Music
Ani DiFranco
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Rob Adams
four stars
IT IS almost thirty years since Ani DiFranco released her first album. This thought recurs often during her return to Edinburgh for the first time, she notes, since the day after the 2014 Independence referendum.
DiFranco would know a detail like that. Many of her songs reflect her political engagement and there’s an audible link in her work to the folk singers of the 1960s civil rights marches, especially when opening act, Chastity Brown reappears to add her low Tennessean moan towards the concert’s end.
The passage of time thought doesn’t come because DiFranco is now in her mid-forties so much as because she projects the same energy and commitment that launched her Righteous Babe label in her teens. Her performance fizzes.
When she goes back almost to the beginning in a set that works its way chronologically forward, it’s not nostalgic. She attacks the songs, and her guitars with those scary five finger picks, with the passion that wrote them and a physicality that almost amounts to a gym session with swift changes of instrument.
Working (out) with bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Terence Higgins, DiFranco hits a groove from beat one and varies the pace and tone, with a tenor guitar here, a New Orleans shuffle there, while fielding requests and making a heartfelt dedication to her guitarist friend, Dave Rosser, who died the previous day.
It’s an invigorating experience, nowhere more so than on Binary, with a searing guitar solo from Brown’s partner, Luke Enyeart and its “Where are my sisters? Where are my brothers? Where is my family who take care of each other?” refrain that could be the anthem of our times.
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