Review | Surveying the Rhiannon Landscape

Getting a reasonable fix on the essence of Rhiannon Giddens can be tricky business, entailing an evolving, moving target. Where does the category-seeking observer place this unique cultural phenom and American musical treasure? Is she, among other attributes, an African-Americana visionary gone wild?

The defining prospect has only become trickier in the last couple of years, between her diving into the large canvas of opera (which she studied) with her Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Omar and just recently enjoying four minutes (well, 3:53) of general public fame, playing banjo on Beyonce’s chart-topping country tune “Texas Hold ‘Em.”

One way of getting a good overview of Giddens’s musical persona is to catch her with her own band, as an enthralled and packed Arlington Theatre crowd did last week. Her thrilling and wide-ranging setlist amounted to a survey of the Giddens story so far, calling up tunes new and old — and older, dipping into archival 19^th century material — as she wielded her signature banjo and sometimes fiddle and sang with soul and versatility.

No, there were no Beyonce covers in the mix or nods to her new operatic life (which we heard in her concert version of Omar last June as musical director of the Ojai Music Festival). Instead, we got a “story thus far” portrait of an artist deep into a rich and meaningful artistic path, with a warm and familiar vocal power alongside a deep commitment to social issues.

This thrilling night was her second Santa Barbara appearance this season hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures, after last fall’s Silkroad Ensemble program, Giddens brought it on with her powerful and “rootsy in the right ways” band, officially part of a tour supporting her latest album You’re the One. Songs from that album included the funked-up “Hen in the Foxhouse” (dedicated to another American icon, Dolly Parton), the lustrous old school ballad “Who Are You Dreaming Of” and the chugging earthy folk-rock tune “Yet to Be,” which features Jason Isbell on the album.

Her necessarily flexible and soulful touring band included stellar multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, who produced her dazzling Freedom Highway album and appeared with Giddens at her 2018 Campbell Hall show. Other key players in the troupe were her current right-hand man (and partner in life), Francesco Turrisi on organ, accordion (his main “squeeze”), and percussion, and the rippling fine Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu, who seized the spotlight more than once. He has also been part of the Silkroad Ensemble.

Other guests in the concert’s mix included Charly Lowry, a Native American from Giddens’ home turf in North Carolina, who offered up a sweet opening set, and her rapping nephew Justin Harrington (aka Demeanor) on “Another Wasted Life,” a lament for an unjustly accused teen whose years at Riker’s Island drove him to suicide. Never one to stick strictly to an entertainment principle in her work, Giddens spoke passionately about the injustices and links to slavery in the prison-industrial complex.

In the first segment of her Arlington concert, Giddens stirred up a lighter atmosphere and spoke about the nature of dealing more directly with love songs recently (“Wrong Kind of Right,” “The Love We Almost Had”), a fairly new wrinkle in her work thus far. But soon enough, she eased into the all-important socio-historical activist side of herself as an artist, saying tongue-in-cheekily, “I know how to clear a room” (not true of course — she knows how to fill ever larger rooms).

Her frequent points of interest and indictment point to America’s dark legacies of slavery and land theft of indigenous peoples. Her commentary segued into the deceptively rolling song “We Could Fly,” about dreams of escape among West African slave populations.

Naturally, the concert also took care to capitalize on the bushels of instrumentalist talent onstage, as with Turrisi’s accordion high style on the Brazilian-fueled “Briggs Forro” and various interactions beyond lyrics.

Fittingly, Giddens wrapped up this engaging chapter in the story so far with a nod to another great American singer-instrumentalist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the gospel powerhouse and potent electric guitarist who helped pave the way for rock ‘n’ roll. In her final encore of Tharpe’s classic “Up Above My Head,” Giddens led the charge of heated gospel spirit in the room, roping the audience/congregation into collusion with call-and-response shoutouts.

Rihannon Giddens’s glorious, unfolding and laterally shifting story continues. Someone ought to write an opera about her story.