At Kulttuuritalo, something very important was experienced: The top group reminded humanity of the common ground of music

Roots, folk

Rhiannon Giddens with her band at Kulttuuritalo on Tuesday 2.7.

from the United States there will be pop stars enjoying huge global popularity such as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. And then such uncompromising people who go their own way as Rhiannon Giddens.

Giddens (b. 1977), who also studied to be an opera singer, is a singer, violinist and banjoist whose music is based on folk and other traditional American music, but who has taken as a guideline the common starting points and features of the music of different cultures. This makes Giddens’ music a sum of diverse influences, but the music is not a jumble of influences but a controlled synthesis.

Giddens has been to Finland twice before, in 2013 at the Huvila tent during the Helsinki festival weeks as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops band and in 2023 at Pori Jazz. However, the Kulttuuritalo concert was his first real solo gig with us.

Concert was what one would expect from Giddens: versatile and inclined to many stylistic directions, from the bluegrass riot that raised the mood at the beginning to the end of the show Sister Rosetta Tharpen to hopeful 1950s gospel Up Above My Head.

In between there was cajun music (cajun master Canray Fontenot’n What to do), Brazilian forróa (Briggs’ Forro), a feminist spin smoothed with humor (Dolly Partonin inspired by early songs If You Don’t Know How Sweet It Is and Hen in the Foxhouse), a couple of wistful reflections on interpersonal relationships (The Love We Almost Had and Wrong Kind of Right) as well as a touch of rock and scat singing.

And Giddens didn’t forget sustainability either. Songs Come Love Come and We Could Fly dealt with slavery and Another Wasted Life a young man who spent years in prison, who committed suicide after being released.

Meeting the style of the 1930s jazz classic Who Are You Dreaming Of would have sat well, for example Ella Fitzgerald this Sarah Vaughanin software once upon a time.

Giddens’ latest album You’re the One came out last year, so naturally most of the songs in the concert, no less than seven, came from it.

All all in all, Giddens, who sang and played beautifully, and his band proved themselves to be top musicians for whom the transition from one genre and musical culture to another is both important and natural.

It was not for nothing that Giddens said a couple of times that there is a lot of expertise and skill on stage, including his spouse, originally an Italian jazz musician Francis Turris and long-term partner Dirk Powell.

Musicians like Giddens and his band are important because they remind us of the common ground of humanity’s musical heritage. That behind the fog curtain created by industrially produced pop music, there is much that is genuine, versatile and touching, and where stylistic trends mix and intersect in a fascinating way.

What Rhiannon Giddens and her band offer is, simply put, music with a capital M.

Read more: Oh boy what a band!