Music / National Folk Festival Closing Concert. At Epic, April 18. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

A FEATURE of the National Folk Festival this year has been a series of carefully programmed concerts.

In addition to the opening and closing concerts, artistic director Katie Noonan programmed three “Songs of…” concerts featuring the music of Don Walker, Joni Mitchell and this year’s NFF Lifetime Achievement Award, Judy Small.

The Joni Mitchell tribute was held in the main Narragunnawali Stage on Sunday afternoon. The format was simple: a row of chairs along the back of the stage where the dozen or more performers sat and were then calling up in turn for their song.

The concert was hosted by former Canberran Queenie Van Zandt, who has been touring a Joni Mitchell tribute show for five years and thus able to fill in the gaps with snippets of Joni biography. The songs were almost all from Mitchell’s earlier work, up to the mid-’70s and I suspect that just about everyone in the audience knew the words to all of them. All the performances were enjoyable, with a couple of standouts from The Little Quirks and a young singer Jo Davie, whose pared-down treatment of “Both Sides Now” was delightful.

The festival’s closing concerts are always much different from the opening events. This had a similar structure to the opening concert in that it was a single item from a selection of festival performers with the addition of the presentation of a number of awards, which were done efficiently and respectfully in the first part of the concert.

A local First Nations dance group led by Serina Williams and her family opened the concert with a welcome to country and smoking ceremony followed by three short dances. This was followed by Neil Murray singing “My Island Home” (which he wrote) along with Jude and Alinta Barlow, who had performed the Ngunnawal translation of the song in the opening concert. 

After the awards, the concert continued with songs from Lior & Domini and Montgomery Church, a spoken performance piece by Omar Musa, a song from last year’s National Library Folk Fellow Archer, who sounds as if he has been transported from the 1930s (in the nicest way), a sprightly Nordic dance tune from the Phoenix Collection String Quartet before the final song from Neil Murray, the Warumpi Band’s “Black Fella White Fella”, with a stage full of the festival choir, the Phoenix Collective String Quartet (with grins from ear to ear), the Hauptman Trio and upwards of a dozen singers as well as Murray and his guitarist. 

It was a  wonderfully chaotic way to finish which brought the audience to its feet, yet again.