Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi
March 21, 2019
Knoxville, TN @ Visit Knoxville - Big Ears Festival - 12am

Shure MV88 > iPhone 7 > Motiv Audio App > WAV > Cool Edit Pro (amplified) > FLAC
Recorded by Mr. Mountjoy

01. 20:25
02. 19:07

Notes: Beware, the applause between songs is very loud on this recording.
This set was recorded and broadcast live on WDVX Blue Plate Special radio show.

Rhiannon Giddens� career has been built on a sense of surprise and revelation, her music telling you something new that you feel you should have known all along. For many people, her Carolina Chocolate Drops exposed the deep African-American roots that run beneath much of what has simply been reduced as �Americana.� And her solo albums have shown the ways those same traditions can connect to Broadway and the blues, rock �n� roll and royal concert halls.

Her latest collaboration with borderless Italian percussionist and pianist Francesco Turrisi is no different. Together, they explore the hidden rhythmic and melodic connections between the music of Southern Italy (Turrisi�s ancestral land) and early American banjo idioms. As he plays a frame drum called the tamburello, she picks an enormous fretless banjo from the 1860s. A spiritual callback to those salad days of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, their chemistry is easy and humble, their lessons again revelatory.