Dance is Leni Stern's coming out party. After being penned up and cooped up due to COVID for a year and a half, the guitarist and singer is ready to stretch her legs (and her fingers!) and take up her ax again for a new album- this time matching wits and chops with keyboardist Leo Genovese, skin man Eladje Alioune Faye, and the magnificently dry bass-styles of Mamadou Ba.
Since giving herself over to the muse of performance and composition in 1983, she has released an album every two years on average, meaning that Dance (2021) (the follow-up to 2020's 4) is arriving a little ahead of schedule*- lockdowns and other consequences of a global health emergency notwithstanding.
Thematically, Dance is an optimistic album in a manner that is joyous in its rebellion against the current swell of chaos that the post-pandemic world has been birthed into. On the track " Kono - Bird," Leni sings in her peculiar, supple, and flexible demeanor, unleashing a fanciable dream of freedom, and imagining herself as a bird playfully swooping past the sill of a window with nary a care in the world.
In granting this power to herself, she further imagines being able to reach those she loves half a world away in an instant- a gratifying wish that I remember well from 2020, when taking the chance to visit friends and family seemed like a reckless undertaking- a series of decisions and anxious calculations that I would have given just about anything to lift the weight and the fear off of.
Throughout Dance, Leni allows her vocal training in India to imbue her singing with a weaving, concerted caprice, matching the evocative character of the absolutely stunning grooves conjured by her backing band, and her own guitar playing, in a consonant and ephemeral butterfly stitching of feeling and form. Here and there you even have the chance to witness Leni harmonizing vocally with her own guitar melodies in a manner that reifies the lyrical and narrative nature of her unique relationship with that instrument. Speaking of her playing, it is top-notch on Dance, combining South and West African rhythms with an electric blues style that sounds right out of the cold, windy streets of Chicago.
In fact, the entire album works to collapse distinctions and borders, leading one to wonder where the percussive flutter of a Thelonious Monk-styled piano jam and incoming waves of Central American funk begin, and where the unifying pulse of a marshal drum and the hypnotic pattern of a kindred nomadic rhythm ends. It's all the product of a single world, after all, united by the universal language of sound and the effervescent development of the creative spirit. Dance won't just move your feet- but your heart as well.
*Can't blame a girl for getting stir crazy, can we?
