SOUNDTRACK: RHIANNON GIDDENS-Tiny Desk Concert #891 (September 16, 2019).
I have been aware of Rhiannon Giddens for some time. I knew she played the banjo, but I didn’t know much else about her. I saw her (as part of an ensemble) at the Newport Folk Festival.
For some reason I was sure that she had performed a Tiny Desk Concert before, but evidently not. Maybe I watched this when it came out? That doesn’t seem right either.
So I’ll stop thinking about it and write about this Tiny Desk Concert instead.
There is an intensity to Rhiannon Giddens I could feel from the moment she arrived at the Tiny Desk, and her songs reflect that spirit.
Giddens is a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops (and Our Native Daughters, who played at Newport), an old-timey string band. But for this Tiny Desk Concert, she is accompanied by upright bass (Jason Sypher) and a whole bunch of other instruments played by Francesco Turrisi.
Giddens and Turrisi had recently collaborated on an album which World Cafe Live describes:
While Rhiannon’s work has focused on the influence of African traditions on what we think of as American music, Francesco is an expert in the often unacknowledged influence of Arabic and Middle Eastern music on what we think of as European sound. They found common ground in their quest to dispel false cultural narratives and turned it into gorgeous music on a new collaborative album called there is no Other.
For the first song, Turrisi plays banjo (although this one looks different from a typical banjo) while Giddens sings and Sypher adds deep slow resonating bass notes.
“Ten Thousand Voices,” the first song in the set, was inspired by Rhiannon reading about the sub-Saharan slave trade.
The combination of Giddens’ lyrics with Turrisi’s middle-eastern sounding banjo is wonderfully compelling.
She explains that the second song, “At the Purchaser’s Option”
was inspired by the American slave trade and a New England newspaper ad in the late 1700s of a young woman “for sale” and her 9-month old baby who was “at the purchaser’s option.” Rhiannon Giddens’ thoughts of this young woman and how her life and her child were not under her control.
That is a pretty intense introduction and inspiration for a song.
Despite its weightiness, Rhiannon Giddens’ music is entertaining, and her voice, the melodies, and her accompaniment are engaging. But it is music infused with lessons and deep purpose — something all too rare in popular music in my opinion.
Turrisi switches to piano which really changes the texture of the music. Sypher plucks the strings on this songs which gives it a bit more of a “song” feel than a “composition” feel. The chorus is also memorable both for the melody and the powerful lyrics.
My favorite track is the third one, “I’m On My Way.”
Rhiannon picks up a replica of an 1858 banjo for “I’m On My Way,” which she says helps her access her ancestors. “So much beauty and so much horribleness wrapped up together seems to be our story,” she says.
While Turrisi is certainly an excellent banjo player, it’s great to hear Giddens play as well. Especially this fascinating fretless banjo. Turrisi plays the frame drum–different from an Irish bodhran in that it seems to have snares in it. The plucked bass along with the addition of percussion and the great banjo melody are just fantastic. When Sypher switches to bowing, for a solo, it adds a whole new dimension–especially when he slides all the way up the neck to get the highest note possible.
T final song is the gospel tune, “He Will See You Through.” Giddens puts down the banjo again (awww).
For her closing number, she focuses on the beauty. “You can call it whatever you want, ‘gravity,’ ‘God,’ whatever. There’s a force that I believe in, and that’s what I focus on.”
[READ: July 3, 2019] “Stuart”
I love the way that this story unfolded. It begins in one location and moves only a few blocks by the end. But the kicker is that it starts with one character and ends with someone else. It read kind of like an early David Foster Wallace story.
The story opens by telling us about two Greek immigrants working at a hot dog truck. They are described in vivid (rather unflattering) detail. While they get their food ready, three teenage boys walk up. They are pretty much identical except for the color of their shirts She describes them vividly as well.
They have man-sized hands sprouting from elongated, spindly limbs like the extremities of flamingos, and their feet are so huge they might be prehensile. There’s nothing in the backside of their immense, baggy jeans.
They boys order hot dogs and ask for them quickly “before they fucking catch up with us, eh?”
The “they” is a gaggle of younger girls “none older than nine…indeterminable in number because they move so quickly toward these older boys, pull at their legs, crowd round them and begin twittering all at once.”
While the one boy is dealing with them, the other two run off…who knows if they will come back.
During the exchange his beer can slips to the ground. The Greek asks him to pick it up. The bot throws it into the truck’s bin which turns out to be a napkin holder. The Greek is annoyed, but shows him where the bin is by throwing the beer can toward it.
The can hits the bin and spills some of its content on a man walking by. The man gets really angry at the Greek chef and says if his phone is ruined…. but it is fine. He uses the phone to talk to a woman and tell her about this stupid Greek man. The Greek man is hurt by the bad words in part because now this woman, who he will never meet, thinks poorly of him, thereby lessening his chances of getting together with her.
He takes it out on the boy who is still standing there, demanding payment immediately. When the boy delays, the Greek man punches him in the face(!). The boy justifiably freaks out and people coming running over as the blood flows from the boy’s nose. The other two boys rush up as well and the get involved in the fray. One of the boys hits the man on the back of the head with his own beer can.
The Greek man acts like someone pulls a hair out of his head. He turns and the blue-shirted boy runs off. The blue-shirted boy realizes that a chase is on and he takes off. He also realizes that this is a going to be a longer race so he changes his pace, while the Greek man slows down from fatigue.
It is the blue shirt who first spots the final metamorphosis from the four hundred metres to the hurdles…. it’s just the elegant way he leaps them, barely breaking his stride.
The small Greek man stands no chance and he just washes as the boy flies through the air. But he doesn’t stop moving. That’s when we finally meet the title character.
And that’s when the story fails for me.
There is an epigram that says “He lies like an eyewitness” and I feel like it is appropriate for this story because I feel like everything about Stuart is false.
Stuart is an immense man. “Three hundred pounds of a man. He barely walks, this man, but waddles…he’s out of breath from the effort of crossing the road and you get the feeling he’s always out of breath.” Three hundred pounds seems small for that description. But whatever. It is when the Greek man crashes into Stuart that things get unbelievable. There’s no way some one this planted, this heavy would “go up in the air” when someone crashes into him.
Going one or two feet up in the air? No, indeed not. Unless the Geek man hit him in the knees and was rising at the time, this fat man would have simply fallen down. But the fat man hits the ground hard and breaks his leg.
It’s a shame this story ended this way because otherwise it was do enjoyable–fast paced and wonderfully detailed and otherwise very believable.
This is a very early story from Zadie Smith and I love seeing the way her style changes depending on what she is writing about.
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