Joan Baez review, Royal Albert Hall: a rapturous evening with a legend
In nearly 60 years in music, Joan Baez has been through it all. A mouthpiece for the oppressed, she is as notable for her relentless activism as for her folk songs, and has marched alongside Martin Luther King, and taken to the fields with Cesar Chavez. Now 77, she released her first album in a decade, Whistle Down the Wind, earlier this year.
She intends it to be her last: to bookend her career, and make some “beauty in the face of evil”. It triumphs on both counts: sparse on love and serious on protest. It was this trademark revolutionary spirit that she brought to a rapturous Royal Albert Hall in her Fare Thee Well Tour on Monday night.
Baez’s small frame cast an imposing shadow behind her as she opened with a lush acoustic rendition of the war-weary There But For Fortune. The hopeful God is God and haunting Farewell Angelina followed, before she introduced on stage her son Gabe Harris on percussion, and astonishing multi-instrumentalist Dirk Howell, for her latest album’s title track, written by Tom Waits.
Baez’s voice remains flawless, but her soprano only occasionally soars, birdlike, as it once did. Age has forced her to choose songs better matched to her mature sound, and this was rich, oaky and sublime.
Her classics were most rousing. House of the Rising Sun was creeping, bluesy bliss, while Diamonds and Rust, about her relationship with Bob Dylan – whom she introduced to the world – was brilliantly melancholic. A cover of his It’s All Over Now Baby Blue prompted an elated singalong.
Most powerful were the songs that espoused social justice. Woody Guthrie’s Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) was as impassioned as if heard anew, as Baez shared that she had sung it with the families of the unnamed Mexicans killed in the crash in 1948. She marvelled at Florida students fighting for gun control, before singing The Times They Are a-Changin’, and the spectral Another World was a call to arms as she thumped her guitar with the palm of her hand and warned that this world was “nearly gone”.
Baez recently told the New York Times, “When I go on stage, I don’t make history, I am history” – which was striking on Monday night, with songs she played “long before Woodstock, then at Woodstock”. A nod to her Mexican roots, Gracias a la Vida was a velvety, jubilant ode to life as Baez thanked her feet, “that are tired from so many marches.”
With a feverish standing ovation, there seemed to be no tired feet in this house. If this is her farewell tour, Baez bows out a legend, with her maverick spirit and musical gifts undimmed.
Until tonight. Tickets: 020 7589 8212; royalalberthall.com
