Rhiannon Giddens is on her way to Tucson this month. She’ll be taking the stage at the Rialto Theatre on Saturday, April 27, with support from Charly Lowry.
The show is another notch on the crazy ride she’s been on since releasing her 2015 solo debut “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” following her successful run with old-time string band The Carolina Chocolate Drops.
A renowned banjo player and a 2000 graduate of Oberlin College, Giddens has had quite the recent five-year run. She released two albums with creative/romantic partner Francesco Turrisi — 2019’s “There Is No Other” and 2021’s Grammy-winning “They’re Calling Me Home” — wrapped up the second of two seasons playing a gospel-singing social worker on the television drama “Nashville,” wrote a pair of children’s books (“Build a House” and “We Could Fly”), scored music for the Nashville Ballet (“Lucy Negro, Redux”) and was commissioned to write music for an opera for which she won a Pulitzer Prize for Music (2020’s “Omar”).
That doesn’t include stints hosting a podcast (“Aria Code with Rhiannon Giddens”), being named the artistic director of the cross-cultural music organization Silkroad Ensemble, overseeing a 12-part video series called “The Banjo: Music, History and Heritage” or being named the musical director of the 2023 Ojai Music Festival.
Let’s also not forget she recently released the Jack Splash-produced “You’re the One,” her first solo album since 2017’s “Freedom Highway,” and has another album, “My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall,” coming out in April. That album features contributions of several African-American vocalists, including Allison Russell and Valerie June, performing songs from Randall, a rare African-American songwriter working for four decades in country music.
If this sounds like a rather hectic pace to maintain, understand it is the North Carolina native’s modus operandi.
“I tend to work better when I’m also doing eight other things,” Giddens said. “I think I’m destined to go through life constantly stressed, but it is what it is. I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities that I’m grateful for.”
While much of Giddens’ recorded work deals in weighty subjects — ranging from the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Baptist church in Alabama that killed four little girls to the evils of slavery — the dozen songs that make up “You’re the One” allowed the musical polyglot to step back and not write about such heavy fare.
“I’ve been doing pretty heavy mission-based work for a long time with my music and I’m happy to,” Giddens said of her new album. “I think it’s my raison d’être (purpose for someone’s existence). I needed to play a little and I just needed to take a break. I definitely felt like things were getting mentally a bit tough.
“Last year was very tough — the opera took a lot out of me. The way that I write is that it’s all living in my head 24/7, which is just the way that I write. But it also means that it’s very emotionally draining all the time. There are these songs that hadn’t really fit into anything. They’re all kind of conceived of in a similar shade of mind. I was playing around with form, looking at the American Songbook and thinking about people who’ve inspired me in American musical history like Dolly Parton, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. I was just taking those inspirations and turning them into songs and just writing and putting them away. It seemed time to give them life.”
Working with Alicia Keys/Kendrick Lamar producer Splash, Giddens dove into a mix of blues, jazz, country, gospel and rock sounds during a six to seven-day November 2022 recording jag in Miami.
“In terms of the majority of all of the music that was recorded, it was made live,” Giddens said. “It was my guys and Jack Splash’s guys and it was like, ‘Here’s a song. Let’s listen to the demo and now let’s go cut it.’ It was kind of old-fashioned, with many of these musicians never having met each other before.
“A record like this, for my tastes, had to be made that way because it would sound like an exercise otherwise. It would sound a bit fake and I’m not doing that. It’s about how the musicians respond to each other and that’s what’s going to make it work and I think that’s what happened.”
For folks looking to see how this sounds live, Giddens says to expect more of that spontaneity and juicy musical interplay in her shows.
“I’m going to be doing most of the songs on the record and everyone on the stage, with the exception of one musician, was all on the record, which is always a great thing,” she said. “We’ll also be doing some of the older stuff from my previous records. It’s a big band — there are six people on stage who are all incredible musicians. It’s just the kind of a tour that I’ve been dreaming of.”
As for Giddens’ other pursuits and accomplishments, being a children’s author whose influences include Virginia Hamilton, Robin McKinley and Shel Silverstein, ranked rather high for her.
“That was a pivot that came about during the pandemic,” she said. “I always wanted to write kids’ books. The third one that I’m working on now is the first one that is going to be all-original. The other two were based on songs. I’m just very proud to have added to that canon.”
Then there’s the small situation of landing a Pulitzer Prize for Music for composing an opera based on the Arabic language autobiography of Omar Ibn Said. The highly literate Muslim cleric was enslaved and brought over to the United States in the early 1800s, during which time he died in bondage, but not before penning his memoirs.
“The Spoleto Festival USA approached me about it and asked if I’d ever heard of Omar Ibn Said and I said no,” Giddens said. “They told me a story about him being brought to South Carolina as a slave and they asked if I’d be interested in writing an opera about it and I agreed. And then I thought, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?’ But yeah, it was an amazing experience.
“I’m not sure it’s one I want to repeat, but it got delayed a few years by the pandemic, which only made it better to give us a little extra breathing room to finish the things we needed to. I worked with Michael Abels on that, who is a fantastic composer and film scorer. The timing of it was weird because I had been working on it for three years before the pandemic hit. I was almost done with it and it’s not like it was a pandemic project. Maybe it would have been better, but I doubt it.”
Having replaced founder Yo-Yo Ma as the artistic director of the Silkroad Ensemble, Giddens is eager to get back to her nose-to-the-grindstone ways.
“We have a big initiative called The American Railroad, which is looking at the building of the transcontinental railroad from the viewpoint of the people who built it and the people that were most disrupted by it rather than the people who benefited most from it,” she said, “People like the Chinese and African-American workers along with the indigenous groups whose land was confiscated so the railroad could go through it. You know, light, fluffy stuff.”
Rhiannon Giddens Concert
WHEN: 8 p.m., Saturday, April 27
WHERE: Rialto Theatre, 318 E. Congress Street, Tucson
COST: $33.50 to $81
INFO: www.rialtotheatre.com
