Look who’s back. Folk rocker Ani DiFranco, one of the most committed and original American singer-songwriter voices of the 1990s, will be in Italy in June: she will perform on June 14 at Casa del Jazz in Rome and the following evening at Castello Estense in Ferrara, as part of the ‘Ferrara Sotto Le Stelle’ festival. She has been missing from our country for a good eight years. So, ‘welcome back’!

By Luca Testoni

‘Minstrel’ with Doc Martens (an iconic image in spite of herself), feminist and queer activist, as well as a long-standing militant against war and environmental disasters (that’s how she looked 30 years ago…), even now that she is over 50 and the mother of two children, the singer-songwriter of Italian-Canadian origin who grew up in Buffalo, New York, but has long been based in New Orleans, does not seem to have lost any of her verve. More of her singing against the tide.

The pungent ‘Unprecedented Sh!t’, her 23rd album (on her own Righteous Babe Records label), was released last year, a few months before the US presidential election, and it cannot be said that she did not foresee the drift her country had taken with Trump’s rise to power and the rhetoric of ‘Make America Great Again’. Although, in all fairness, that didn’t take much, did it?

If in the early days she did everything herself, faithful to the rhetoric of ‘Do it yourself’, but lately she’s also accepted to have her records produced (this is the case of BJ Burton) and to duet with others (for example, Bon Iver). However, she has not lost the habit of jumping from one genre to another. And if she used to do so by exploring folk, jazz, Delta blues, roots and rock and absorbing the influences of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Miles Davis and Betty Carter, now his songwriting, where the political and the personal and vice versa are a pole star, she now flirts here and there with electronics.

That said, her music has never been mass-produced and never will be.

Info & Tickets: https://ponderosa.it/artist/ani-difranco/

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