As far as I can tell, this is probably Diamanda Galás' tenth live album to date and it documents a pair of 2017 performances in Chicago and Seattle (Galás' previous live album, At Saint Thomas the Apostle Harlem, dates from the previous year). For the uninitiated, that probably sounds like an excessive number of live albums, but the improvisatory nature of Diamanda's art ensures that every single live performance is a truly singular event. Of course, actually experiencing Diamanda Galás live (an essential experience) is not quite the same as hearing a recording of the performance, much like watching a professionally shot video of a burning house is not quite the same as actually being inside one. That said, it is still a wild and compelling experience nonetheless and the lines between studio albums and live albums are increasingly academic given her volcanic spontaneity and preference for single-take recordings. The similarities to jazz do not end there, however, as Diamanda Galás in Concert is devoted to radical piano-and-voice interpretations of an eclectic and fascinating array of unconventional standards.
I recently saw someone suggest that Diamanda Galás "has felt the pain and suffering of the entire world her whole life" and it unexpectedly stuck with me. Regardless of whether that statement is actually true, it occurred to me that Galás is somewhat akin to cross between a sin-eater and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but instead of allowing guilty souls to finally rest in peace, she just screams humanity's ugly sins right back in our collective faces with harrowing intensity. The most obvious illustration of that dynamic is Diamanda's undiminished rage and sadness over the cruelty of how the world handled the AIDS epidemic, but she has plenty of similarly strong feelings about oppression and genocide too and that comes through even in her choice of cover songs (though "cover" is a hopelessly inadequate term for any song reshaped by Diamanda Galás). In keeping with that theme, she describes four of the songs included here as being "for and by the forsaken, outcast and debased," while the remaining three tackle yet another familiar theme: the dark side of love. That said, the stylistic breadth of her source material covers an impressively wide swath of both time and space, as she gamely finds and celebrates the connective tissue that runs through "rembetika, soul, ranchera, country and free jazz" (and even that is hardly a comprehensive list of all of the various cultural threads that Diamanda Galás In Concert touches upon).