One Wild Night in Concert

Many find Christine Lavin more engaging live than on disc. She s been selling out the coffeehouse circuit for years, and, like Steve Goodman and Phil Ochs, her ultratopical material seems wittier and more charming onstage. Even her sweet silliness feels less cloying as her bubbly soprano becomes more engaging. At concerts like this one, Lavin s jokes fly furiously, and just when you re sure she couldn t take the black plague seriously, she ll hit you with the wise and tender The Kind of Love You Never Recover From or the shocking The Wild Blue, the story of the first kamikaze pilot. When she s on, Lavin is almost disturbingly entertaining, and this night in Bloomington, Illinois, she s on. There s not much musical variation here, but even for Lavin die-hards, there s plenty of previously unreleased material and borderline-hysterical audience interplay and ad-libs. To be sure, the marching-band finale was certainly more effective visually than it is aurally, but the closing Sensitive New Age Guys (not listed on the CD) compensates nicely. --Roy Kasten