Joan Baez Back To Play İn Istanbul After 11 Years

American folk singer Joan Baez is back in Istanbul after 11 years, with an open air performance at the 22nd Istanbul Jazz Festival.



Baez, whose career has spanned seven decades, spoke to Anadolu Agency ahead of her hotly anticipated concert on Wednesday evening.



"What I try to do in concerts now after 55 years is sing something that is new," she said. "I am trying to plan a concert that non-English speakers can relate too as well as people who speak English. I want to avoid having a translator."



Recalling her first visit to Turkey in the late 1980s when she performed amid the Roman ruins at Ephesus, the 74-year-old said the concert springs to mind when she is asked to name her favorite performance.



"It was very special… the sun was going down… it was exceptional," she said of the amphitheater show near Turkey's Aegean coast.



Before her scheduled concert, Baez, whose activism stretches from anti-Vietnam protests in the 1960s to performing for Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in 2011, Baez unexpectedly joined Grup Yorum, a leftist protest band for a concert last Sunday in Istanbul's working class Zeytinburnu district, when she performed Land of a Thousand Dances.



"It was a little left-wing militant for me," she said. "It was fun... All of the political issues I have been involved with were non-violent so I try to make a little statement at the end of my section."



Referring to the legendary 1969 New York festival, she added: "It was twice the size of Woodstock. It was impressive. It was very moving."



Speaking about the link between political activism and music, Baez cast her mind back to the 1960s and the "huge explosion of challenge".



Noting that musicians often seek to write anthems for their own movement, Baez said: "I am smart not to try, because it is the most difficult thing to write an Imagine - it is nearly impossible."



Baez has written many own songs but is perhaps best known for renditions of hits by artists such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder - delivered in her trademark soprano voice.



Her career was launched in 1958 when she took the stage at the Club 47 folk bar in Boston, Massachusetts. She has since released nearly 50 albums. - İstanbul