Baez transports fans back to timelessness

It's been 50 years since a 17-year-old Joan Baez played her first engagements, an anniversary that briefly fazed her during her show at the Kimmel Center on Sunday night. "I look out at this, and I think, 'This is just insane,' " she said, sweeping an arm across the Kimmel's burnished interior and an adoring audience.

For the crowd, many of whom looked as if they'd been listening to Baez's music nearly as long as she's been making it, the concert doubled as a love-in. When requests rang out, they sounded less like orders than supplications.

In a black dress adorned with a floor-length pink scarf, Baez looked like a coloratura preparing for a recital. But her bearing was warm and unassuming, her comments laced with self-deprecating asides. Between songs, she struggled to keep her guitar in tune, frequently handing it off to one of her sidemen for a quick adjustment.

Baez's voice needed no such tweaking. Her fluttering soprano filled the hall even when she stepped away from the microphone, transporting the audience back to the folk clubs and protest marches of the 1960s. Although Baez is as renowned for her activism as her music, she limited herself to a single evocation of Barack Obama's name, which produced a roar of a magnitude sufficient to render further comment moot.

With a three-piece band on acoustic instruments beside her, Baez ranged freely through her catalog, ranging back to the days when, she recalled, she would fall asleep learning new ballads and awake with the guitar still on her chest.

For an artist like Baez as well as her audience, the greatest danger is letting nostalgia take the place of outrage. Singing Steve Earle's "Christmas in Washington," she slipped backward through time to the days of Woody Guthrie and Joe Hill, moving away from the present as she called upon their spirits.

For her new album,

The Day After Tomorrow

, Baez said she sought "new songs that sound old," attempting to bridge the then and the now

.

The Tom Waits-penned title track, written in the voice of a 21-year-old soldier, was inspired by the Iraq war, but it could have issued from Vietnam or the trenches of World War I. It was timeless, for good and for ill.