OJAI MUSICFESTIVAL 0608 –0611 2023

encountering a playlist you never knew existed — and falling in love with all of it.”

The festival’s opening concert is titled, appropriately, Liquid Borders, featuring a work by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz performed by the red fish blue fish percussion ensemble, and the Attacca Quartet playing works by Haydn, John Adams, Flying Lotus, Philip Glass, Kayhan Kalhor, and Giddens herself.

After graduating from college, still active in North Carolina’s contra dance scene, she heard old-time Black music in Greensboro, and delved into scholarly study of the banjo. Contrary to popular opinion, she learned, the banjo is not an instrument with roots in “mythical white mountaineer history.”

“It was an African American instrument,” she says. “Why don’t we know that? Answering that has been driving me for the last 15 years.”

by KAREN LINDELL

Liquid borders — musical ones — are what Giddens hopes to explore at this year’s festival. “Borders are not hard; they’re always soft,” she says. “When you look at the spectrum of color, there are no walls, no place where blue stops being blue and green starts being green. There’s this constant gradation, and that’s what music is. All these things blend into each other because of movements of people and histories of countries.”

She doesn’t fuse or “smash” together seemingly disparate musical styles. Instead, she layers them on top of each other to

As Giddens said in a 2017 keynote speech at the IBMA (International Bluegrass Music Association) Conference about the history of not only the banjo, but also bluegrass music: “We need to move beyond the narratives we’ve inherited, beyond generalizations that bluegrass is mostly derived from a Scots-Irish tradition, with ‘influences’ from Africa. It is actually a complex Creole music that comes from multiple cultures, African and European and Native — the full truth that is so much more interesting, and American.”

Black string bands, she says, were “a really important piece of musical history that’s almost been erased from the narrative. She describes the bands as “the jukeboxes in the 1800s,” playing especially for dances.

In 2005, while steeped in learning about Black old-time music, she attended the Black Banjo Gathering at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, to hear fiddler Joe Thompson perform. Thompson, in his late 80s, was the last in the line of a family of African American string players from North Carolina going back to Frank Thompson, a popular Black fiddler in the 1800s.

(Giddens discusses both Thompsons in Black Roots, a podcast series for BBC Radio 4 in which she explores the history of African American roots music.)

There, she met her future Carolina Chocolate Drops co-founders: violinist Justin Robinson and multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons. Thompson became the group’s mentor and teacher before he died in 2012.

“Jane Austen led me to Joe Thompson,” Giddens says. She now tells young music students: “You have to live and do things that are not related to your classical training. That is what might lead you to a thing you didn’t know you were going to be interested in.”

The Carolina Chocolate Drops went on to perform on the Grand Ole Opry, open for Bob Dylan, and win a Grammy.

Giddens became known as a solo artist in 2013 when she performed at a folk concert in New York inspired by the film Inside Llewyn Davis and produced by T Bone Burnett. She held her own in a lineup that also included Joan Baez, Patti Smith, and Gillian Welch when she sang the American folk song “Waterboy” along with Gaelic music. Burnett then produced her debut solo album, “Tomorrow Is My Turn,” a mix of folk, gospel, blues, and country (although Giddens hates labeling music with such terms).

Cross-cultural collaboration

Giddens is not a newcomer to the Ojai Music Festival. Audiences who attended the festival in 2021, with John Adams as music director, might remember her playing the banjo and singing with the Attacca Quartet, including a performance of one of her own songs, “At the Purchaser’s Option.” The haunting ballad was inspired by a historical flyer Giddens saw that advertised an enslaved woman for sale, with her 9-month-old baby included “at the purchaser’s option.”

Guzelimian invited Giddens to be the 2023 music director at the 2021 festival when he realized they were kindred musical spirits.

“We talked about what ‘classical’ music means when you look at the term outside European or Western cultures,” Guzelimian says.

Among the musicians performing in 2023 are Wu Man on pipa, also called a Chinese flute; Kalhor on kamancheh, a Persian bowed instrument; Seckou Keita on kora, a West African stringed instrument; former Carolina Chocolate Drops member Justin Robinson on fiddle; and Silkroad Ensemble members playing various instruments.

“Cross-cultural collaborations are important because they really show us how similar we are,” Giddens says. “Especially if you don’t share a language, (with music) you immediately find points of connection to communicate.”

She’ll also perform an intimate acoustic concert at the festival with Turrisi; another boundary crosser, he is a native Italian who moved to Ireland and plays multiple instruments.

“We’ve been messing with boundaries and borders of genres,” Giddens says. “Maybe we’ll do a 17th century Italian classical song next to a ‘60s pop song that would have been on radio, but with voice and piano. Hopefully the people in the audience won’t know where either one came from, and won’t care.”

An enslaved man’s journey

One of the highlights at the festival will be the world premiere of Omar’s Journey, a chamber work based on the full opera Omar by Giddens and Michael Abels, known for creating the film scores for Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us, and Nope. Omar premiered at the Spoleto Festival in South Carolina in 2022, and was performed by the LA Opera in fall 2022.

Omar’s Journey, written for singers and a small ensemble of musicians, will be framed by music from Senegal and the Carolinas that the opera’s real-life title character might have heard during his lifetime.

The opera tells the story of Omar ibn Said, an enslaved man born in the Futa Toro region of West Africa, now along the border of modern-day Senegal. In 1807, at age 37, he was taken from West Africa to Charleston, South Carolina, and sold to a cruel owner. He ran away to North Carolina, was caught and imprisoned, then lived with another slave owner.

In 1831, Omar, a Muslim, wrote an autobiography in Arabic, his native language. The short, 15-page memoir was later translated, and is described by the Library of Congress as “the only known extant autobiography” of an enslaved person “written in Arabic in America.” Omar’s writing reveals that he was not only literate, but a scholar of the Quran, and a man of deep faith who held on to that faith even though he converted to Christianity in the U.S.

The Spoleto Festival USA commissioned Giddens to write the opera, even though the singer until then had not heard of Omar.

The memoir’s brevity could have been a liability, she says, “but it was a freedom, too” because it allowed her to add new elements that might not have been historical facts, but captured the spirit of the time and his story.

“I tried to stay true to all the things I read in his autobiography, what he quoted from the Quran, phrases he wrote that I contextualized,” she says. “The central narrative is really about his faith.”

At one point in the opera, when Omar escapes from South Carolina, he meets a fictional woman, Julie, who helps lead him to North Carolina. When Omar sees Julie again, he asks her why she helped him. In “Julie’s Aria” (Rhiannon will sing the part of Julie in Ojai), we learn that Julie recognized Omar as a Muslim, like her own father: “My daddy wore a cap like yours.”

The aria reminds listeners of colors, and hearts, that bleed into one:

No matter what they say

Our hearts beat red

Just like theirs

For more information about the Ojai Music Festival or Rhiannon Giddens, visit ojaifestival.org or rhiannongiddens.com.

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