As on previous live albums ("Live in Italy" ('70) or "From Every Stage" '(76)) converts Joan Baez also here on the fine line between really poignant (Diamonds and Rust, For Sasha, Cambodia) and its slope, in presented with doe-eyed fervor songs full of melodic bliss and campfire romance (The Boxer, Gracias a la Vida) to sink ("lalalala la la la ..."). Worst of all is when the boundaries become blurred here and songs that originally have really powerful social criticism and political messages, reduced to pure sing-along and Mitklatsch arias (Here's to you).
I'm not a purist when it comes to post-live recording in the studio. On this album she has done so in most cases, even though they obviously had all the concerts solo contest: to Gracias a la Vida are added Spanish guitar sounds, Soyuz Druzyei is thickened with mandolins playing, Cambodia with a flute, and in some songs twice they her singing (The Boxer, Cambodia, Gracias a la Vida, Here's to you). Here would have been less is more, as the unprocessed images show (For Sasha, Diamonds & Rust).
Joan Baez Dylan can parody really good as they showed in Simple Twist of Fate or '83 in their live version of A Hard Rain's a-gonna fall already '75. But if they also simulate in totgenudelten Blowin 'in the Wind with another studio vocal track, a duet with Bob Dylan, then puts it dangerously close to the kind of destructive self-parody zoom, with Dylan in turn have a song like The Boxer (on "Self Portrait", 1970) had destroyed - only this was done at the time with him, unlike Joan Baez, in a deliberate attempt to destroy his image.
Another unpleasant aftertaste left precisely those announcements that might arise from their uncertainty out, but rather act chumming, for example, if your audience praises in The Boxer after the first chorus: "That was good, by the way Tres Tres bon.. . bien - tres bon Both "as if not just sing the chorus of this song easy; or if you animate the audience in front of the chorus of Blowin 'in the wind to sing along, by announcing repeated: "The answer ...", as if there is still someone who does not know what's coming.
"Sometimes I have discovered satellite ven I'm speaking in se Tschörman people it's better sometimes to sound like so sis and sen Understanding sey me better." There are a few laughs, but I find it very inappropriate to mock in this way about the linguistic deficiencies of their audience. Your well-demonstrated talent for languages in all honors (Soyuz Druzyei she sings even in Russian, of course, what I can not check); but it is laughing nobody about their pronunciation in "Children (If so small hands)" or in The Rose, which she sings in German, while the "r" at times rolled in a way that suggests that they, the song has learned phonetically according to one version of Konstantin Wecker. (In her alarm clock cover of "If our brothers come" on "Live in Europe" three years later in any case meets the too obvious.)
The third star will receive the album from me for Diamonds & Rust and For Sasha, two of their best songs ever.
