POP MUSIC REVIEW : Baez Message at the Coach House Is Her Music

Joan Baez has become such a fixture on the arena and stadium-level benefit circuit in recent years that it has been easy to forget what a splendid human-scale communicator she can be, a quality that was reasserted in a sterling, low-keyed performance at the Coach House Friday night.

The Amnesty International tours and other cause-related events Baez has undertaken tend, oddly, to be the least compelling settings in which to see the Queen of Folk. Often she’s trotted out like the hallowed ghost of protest past, the bona fide conscience of a whole generation (on the nights they can’t get Dylan to show up) instead of a flesh and blood person.

Lending further distance, the very scale of those shows seems to work against her better vocal instincts. Confronted with a large hall or stadium, Baez tries to fill it with her voice, in the process resorting to volume, histrionics and a hellish vibrato that overwhelms rather than reveals the lyrical content of her songs.

In the intimate concert club setting, though, the singer connected with wit, grace and a splendid, expressive voice, and reminded us that there are reasons she has become a legend.

She came onstage sporting a rainbow of ribbons in her short, peppery hair, a vest and short-sleeved blouse, denim skirt and running shoes. Before singing, she offered a playful help for those in the audience still dining: “Eat with your fingers, it’s quieter.”

Much of her performance did indeed demand that hush. Accompanied only by her own guitar (and, briefly, piano), and second guitarist Jamie Fox, she gave a career-spanning 14-song show that commenced with a delicate, personal rendition of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”

Other entries from her early folkie days included “House of the Rising Sun” and “The Butcher Boy,” one of those love ‘n’ death ballads from antiquity. There was a trio of songs with sing-along “la la” choruses: “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” and “Gracias a la Vida,” one of two Spanish-language songs in the set. Like Linda Ronstadt’s, Baez’s voice proved especially well suited to the more expansive drama of the Latin tunes.

“Diamonds and Rust,” a song reportedly about her romance with Dylan, was sung with a close poignancy. In a departure from style, she sang the old standard “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” with a torchy, bluesy vocal more than a bit reminsicent of Michelle Shocked’s recent excursions into swing styles.

While Van Morrison may have license on the definitive version of the traditional Irish ballad “Carrickfergus,” Baez also was able to invest its doleful strains with a pale fire, her pure, high voice aching with loss and resignation.

Inexplicably, her singing went from its most expressive there directly to its one instance of excess. Her unaccompanied version of the country/soul standard “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” was a vocal tour de force, but all her high-powered upper-register effort and melodic curlicues seemed utterly divorced from the lyric. Even highly limited singers such as the late Gram Parsons have brought more life to the song.

Fortunately there were no such problems with the moments central to Baez’s performance. Throughout her career, the singer (who turned 50 in January) has been inextricably linked with social causes, particularly pacifism. That often has meant swimming against the tide, and she was unhesitant Friday in opposing the powerful current of war exultation now sweeping the nation.

In the middle of her show she warned the capacity audience, “I was about to make a statement, so if you want to plug your ears, go ahead.” She proceeded to read a poem of her impressions of the Gulf War, which concluded: “I would wear a yellow ribbon, were it braided with two black ones / for who is watching the children of Baghdad?”

The idea that, in any war, the “moral high ground” inevitably is built on a heap of bones was expressed further in an impassioned version of Dylan’s “With God on Our Side.”

Baez and Dylan introduced the song--an ironic history of how all wars are “just”--at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. It has since grown by a couple of verses, to include Vietnam and the Gulf War, and in sad probability will grow more still before she can lay the song to rest.