Leni Stern

Leni Stern has earned greater acclaim for her work as a composer than for her abilities on guitar, yet she has developed a distinct artistic identity even while married to the guitarist Mike Stern, whose presence might otherwise have overshadowed her path. Classical piano instruction began for her at age six, though her true direction emerged several years afterward upon finding a guitar in the attic and learning jazz on her own. Before music claimed her attention, Stern had pursued acting in her native Germany, where she appeared on a nationally televised program. In 1977 she paused that career for a summer course at Berklee and chose not to resume acting afterward. She remained in Boston until 1980, then relocated to New York, where she has performed regularly in clubs and issued recordings on the labels Passport, now defunct, Enja, and Lipstick. Until 1997 she had focused chiefly on instrumental work, but the album Black Guitar introduced her skills as a singer and led to a run of releases on her own LSR imprint that blended jazz, pop, and rock, among them Kindness of Strangers (2000), Finally the Rain Has Come (2002), When Evening Falls (2004), and Love Comes Quietly (2006).