Reviews
Artist:Ani DiFranco
Album:Live At Babeville
Label:Righteous Babe
Tracks:14
Website:www.myspace.com/anidifranco
It is true to say that I hardly have an objective view towards Ani Difranco and so I should warn you that this "review" may actually be a somewhat biased ode to The Little Folk Singer. So pressing the 'Play' button on my DVD player isn't quite as exciting as huddling outside a venue with legions of other fanatics at a sold-out show… but then this DVD doesn't just document another night amid a long tour. The DVD documents two consecutive nights at 'Babeville', previously know as 'The Church'; the crumbling building saved from the demolition team of Buffalo NY and brought back to life in the form of the head-offices and permanent venue for Ani's own label, Righteous Babe Records. The DVD extras include some sweeping shots of huge stained windows, polished wooden floors, and temple-like ceilings worthy of any episode of Grand Designs. The two nights follow a complete refurbishment of the whole building and a come-back for the singer following the birth of her daughter.
Following two decades of almost continuous touring and recording, Ani recently took a hard-earned break - if you can call a bout of tendonitis and child-birth a break - during which she apparently took a deep breath and paused to look over her shoulder at her impressively productive career to date. Live At Babeville is effectively the DVD supplement to her recent retrospective album, Canon, and the result is a very broad overview of her sprawling discography. For once, she isn't 'touring' a new album - as she seems to have been doing seemingly consistently since her time selling home-made cassette tape recordings from her car as a teenager. Instead she has cherry-picked snapshots from periods of her career stretching back across the decades.
In Ani's defence, to condense a body of work as broad as hers into a couple of hours is a near impossible task, but I do feel the choice of songs aren't necessarily a totally adequate summary of her catalogue. There are only two new songs slipped in; the beautiful Present/Infant shows she is still as eloquent and honest lyrically as ever and the songs acts as a testament to how far she has come from the shaven-headed girl of the 90s, while Alla This harks back to Ani's revolutionary protest-song days. Now a mother, a business-woman and, if the new Righteous Babe 'Church' is anything to go by, a project manager; her priorities have changed but her political values and candid approach to lyric-writing certainly hasn't.
As with any respectable retrospective, she doesn't shy away from "The Hits"; if you'll excuse the pun. She opens with Napoleon; the only song on the DVD from her highest-selling album to date, Dilate. A couple of tracks in and she even drops in a rare rendition of Not A Pretty Girl, which only gains anthemic proportions from a full backing band compared with it's original stripped-back two-person album recording.
Which is another thing that has notably changed over Ani's career; her band. She's been accompanied onstage by everyone from lone poets branded only with a microphone to the full New York Symphony Orchestra, but just a few complimentary band-members is enough to bounce around the energy onstage that really makes an Ani show. Everyone here is an established live act in their own right; Allison Miller bring modern jazz drum compositions and has played with everybody from Natalie Merchant to Erin McKeown; Todd Sickafoose, a man with 3 albums to his own name, creates a solid bass backing; whilst Mike Dillon is the only person I have ever seen make a vibraphone look seriously cool, mixing it with loop machines, effects pedals and lo-fi percussion that compliments Miller's bold high-voltage drumming. Sickafoose and Difranco throw the melody back and forth between themselves, seeming to predict the others' next move. Meanwhile, Miller and Dillon built up funky rhythmic crescendos between themselves - Sunday Morning has a particularly sublime interaction between the drums and the vibes. Finally Ani is accompanied by the only band member that seems to have been consistent throughout her career - her audience - who dotingly accompany her on vocals on almost every song, particularly prevalant on guaranteed crowd-pleasers such as Little Plastic Castle and Shy.
Hands down, the most noticeable change in her performance is all the talk about babies - which just a few years ago would have been as hard to imagine as Ani Difranco publicly praising the Bush administration. On the other hand, somehow it's hard to imagine many live acts whose live show banter includes discussions on stock-piling towels and wet suits in preparation for a home birth. She certainly seems more domestically orientated these days than she ever was in her early days; she even dedicates Paradigm, a song about how she was encouraged into radical feminism, to her mother. She finishes her encore with one of my all-time favourites, Hypnotized, complete with Todd Sickafoose's magnificent bass opening, and it's magical.
Ultimately the DVD is hardly an accurate summary of her entire career - it skips most of the very early stuff and ignores certain albums entirely - but it serves more than adequately as an overall celebration of her discography to date. It's the same stripped-back acoustic folk of her early albums, with all the big-band style jazz of a few years ago (only sans big-band), and retains the alternative political allegiances that Difranco has been loyal to from her radical teen years through to motherhood. The atmosphere and electric in the venue is apparent through a television screen, and the new Righteous Babes headquarters looks nothing less than a temple to the Ani Difranco vision. The recent additions to the Righteous Babe roster (babies, a new home…) indicates an even bigger and better future for a record label that started with a modest $50. The DVD feels much less like a retrospective than a sort of birthday party of sorts; halfway through the DVD Ani says, "I love my job". Live In Babeville is a celebration of not just Ani Difranco but the entire Righteous Babe community; a must-see for anybody who has ever enjoyed an Ani song.
Alice Ralph