Venue: Križanke, Ljubljana
Concert date: 17.06.2007
Attendance: 1500
Ticket price: 42 EUR
Vaya Con Dios are currently touring to promote their new compilation album The Ultimate Collection, so it’s understandable that a few people probably showed up expecting exactly that – the greatest hits, and nothing but. Those folks most likely went home not entirely satisfied. But the ones who didn’t expect that, or better yet, expected nothing at all, surely found plenty for their souls in a pretty esoteric evening.
Of course, Vaya Con Dios played some of their best-known songs too, but mostly in much calmer, mellower arrangements that drew heavily on the blues and in places on lighter jazz, with barely a trace of Latin. The music itself painted a picture of the place where it’s supposed to be heard: a small, smoky café with dim lighting, one of those poorly ventilated jazz holes where you can’t tell the audience from the performers and vice versa. In reality, though, it was quite different. Still, the music shone even in the embrace of Plečnik’s Križanke, since the venue is made for this kind of event and does its job brilliantly. The problem starts when you get an organizer who sees little beyond the bottom line and lets that have the first and last word. Actually, the only word. So the whole show it was impossible to listen to just the five people on stage, who were, by the way, far too quiet, without hundreds of passing vehicles chipping in with their contributions, more or less unsuccessfully accompanying a band narrative that was already, at times, almost too intimate and subtle. The wonderful double bass solo intro that announced “Puerto Rico” was completely drowned out, because a soloist on a Vespa, even on the other side of the wall, simply couldn’t be matched in volume. A slap in the face for performers and listeners alike! It’s high time organizers asked themselves whether shows like this make any sense, since the tickets aren’t exactly cheap, and listeners won’t want to sit through every single open-air event to the constant drone of thousands of vehicles for much longer. And it’s downright shameful that this gets allowed even though everyone knew beforehand it was a fully acoustic event, which by its very nature calls for a bit more attention and preparation.
Otherwise, Vaya Con Dios served up some really solid playing. From the opening “Just A Friend Of Mine” to “What’s A Woman?” closing the first part of the set, all four instrumentalists made sure they came across as quality, inspired musicians, who never quite took the leading role. That belonged without a doubt to Dani Klein’s voice, but then again, Dani Klein is Vaya Con Dios. After all these years her voice is still exactly the same, surprisingly supple, and with that trademark color it’s instantly recognizable, of course. As a band they made up a tight, joyful quintet that honored us with a visit at just the right time. Well, the meeting would probably have been a bit more intense if it had happened in the early nineties, when they were at the peak of their creative powers. But it would most likely have been a lot paler if Vaya Con Dios had come some ten years ago, when the lineup was bursting at the seams and all the joy they showed now would have been replaced by a painful rehashing of the hits, which in their current form have found a new, completely different identity. An extra dose of nostalgia does its job too.
And if “Johnny” mostly sounds like it used to, as if the title character of the song never aged, then “Heading For A Fall” has clearly lived through a thing or two, and it left marks on the song, showing up in a slight shift in tempo that suited Dani down to the ground. “Don’t Cry For Louie” came as a response to Dani’s comment on the role of women in the porn industry. “You know, we women aren’t objects, we’re human beings too”… “girls don’t cry for Louie, Louie wouldn’t cry for you…” Sure, there are guys like that out there, but that’s another story… and the song was played really beautifully.
Somewhere in the middle there was also a moment where Vaya Con Dios, or rather Dani, paid tribute to the Roma and their music: “some people say these people and this music don’t deserve credit for anything, but I say they deserve credit for everything! This is my tribute to them.” A cover of “Djelem, djelem”, which in French comes out as something like “Je L’Aime, Je L’Aime”. In their rendition the song doesn’t quite have that real Gypsy fire, and instead comes across as a chanson, which is perfectly fine.
So Vaya Con Dios slowly danced their way to the end of their romantic program, but it didn’t feel at all like they’d said everything there was to say. Not until they came back on stage for the encore. Despite the fact that they mostly leaned toward mellower interpretations of their music, the crowd was anything but calm. For at least the last fifteen, twenty minutes everyone was out of their seats, the seats being what all the listeners had to enjoy the show from, except the journalists, who were assigned practically penal-colony standing spots behind a fence at the point of Križanke farthest from the stage, with no access to the toilets, totally pointless. And all the answers to the questions Dani asked, “Do you want to sing? Do you want to dance? Do you want both?”, were of course yes, how could they not be, since Vaya Con Dios picked “Nah Neh Nah”, in perhaps the most unchanged form of all the songs they played, as their closing number. The madness kicks in early, right in the first, maybe second bar, the whole place is dancing, but then Dani cuts the song off: “Wait! Wait! Didn’t we agree you’d sing? Come on, once more.” They pick up where they left off and take the whole thing way further than it seemed possible.
One more moment of ecstasy and they were gone, vaya con Dios!
