Music / blues
Review: Rihannon Giddens, Colston Hall
Some may know Rihannon Giddens for being the founder of the band Carolina Chocolate Drops, some may have fallen in love with her voice in The New Basement Tapes, and others may have seen her make an appearance on the TV series Nashville. Giddens is one of the most eclectic musicians that I have ever encountered. She is a graduated opera singer, a multi-instrumentalist, award-winning musician who won the MacArthur Fellowship this year and will be the guest curator of the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2018.
Accompanied by a faultless band, whose members are for the majority multi-instrumentalist like her, Rihannon ranges across different styles of old-time traditional music and her own songs, which feature a great deal on her newest album, Freedom Highway. Tonight the show is a celebration of the music of the past and the story-telling traditions of North America. She craftily takes us on a journey through history, touching on subjects such as slavery, the Civil War and freedom-seeking ideals of the sixties.
is needed now More than ever
She performs At the Purchaser’s Option, a distressing story about an enslaved woman who is forced to part with her baby. The slavery theme is also found again in the delicate We Could Fly, another composition of hers which draws inspiration from an African-American tale about dreaming of freedom. Giddens also integrates in her set some gospel numbers, such as the cumulative feet-stomping Children, Go Where I send Thee, during which some of the reserved audience get a burst of energy.
Giddens continues her set with the funky Better Get it Right the First Time, on which she invites a rapper who brings a touch of modernity to her repertoire. It’s a reminder that the music from the past is still very much coherent to our time and bridging the style can result in an interesting concoction. Her performance of the traditional song Waterboy is the highlight of the evening, her voice shining powerful and strong onto an Americana background. Her last winks at inspiring female characters are the covers of Aretha Franklin’s Do Right Woman and the encore Up Above My Head, from Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a woman who brought secular and church music together.
Tonight Rihannon Giddens mesmerises the audience with her impressively varied set. Some notes are on the banjo, some on the fiddle, but her voice is the greatest of her instruments. From folk, gospel, jazz, soul and bluegrass, she has told us stories with an incredible virtuosity. Stories that we will undoubtedly not forget.
Our top newsletters emailed directly to you
