Ani DiFranco’s Soul and Funk Revue (11/1, Palace Theater, Albany)
By Seth Rogovoy

(ALBANY, N.Y., Nov. 2, 2000) Just a few years ago, Ani DiFranco was still known primarily as a solo acoustic performer. She mostly played folk clubs and festivals, where her dynamism and the fiery wrath of her outrage earned her the epithet “folk-punk.”

Little by little, over the years, DiFranco has added new musicians to her band. First, she took the unusual step of playing with a drummer. Then she added a bassist. Before long, a keyboard player. On her current tour, which stopped at Albany’s Palace Theater on Wednesday night, DiFranco rolls in with all of the above, plus a two-person horn section. The good news is that all this extra musical baggage does not detract from DiFranco’s songs or persona. In retrospect, it seems that DiFranco’s plan must have all along been eventually to set her feminist anthems and narratives of female resilience to the big-bottomed soul-groove that now powers her music.

In a word, “folk-punk” got it wrong by one letter. Funk was the operative word on Wednesday night. And with enhanced production values in a stage show that included seamless transitions aided by several roadies and technicians, a dazzling synchronized light show, pinpoint arrangements and a riotously funny encore, DiFranco has come quite far from her solo acoustic days.

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome Ani DiFranco’s Soul and Funk Revue.

Apparently, as much as Ani DiFranco set out to update the folk-protest tradition of Woody Guthrie, Utah Phillips and other pro-labor, anti-corporate folksingers, she also has harbored a not-so-secret desire to funk things up. It’s been apparent on her recordings at least as far back as 1996’s “Dilate,” but never has it been as fully and successfully realized as it is on her current tour.

There is an inherent danger for DiFranco, of course, in toying with her intimate, intense material, which works so well when it is delivered straightforward, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar and her incredibly expressive and warm vocals. Adding all these stylistic layers and colors to her performance, literally with the light show, and figuratively with its nods to ska, jazz and commercial dance music, could undermine the seriousness of the material, which generally bespeaks DiFranco fervent desire to break through the economic and cultural chains and fetters that still plague a huge swath of the female population in particular, and everyone in general.

The memory of a similar attempt by Bob Dylan - with whom DiFranco has been closely associated - in the late-1970s, in his relatively unsuccessful and ill-advised transformation of himself into a Las Vegas-style entertainer, as documented on the “Live at Budokan” album, still sends shivers up the spine. But DiFranco is clearly not attempting anything that doesn’t come totally naturally to herself and her music. In fact, she is singlehandedly accomplishing a revolutionary fusion of serious, populist-derived social-folk criticism with African-American escapist party music. She’s not the first to attempt such a fusion - indeed, Sly and the Family Stone certainly had their fair share of protest songs, and ‘80s art-rock groups like Talking Heads and Gang of Four, of which show-opener Sara Lee was a member - but she is probably the most extreme in applying the radical storytelling tradition of Guthrie and Phillips to dance music.

Sara Lee has long been known as the glamorous bassist for a host of bands, including B-52s, Indigo Girls and most recently, Ani DiFranco. But she recently released her debut album, “Make It Beautiful,” under her own name (on DiFranco’s Righteous Babe record label), and she is promoting it as the opening act on DiFranco’s current tour.

Lee’s set was also grounded in funk, more akin to the art-funk of the aforementioned Gang of Four, and other 1980s English bands like Eurythmics. The music was somewhat innocuous, but the arrangements, consisting of a wash of synthesizer penetrated by bullets of guitar, were pleasant - the perfect warm-up music.

The concert came to a gloriously giddy finale when, for her encore, DiFranco brought out her band and Sara Lee’s entire band and together they performed a campy version of Rick James’s “Superfreak.” After 90 minutes of DiFranco’s torrid narratives of decaying cities and towns, exploited sex workers, corporate greed and malfeasance, it sent the audience out into the night with a suggestion that in the end, grrrls just wanna have fun.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Nov. 4, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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