At Newport
RHINO
7/10
IT’S hard to evaluate a miracle using standard critical criteria. Joni Mitchell’s return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival last July was an event as triumphant as it was wholly unlikely, following her long (and continuing) struggle back to health in the wake of a brain aneurysm in 2015.
The show preserved and presented here was intended as a public recreation of the Joni Jams, the informal, good-timey, therapeutic evenings of music and laughter which Mitchell has hosted with a bunch of musician friends in recent years. Chief among the Jammers is Brandi Carlile, who was the prime mover and last year, nobody was quite sure until the final moments whether Mitchell would do it or not.
