Photo credit: Adam Miszewski
The reasons one can appreciate Ani DiFranco are manifold: her pushing the boundaries of folk music conventions, the inventive guitar playing that abets her boundary pushing, her lively vocal phrasing informed by blues and jazz, the entrepreneurship that has propelled her career for more than a quarter-century, and her history as a role model for politically left young women.
But it was her role as protest singer that primarily brought her to Turner Hall Ballroom Friday night, at least according to what she’s calling her current tour. She titled it “Paint Congress Blue,” and early on in an energetic set she expressed her pleasure at how Wisconsin’s Democratic presidential primary went the previous Tuesday.
Yet a comment about defeating what she believes to be evil, likely personified by politicians with Rs after their names when they show up on TV news, was the only other overtly, confrontational political statement DiFranco made apart from letting her often propulsive and riff-driven music do the talking.
The album she’s ostensibly touring behind, 2014’s Allergic To Water, finds her in an often copacetic, sometimes whimsically self-deprecating mood, as she articulated on the few numbers from it that she played Friday. The metaphor she employs in the collection’s titular song could apply to introversion, but one might not think to diagnose her with that, considering the gusto she displayed while leading a minimal band comprised of male drummer and upright bassist, with a supplementary dude on acoustic guitar on the unlit portion of the stage to bolster DiFranco’s own masterful finger work on baritone and tenor axes she switched between.
Her role as activist came to the fore as she assayed a song based on a poem written by Spoon Jackson, currently incarcerated at California’s Folsom Prison. The song will appear on an album of songs by inmates at the same facility, to be produced by DiFranco and spearheaded by her fellow folksinger Zoe Boekbinder, its proceeds going toward a programs promoting the arts behind bars and preventing recidivism.
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Other songs of her own composition, largely deriving from the mid-late ’90s when mainstream news media were starting to take note of DiFranco’s uncompromising DIY success, depict other kinds of confinement, particularly others’ expectations and circumstances not entirely of one’s own making, as in “Fuel” and her opener, “Shy.” More joyfully, “Angry Anymore” addresses familial reconciliation. And despite the protestation she makes in one of her more famous songs she didn’t perform Friday, she has the smile of a pretty girl when she sings such lyrics. She likewise employed her wide grin to comment on the slant of Turner Hall’s stage and the devotion of and good vibes generated by her fans.
Starting off the evening was the soulful singer Chastity Brown. Her calls for love, even the sexy kind, throughout society and talk of her involvement with Black Lives Matter peppered a solid set of a half-dozen numbers that could bode for better things to come. Perhaps part of DiFranco's bravery is her willingness to pick an opening act who could have easily upstaged her?
