Concert Review: Joan Baez, Fare Thee Well Tour, Royal Albert Hall, London (28th May 2018)

Joan Baez at the Royal Albert Hall (Photo credit: Martin Harris)

The last time Joan Baez took to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall was 10 years ago, during a tour celebrating the fifth decade of her storied career. Baez’s return to the venue on Monday night also marked a significant, though rather more bittersweet, occasion: the London stop on what she’s announced will be her final world tour, one which will continue in Europe throughout the summer  and then head to the US in the Autumn. The tour accompanies the release of Baez’s fine new studio album, Whistle Down the Wind [review], a modest, beguilingly humble work that lightly touches some of the abiding concerns of her career, one in which activism and artistry have, of course, always been intimately interconnected. Taking its cue from the album, the concert itself also avoided any sense of grandstanding or any big, forced statements. Instead, Baez placed the focus firmly on the music, letting the songs – old or new, political or deeply personal – speak for themselves. 

Baez is an artist who invariably creates an exceptionally warm and inclusive atmosphere for her audience, and she did so here from the moment she arrived on stage, apologising for her “lateness” (about five minutes or so!) with the confession “I forgot my lipstick.” She opened the show solo, performing  Phil Ochs’ "There But for Fortune”, Steve Earle’s “God is God” and Dylan’s “Farewell Angelina” as a trio that harked back to the stark power of her first performances - a girl, a guitar, a commanding voice singing potent words - before being joined by what she jokingly referred to as her “big band,” an outfit comprising only her son, percussionist Gabriel Harris, and multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell. The all-acoustic set-up brought the Whistle Down the Wind songs to vivid life, with a spellbinding take on Josh Ritter’s neo-folk ballad “Silver Blade” and a stately, deeply moving performance of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s ode to memory and mindfulness, “The Things That We Are Made Of," among the stand-outs.   

Fresh, supple textures were also added to standards such as a newly-relevant “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” a stunning, dramatic “The House of the Rising Sun” and an intense “Seven Curses,” Baez’s lower, weathered tones, with occasional rationed jumps to her higher register, finding new depths in the familiar material. Perhaps the only disappointment was “Silver Dagger,” drained of some its tension here in a more meandering arrangement that showcased Powell’s fiddle-playing. On the other hand, the contributions of the young singer Grace Sturmberg, who added ghostly harmonies to a haunting “Diamonds and Rust” and youthful zest to a rollicking “Darlin' Cory," were terrific.

Throughout, Baez seemed touchingly awed at the audience response, and her affection for the “beautiful, gorgeous” venue was palpable, especially  as she recalled her first time performing there in the early ‘60s and her inclusion of the English music hall song “Isn’t it Grand, Boys?” in her set. “I got told off for singing ‘bloody’. Well, times have changed.”

Times have changed – are changing – but the greatness of Baez’s shows is that they offer us links to the past without ever feeling like mere nostalgia-fests. Nowhere was that clearer than in a section that began with, yes, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” – which Baez dedicated to the Florida students currently challenging the NRA – before  progressing though Zoe Mulford’s hymnal “The President Sang Amazing Grace” and ending with a rousing “Joe Hill.”

Audience singalongs were encouraged from “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue” onwards, and by the time the show reached its climax, which included a joyous, cathartic “Gracias A La Vida,” a tender “Imagine” and a stirring “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” these singalongs could be guaranteed without any prompting. Interestingly, no direct reference was made to the tour’s status as Baez’s last, and the addition of some new UK dates in 2019 suggests – happily – that this farewell tour may in fact turn out to be “a long goodbye”. Perhaps the closest that Baez came to acknowledging the significance of the tour was her repetition of a lyric in the final song that she performed, words from “The Boxer” that resonated as a statement of her shining legacy of activism and endurance: “I am leaving, I am leaving/But the fighter still remains.”   

Set List

There But for Fortune

God is God

Farewell Angelina

Whistle Down the Wind

Silver Blade

It’s All Over Now Baby Blue

Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)

The Things That We Are Made Of

Diamonds and Rust

Me and Bobby McGee

Another World

The Times They Are A-Changin’

The President Sang Amazing Grace

Joe Hill

Seven Curses

Silver Dagger

Darlin’ Cory

Gracias a la Vida

Imagine

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

The Boxer

Concert Review: Joan Baez @ Royal Festival Hall (17/03/2012)

Reviewed for Wears the Trousers.

Beaming, Joan Baez takes to the Royal Festival Hall stage with a spring in her step and a little high kick, looking for all the world like there’s nowhere else that she’d rather be. “It’s always so good to be back in the land where half of my original repertoire came from,” Baez avers later, by way of introduction to a couple of Ballads. “The songs touched me so much. They were long and sad and beautiful. And, usually, at least one person died. In fact, if no-one died then the song didn’t make it into my repertoire.”

It should be no surprise, really, that Baez seems so comfortable and at ease on stage: she’s spent the greater part of her 71 years on them, after all. Saturday’s show was the second stop at the Royal Festival Hall in her current UK tour. And, as always, the audience seemed just as delighted to have Baez here as she seemed happy to be present. Unlike her last visit in her landmark year of 2008 [review here] Baez has no new album to promote this time around - not that that’s ever stopped her from constructing a wide-ranging set-list that touches as many corners of her voluminous repertoire as possible. Saturday evening’s show moved between old and new material, taking in the aforementioned ballads and songs by the writers Baez has championed and popularised - Dylan, Phil Ochs, Donovan, Steve Earle and (yay!) Richard Shindell - to construct a seamless story rich with the (lightly worn) weight of decades of history and political commitment as only a Baez gig can be.

Opening with Earle’s “God is God” from her last album, Baez took the first three songs solo on guitar, before being joined by her two accompanists: multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell and percussionist (and  fils Baez) Gabriel Harris who contributed some fresh textures to the most familiar material and nicely complemented Baez's own ever-distinctive guitar-work. A bluegrass spirit infused a rollicking “Lily of the West” and a supple “Long Black Veil,” while slinky bass invigorated “The House of the Rising Sun” and reeling accordion fleshed out a biting “With God on Our Side.” Indeed, the brace of Bob tracks were received with particular enthusiasm, a gorgeous “Love is Just a Four Letter Word” the standout.

Baez’s deepened, weathered tones - high notes now strictly rationed - also continue to contribute fresh aspects to the music. Her voice seems richer than ever for its creaks and croaks and her ability to turn a song taut and dramatic while keeping it conversational and intimate is superb. “Be Not Too Hard,” “Suzanne,” “There But For Fortune” and Shindell’s “Mary Magdalene” were timelessly restrained and haunting, and as often Baez delighted in putting some twists and reversals on particular lines: those cufflinks in “Diamonds and Rust” were now given to that tricky lover “fifty” not “thirty years ago.” Her quirky humour and playfulness surfaced on an entertaining - if slightly arch - honky tonk rendition of “Stagger Lee,” while various anecdotes - making tea for The Beatles, singing for Havel in Czechoslovakia - also added context, insight and amusement. There was just one duff song selection: a gloopy bit of undistinguished balladry entitled “I Need You Just the Way You Are” that might have strayed in from a Celine Dion set-list. Baez (who seemed oddly sheepish about the track in the introduction) gave it a dignified enough spin, avoiding bombast. But when you consider the classics (or stronger new material) that it’s replacing it seems an unworthy choice.

Baez’s warmth and graciousness as a performer, her ability to make everyone present feel like a vital, valued member of a collective enterprise, are well-known, yet always striking. Once again, she demonstrated her ability to reduce a large venue to coffee-house intimacy, frequently waving up to the audience members in the balcony and often turning to sing directly to those occupying the choir seats behind her. Appropriately, the final section of the show - from “Gracias A La Vida” through to “Blowin’ in the Wind” - became a singalong, infused with 60s spirit.

From the perspective of our current culture, it’s slightly tormenting to think back to a period when songs like “There But For Fortune” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were massive mainstream hits. Baez’s status as a bridge back to that tumultuous yet perhaps more engaged and more conscientious time clearly constitutes a considerable part of her enduring appeal. And yet her gigs seldom feel like exercises in nostalgia, and that’s due not only to the timeless appeal of the material but also to Baez’s ability to extend a bit of the past into the present, as evidenced by her dedication of a stirring “Joe Hill” to the Occupy movement. How urgently we need the lessons in compassion and empathy - and the calls to action - promoted in these songs, these days. And how heartening it is that, all these years on and as vibrantly as ever, Baez is still out there, delivering them.

Set-list:

God is God
Be Not Too Hard
Farewell Angelina
Lily of the West
Railroad Boy
Scarlet Tide
With God On Our Side
I Need You Just the Way You Are
Jerusalem
The Ballad of Mary Magdalene
Catch the Wind
There But For Fortune
Swing Low Sweet Chariot
Joe Hill
The House of the Rising Sun
Suzanne
Love Is Just A Four Letter Word
Long Black Veil
Gracias A La Vida
Diamonds and Rust
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Imagine
Blowin’ in the Wind

DVD/CD Review: Joan Baez - How Sweet the Sound

Given Joan Baez’s centrality to American cultural and political life over the past five decades, the greatest surprise about this documentary is that it wasn’t made much sooner. While Bob Dylan’s career has been the subject of a multitude of docs and bios, essays and retrospectives, Baez’s work - both as artist and activist - has received comparably little scrutiny or contextualisation. While her classic Vanguard albums have been carefully and conscientiously re-issued and re-mastered (and supplemented by comprehensive liner notes by Arthur Levy), it’s still been over 20 years since the publication of Baez’s autobiography, And A Voice To Sing With (1987), and that book is not widely available now. This lack of attention means that Baez - despite her continued vibrancy as a live performer, her ongoing campaigning work and the overall excellence of her recent recorded output - has arguably risked being fixed in the popular imagination as a worthy but dull crusader. A 60s icon, to be sure, but also, to some extent, a footnote in Dylan’s life-story, an emblem of the “protest” stage that he had to transcend before going on to create his most dynamic and experimental music.

In a pleasingly low-key and unassuming way Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound puts this situation to rights. Produced by Mark Spector and Mary Wharton, and directed by Wharton, this American Masters documentary premiered on PBS on in 2009 and is available in an excellent CD/DVD package which supplements the film with bonus content and a soundtrack disc of performances. Stylistically, the documentary is conventional: a linear journey through Baez’s life and times, comprised of archive footage, concert outtakes (from Baez’s earliest and most recent live shows), and present-day interviews, with Baez and a selection of talking-heads, among them David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, Jesse Jackson and Dylan himself. (The bonus content adds conversations with Steve Earle, Dar Williams and Vaclav Havel, though the latter’s contribution is disappointingly brief.)

For those hoping for a more idiosyncratic I’m Not There -ish take on Baez, How Sweet the Sound is not the place to come. But it’s a clear, well-made and thoroughly enjoyable documentary, respectful in tone, but rarely hagiographic. Baez’s characteristic wry humour and sly self-mockery deflect such a response. Musing with wit and candor on the shock of her early fame, her musical heritage, and her politics, Baez is great company - not to mention a living, breathing witness to some of the most important events in 20th century culture and politics. The archive footage that Spector and Wharton have amassed to illustrate her recollections is superb, and encompasses family home movies and footage of wider political significance, showing Baez in the thick of Civil Rights and draft-resistance protest, and capturing her visit to North Vietnam, where she is seen praying with the residents of Hanoi during the heaviest bombardment of the war.

Perhaps the most affecting anecdote, because somewhat lesser known, is the story of the concert Baez performed at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa in 1964, at which she succeeded in creating a peacefully integrated show in a bitterly segregated town. Baez’s conversation with her co-conspirators at this event, Professor Bill Fegan and Bishop Ernest Palmer (presented in full as one of the bonus interviews), adds further context and insight. (As well as humor. When Fegan presents Baez with a scarf that she left behind at a party in ’64 Baez deadpans: “I’ve been looking for that!”)

Baez states frankly that her political activities sometimes took precedence over her music and her personal life; her conversation with her ex-husband David Harris - two 60s warriors surveying their “tumultuous times” as “Mr. and Mrs. Peace In America” with perspective and good humour - addresses some of these issues in a particularly engrossing way. Dylan’s contribution is similarly affectionate; he speaks with palpable warmth about his early collaborations with “Joanie”, and offers his take on the 1965 British tour - described by Baez here as a “hideous” experience. Superb footage of the pair gleefully duetting on "I Pity The Poor Immigrant" (from the Rolling Thunder Review tour in the mid-70s) captures the dynamism of their renewed rapport.

In a life-story as rich as Baez’s, some elements, inevitably, get merely sketched in here. Baez’s family background could have been examined in more depth, while the coverage of her campaigning activities in the 1980s and 90s becomes a whistle-stop tour of war zones. Condensing her wide-ranging work onto one CD must have been similarly challenging, but the 15 songs selected (mostly live or rare performances) do a pretty good job of showcasing Baez’s genius for inhabiting songs both ancient and contemporary, and also highlighting some of her rare forays into original composition. It’s also moving to hear Baez’s voice deepen and develop from its early stark power to its now richer, womanly present-day tone.

As CD and film, what Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound conveys, finally, is the interrelatedness of Baez’s activism and her artistry, and her inspiring commitment to music as a bridge to others, a means to integration and understanding. As the song advises: “Carry it on.”