44 Tickets Only!
Rhiannon Giddens is a celebrated artist who excavates the past to reveal bold and candid truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient, she has performed for the Obama’s at the White House and acted in two seasons of the hit television series Nashville. She has been profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among others. Her acclaimed solo albums, Tomorrow is My Turn (along with the EP Factory Girl, produced by T Bone Burnett) and Freedom Highway, received 3 GRAMMY nominations; her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops (which she co-founded) received a Grammy in 2010. Songs of Our Native Daughters, a collaborative album featuring Giddens that tells the stories of historic black womanhood and survival, was released on Smithsonian Folkways to rave reviews.
Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi defies easy categorisation. Called “a musical alchemist” by the Irish Times, Turrisi is a Turin–born musician whose Dublin base reflects his global sensibilities. With his unique ability to fold early music, pan- Mediterranean modal melodies, and European flavored jazz into a single repertoire, Turrisi has developed a musical style that crisscrosses cultures and forges musical alliances that are, at once, old and familiar and startlingly brand new. He has performed and recorded with Bobby McFerrin, jazz icon Dave Liebman, early music group l’Arpeggiata, contemporary ensemble Bang on a Can, Irish sean-nós singer Roisin El Safty, and tarantella specialist Lucilla Galeazzi.
Their debut album there is no Other traces the overlooked movement of sounds from Africa and the Arabic world and their influence on European and American music,
there is no Other illuminates the universality of music and the commonality of the human experience. Giddens sings and plays minstrel banjo, octave violin, and viola. Turrisi plays piano, accordion, frame drum, tamburello, lute, cello banjo, daf, and colascione. The array of instruments reveal the sonic ties that bind between African, Arabic, European, and American cultures.
Giddens recently told the Irish Times: “It’s all about movement, for both of us...movements of human beings and how we affect each other. If you just look at our range of instruments, where they’ve come from and how they’ve travelled across the world, it’s pretty amazing. The way that both of us approach music is very similar because we’re both educated about where the music is coming from. But when it comes to playing, we’re both just playing what we feel.”