Folk music shouldn’t have stars, but Rhiannon Giddens’ illuminating charge is hard to ignore. This February, she led the brilliant Our Native Daughters project, collaborating with US musicians Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and Leyla McCalla to recover and reinstate some of the African American histories buried in folk music. Three months later comes another album of far-reaching curiosity with a solid purpose: exploring how sounds and rhythms from Africa and the Arabic world connect with the traditional music of Europe and America. Francesco Turrisi is Giddens’ collaborator this time, a Dublin-based Italian multi-instrumentalist usually working in jazz, improvisation and early music. The project could have got suffocated in impossible worthiness, but fear not – it’s wonderful.
What There Is No Other resembles is a 21st-century version of Shirley Collins and Davy Graham’s Folk Roots, New Routes, the landmark 60s folk-rock record that showed how unusual musical connections on paper could sound utterly natural in the service of song. Giddens’ instruments are the minstrel banjo, octave violin, viola and her wide-open, rangy, contralto voice, which adds succour to songs such as civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr’s Brown Baby (“As you grow up I want you to drink from the plenty cup”) and well-known traditionals such as Wayfaring Stranger, covered famously by Emmylou Harris and Johnny Cash.
Noticeably, Giddens swaps around its verses, putting the one about missing her mother upfront, leaving the father for later. She also revisits Little Margaret, a variant of one of the Child Ballads, Sweet William, which she used to sing with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Again, the female protagonist is front and centre, with agency, and Turrisi’s glorious echoing rhythms on the daf (a Middle Eastern frame drum resembling an Irish bodhrán) provide extra menacing power.
Italian ballad Pizzica di San Vito and opera aria Black Swan fit seamlessly into the mix, and for an album recorded in only five days, it wallops with impact. Giddens is going supernova, and it’s a blistering thing.
Also out this month
Nick Hart’s superb, sparse second album, Nine English Folk Songs , marrying his characterful East Anglian voice with stark viola arrangements. They let these traditionals exhale. Laura Cannell’s The Sky Untuned is another East Anglian mood-shaker, a violin-and-recorder gothic-folk-and-drone soundtrack to eerie drives across flatlands and Fens.
The Askew Sisters’ Enclosure is full of beautiful, uncanny, subtly political songs, exploring land enclosure movements, freedom and captivity, and our disconnection from the natural world.
