American Treasure Rhiannon Giddens Continues 805 Trend

Silkroad Ensemble Performs in Santa Barbara on November 9

Silkroad Ensemble | Credit: Adam Gurczak

It may be an understatement to report that the multi-faceted American treasure that is Rhiannon Giddens is having well-deserved moments in the public spotlight at the moment, adding a Pulitzer Prize this year (for her first opera, Omar) to a list of accolades including a MacArthur Grant. Locally speaking, within the space of a year, Giddens — the celebrated singer-banjoist- project-maker-activist — is having a triple-play impact on the cultural life in the 805.

On November 9, at the Granada Theatre, Giddens arrives as director of the storied and definitively multicultural Silkroad Ensemble, under the aegis of UCSB Arts & Lectures. This special event, the first stop on a tour of a new project “American Railroad,” presenting music around the theme of the complexities, exploitation and displacement of people of color and the working class in the process of building the transcontinental railroad.

Her Silkroad project comes close on the heels of Giddens’ role as music director of the Ojai Music Festival last June. She also returns to town with her own project, with a five piece band that includes her partner and Italian multi-instrumentalist with a worldly vantage point Francesco Turrisi, at Campbell Hall on April 23, 2024, promoting her robust new Nonesuch album You’re the One. All told, this is a year when we in the region are afforded the chance to catch Giddens and her many and expanding incarnations and socio-historic dimensions.

The North Carolina-born Giddens spoke to the Independent via Zoom from her current home in Limerick, Ireland, where she is raising two children. She paused to instruct them about the availability of her handmade peanut butter and other food. As she explained, “I make peanut butter and it’s nothing but peanuts. It’s so tasty. I haven’t bought peanut butter in years.”

Somehow, this admission is not surprising.

You are headed to Santa Barbara twice this season and just appeared wearing different hats as director of the Ojai Music Festival. It seems you and this area code enjoy a kind of simpatico. Some places just work well. It’s not everywhere, but you find a community and an audience that seems to be really there for you, and what you do. There are markets that are that way, where we know it’s gonna be a great show and it’s gonna sell. And, and then there are places that could be one or two hours away that are just okay (laughs).

Also, you are becoming an ever more complicated person — I mean as a musician working in multiple directions. I’m not talking about your “person” now. Well, that’s complicated too (laughs).

From another international angle, I also caught you at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy in July. There must be an entirely different resonance when you play in Italy with Francesco, a situation in which you are an outsider. Does it feel that way? I love it. That was quite an intense tour for him because these are places — including Umbria and Spoleto — that would be dream places for him as an Italian musician to play, and to play those big stages. We did “Vedrai Vedrai” for our encore, which we have done in the States a couple times, but not often because it is just such a specific Italian song. Some Italian songs translate, some don’t. I think people hear it and they enjoy it, but to sing something so culturally relevant in a different country, in a different language, I’m channeling it, in a way.

This is very connected to the work I do at Silkroad. It comes to the heart of (the question) “what is communication?” Nobody should not be allowed to do anything, really. I’m singing an extremely Italian song in Italian, not as a native Italian speaker or even a fluent one but have managed to do it in a way that touched Italian people. I think that is essential in any kind of discussion about cultural collaboration and the conversation that you have with somebody from a different culture, which is what Silkroad is all about.

Your role as director of Silkroad seems like such a natural fit given your own explorations of cultural linkages and historical backdrops within music. How was that connection made? There’s no world where I would’ve said yes to Silkroad without having met Francesco first. I had already known Francesco for a few years at that point. He connected me to the rest of the world, whereas I’ve been really sunk into American music, particularly Southern American music, and particularly banjo music and the history surrounding that. He helped me situate that within a global context, and also my connections to the Irish and Scottish world through different people — and learning that our idea of race is not constant. It is ever- changing and is completely made up.

Through Francesco, I began learning about the idea of what he’s been trying to do for the music of the Mediterranean, acknowledging the North African and Middle Eastern elements that then came up into Europe and totally transformed European music and culture. But that never really gets talked about. When you say Arabic numerals, people start freaking out and they don’t realize that they already are Arabic numerals because they came from the Arabic world.

This really took me out of America. He started playing all this music for me, and I started seeing all the connections. You start realizing that the banjo is just a lute in a large family of lutes, going back all the way back to China. You see the connections. It’s basically just people moving from one place to the other, bringing their instruments and affecting and being affected by what they find when they get to the other side of where they’re traveling. That’s really the human experience. Even though it’s done in different ways and in different places and different languages and different music, the experience is actually very, very similar. Oppressed people are oppressed in similar ways everywhere.

In Italian society, Sicilians are at the bottom. Sicily wasn’t even considered a part of Italy. They were considered more like Negroes and more like Africans than Italian people. He was like telling me about Maqams and Arabic music, which just uses different systems of tunings.

After having been exposed to all of that, Kathy Fletcher, the executive director of Silkroad at the time, asked me about coming on as artistic director. I was intrigued because of the work that Silkroad has done. I had worked with Silk Road before on a recording, and I was really impressed with the people and the whole idea behind it. I’m just insatiably curious and I thought, “well, with Francesco by my side, I feel like I know enough to know how much I don’t know.” It’s important to know how vast the knowledge is (laughs), so I can get more information.

I want to continue building on what Silkroad has already done, which is to create this notion of when strangers meet. That was the original tagline when (Silkroad founder) Yo-Yo Ma was involved. And I want to expand that into new realms, and ask “what does it mean to have a cultural conversation with somebody?”

Once aboard, what was the path to the ambitious new “American Railroad” project? “American Railroad” is my first idea for the group. I wanted to connect Silkroad to America. America has this idea that we’re exceptional and we’re unique. But the idea of “America versus the world” was actually the world in America. That’s how we were created. The railroad creates this framework to then also connect that story to indigenous populations who are always here and who are affected in huge ways by the railroad. You have people who built the railroad, people who are affected by the railroad, and all these people are poor. They’re all working class people, people who don’t have the resources.

They don’t have the money, they don’t have the power, and that’s where so much of America’s cultural capital has come from — the underclass. People are coming from all over the world, joining that group of people speaking hundreds of different languages, having different religions, different cultural ways of being, but bringing themselves. They have the music of their culture and the art of their culture. It’s kind of like this way of centering people who are not often centered.

There are multiple generations of Chinese people in California. That’s the American story. African Americans, laboring in an extension of slavery through the convict labor system to build the railroads in the eastern part of the US — that’s the American story. The railroads going through the lands of the Lakota and the destruction of the buffalo, that’s the American story. The Irish who have been pushed off of their land by famine because of colonization, who are then thrown away basically in these terrible work conditions on the railroads in the eastern northeastern part of the country.

All of these are the American story, but that’s never the American story that we hear right. Using music to explore what that means emotionally, what that means, is what we’re doing.

There remains the question of whether music can affect social change. That’s a debatable situation, but music can affect social awareness. Is this project an extension of that impulse for you? It is, because we have so much division in this country. We always have, but it’s really present right now. It’s really on the surface. People are not afraid to say really terrible things about other people. I really feel like that is a job of art. What we do with art is we come together because we have this, as much as we have this incurable need to kill people as a species, obviously — because that’s what we’ve done. We commit genocide over and over again for thousands of years. But we also have this insatiable desire to create.

We love to mix stuff up. We love “oh, I’m doing this thing. You’re doing that thing. Ooh, let’s put it together.” It’s usually the powers that be who say “oh, I don’t want these two people actually talking, because that means that they might compare notes, which means they might realize that I’m the one that they should be fighting” (laughs).

Music has always been under threat for that reason, particularly in America, with the idea of the segregation of American music. That’s part of this larger plan of making sure that people stay separated, even if they had created this music together. String band music, old-time music was a co-creation. It was a creation of different cultures, African and European, but then it’s separated into white culture because all of these things go towards that. We always have to be pushing against that with what we, the stories that we choose to tell as artists.

The inherent categorization in music forces us or asks us very aggressively to put certain things in certain boxes. For instance, Silkroad is often considered to be in the box of “world music,” a very dubious and ethnocentric term in itself. Yeah. It’s one, one category out of hundreds at the Grammys. Like, you’ve got best R&B performance (laughs) at a festival in a cavern at 4 a.m., right? And then you have “Global Music.” It used to be called “World Music,” and now it’s “Global.” That was the big change. What progress.

But your involvement proves the folly of that phrase. For one thing, America is such an innately multicultural place. Does that go into your thinking about how to interact with Silkroad and are working to shift its focus? Well, this is my tenure. That’s the whole point about changing our artistic director. I’m bringing what I bring, which is America-centered, but what’s within America? And for me, like with the history that I do, all I see is immigration. I’m thinking always about people who are, who are all already there. I forget that the primary narrative is this idea of English people came to the Mayflower in Jamestown and all else is kind of tangential to that.

Most of the Silkroad people live in America at this point. So I thought it was really important that part of the “American Railroad” initiative was also education for ourselves, as well as going into schools. We had deep retreats. We went to the Standing Rock reservation, we went to San Francisco, we went to New York with historians talking about this.

I have my own baggage for my own country but it’s important that we all understand what we’re all going through — in both directions. We’ve engaged with some of the stories from across the pond, and now the feeling is to engage with some of the stories in America and see how similar they are. It’s like, say, same thing, different dictator. There are only so many ways to oppress people. It just gets repeated over and over again.

You see that with people talking about what’s happening in Israel and Palestine right now. They don’t know the history, not only the 70 years since the creation of Israel, but the 7,000 years of the history of Jewish people in Europe, but also the history of Islam. People just think about what’s happened in the last 10 years. That’s a really good example of the fact that the more you know the history, the more you understand how complicated it is.

But we are still obsessed with current events. We tend to not think about what led to this point or how it’s just repeating something that’s been going on for millennia. And that’s why our schools are under attack. That’s why classes are under attack, because people know that’s where power is. Knowing the history of these things and seeing the injustice so that you wanna do something about it. It’s not about being woke, it’s about being educated. It’s about just knowing your own history. But that’s threatening.

What we’re trying to do is to sneak it in, saying “here’s a concert” (laughs).

You are sneaky, in the best way (laughs). Considering all that you’ve done and evermore ambitious endeavors — including your opera Omar, leading festivals and more – -you have turned into a kind of virtuoso multitasker. Do you see yourself that way? Yeah, a little too much sometimes. I’ve hit a few walls this year. My spirit is bigger. My spirit of desire to do things is bigger than my body can handle at the moment (laughs). But I tend to know who to collaborate with and that’s why I’ve been able to do what I’ve been able to do. I find the folks to work with, to provide what I don’t have so that I can do the things that I do have really well.

I love collaborating, but I have taken on a bit too much at this point, but I’m maintaining now and learning to say “no.” I don’t wanna ever get to the point where I’m not giving all that I have to something because I’m too busy. So I’m trying to give it a little halt there.

To find balance?

Yeah. I have two kids, you know.

You’ve gotta’ make peanut butter, too.

I’ve gotta make peanut butter (laughs).

For more information and to purchase tickets, see artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/events-tickets/events/23-24/american-railroad.