To those who’ve followed her recent career, it will come as no surprise to learn that Stern’s latest music takes its cue from her “African adventure,” the latest chapter in her globetrotting, episodic career. That’s because for the last six years or so, Stern’s recordings and live sets have served as a desultory chronicle of her increasing immersion in the music of West Africa, particularly the nation of Mali, where she lived for two years and where she has returned since for extended stays. 

 

Stern first gave us a look at her new direction with Alu Mayé in 2007, a five-song teaser for the full-length Africa that arrived later that year; in 2009 came another short glimpse, the captivating Spirit In The Water, which blossomed into the exquisite Sa Belle Belle Ba in 2010. 

 

The first of these recordings blended Malian influences into the guitarist’s distinctive rock-jazz songwriting, where they surrounded her incisive, often haunting (and sometimes downright witchy) voice. Over time, though, the music has become a true hybrid – just as Stern, increasingly accepted into the West African music scene, has become a bicontinental citizen with dual loyalties. 

 

The eight songs on Sabani (which together clock in at barely 30 minutes) sit somewhere between Malian pop and Appalachian folk music. “After all my time in Africa, all the musicians I’ve gotten to work with,” Stern has stated, “I feel like a different guitarist, a different person, like I belong to the red earth and the warm winds and the people I love there.”

 

All these projects have benefited from modern production techniques, which Stern has used in New York, layering instrument and vocal tracks to achieve a glorious brocade of sound. This time is different: “I recorded and mixed everything in Mali – no NYC overdub session; just pure Africa,” Stern excitedly wrote me in September, adding, “I don’t know why I waited so long to record this way.”

 

More to the point, the album’s band comprises just two other musicians (with very sparing use of a few guests): Sabani means “three” in Bambara (the most widely-spoken Malian language). It's a most unusual take on the "power trio." 

 

The album maintains a stripped-down, back-to-basic instrumentation, mainly just guitar and percussion. The small arsenal of accompanying instruments features various drums and shakers as well as the raspy metal percussion instrument called karignan, and a couple of n’gonis, plucked African lutes with four strings – which Stern calls “the ultimate blues instrument.”

 

To Malian listeners, I imagine it recalls their own roots music; to western listeners, it’s as if Stern had dropped her Malian trio into the Mississippi delta, sent them traipsing the dusty back roads, and then thrust a microphone at them.

 

In a way, that’s not far from the truth behind Sabani’s origins.

 

As a member of the touring band led by Malian pop superstar Salif Keita, Stern found herself with plenty of time on the road, waiting for buses and planes, where she and her closest friends in that band – the n’goni virtuoso Haruna Samake and drummer Mamadou “Prince” Kone – would quietly jam to pass the hours. The success of this offhanded synergy led her to conceive Sabani, and to record it with Samake and Kone.

 

As Stern wrote me last summer, using a touch of hyperbole to describe previous production methods: “We have always added all of Bamako [the Malian capital] and NYC to our band. But this is really how everything started since Alu Mayé.” 

 

Still, anyone who has attended any of Stern’s previous shows will already have an idea of the intimate, magnetic pull of this scaled-down format: it approximates the minimalist combos Stern has regularly toured with. (The large number of musicians on previous discs made it economically impossible to reproduce those arrangements on stage.) Within that format, Stern never fails to fascinate, and is often mesmerizing.

 

For the band appearing on tour, which she calls Masters of African Percussion, Stern has tapped several African musicians based in the States: Senegalese bassist Mamadou Ba, a longtime member of Stern’s bands; Nigerian drummer Kofo (known as “The Wonderman” for his expertise on talking drum); and veteran Senegalese percussionist Alioune Faye.

 

This will make for a different sonic texture than the one heard on Sabani. Rest assured, though, the “ultimate blues instrument” will also make an appearance. Stern has spent too much time with the n’goni to leave it behind. She was still gaining fluency on the instrument when she last appeared in the Chicago area, in 2010. But that was 19 months ago, and Stern’s a quick learner; this alone should warrant the price of admission.

 

Leni Stern plays Saturday at 8 PM, in the newly opened annex of the Old Town School of Folk Music (4545 N. Lincoln).