. Not to forget heart: Wordlessly singing his Caribbean-flavored "I Believe You," which serves his balladic side much as "Since We've Ended As Lovers" serves Jeff Beck's, Mike showed a vulnerability and humility that drew appreciative notice from Leni, waiting stageside.
She stepped up for a final showcase on Jimi Hendrix's "Red House," and we had to name her B.B. (Blues Babe) for the Kingly way she stung her Strat in gemlike clusters of bleeding expression. She explained that the U.S. established many military bases in her native Germany after WWII, and the surrounding population couldn't avoid decades of influence from black soldiers' music. Well, some people couldn't.
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PHOTOS BY BOG & BOG.