Rhiannon Giddens added to Jazz Festival line-up

American singer Rhiannon Giddens will perform work by three African-American composers at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival.

Rhiannon Giddens is one of those extraordinary musicians who can wear any number of musical hats. Trained as an opera singer, she’s band leader of Grammy-winning string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops in which she plays banjo and fiddle as well as singing. Nine months of the year is spent on worldwide tour with that band, with her Irish husband and two young children at her side.

Giddens has a sideline in Scottish mouth music with which she recently stole the show in a packed Manhattan Town Hall in New York. The star-studded benefit concert was produced by the Coen Brothers and featured Joan Baez, Patti Smith and Elvis Costello, among many others. At the end of her set she received the only standing ovation of the evening.

Classical music, however, remains close to Giddens’s heart. “It’s beautiful, with the most amazing melodies. I trained for quite a long time so there is part of me that just enjoys using those skills, there’s a thrill singing without a microphone and filling a hall with just your voice. There’s not much in popular music that equals that.”

Giddens comes to Cork at the invitation of Cork Orchestral Society to perform songs by three African-American composers.

Giddens first came across Margaret Bonds in a Women & Music class at the Oberlin Conservatory. “There are so few African-American composers and so of course the fact that she was also a woman really struck me. But when I heard the music I really loved it. She had an effortless way of setting the poetry.”

John Carter is perhaps even less known. “His output wasn’t very large, but his music is really incredible. For this cantata he took really well-known spirituals and really put a twist on them, taking them to another level. He lifted them to another dimension.”

Giddens came across Will Marion Cook in her research. “One of my passions is filling in the holes in African-American music and there is a huge hole between the spirituals and work songs on one hand, and blues and jazz on the other. There’s a lot in between that doesn’t really get talked about.”

Cook, a violinist and composer, studied at the Berlin Hochschule fur Musik, and with Dvorák and John White at the National Conservatory of Music in the US in the late 19th century.

“He had been involved with the revolution of African-American theatre, taking scenes from minstrel songs but still working within the construct of blackface. When he returned from studying in Europe he wanted to take black music and see how far he could push it.

“He wrote some beautiful things but they are kept in dusty books and rarely performed, partly due to dialect issues. He was a really great composer though and worked with great people.

“I think it’s important to be shedding a light on that period in history, I think people will respond. A lot of the jazzers of the 1920s considered Cook a mentor, there’s a line that leads through him straight to jazz and he’s an important part of its history.”

Giddens will perform the Will Marion Cook pieces with the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra in March 2014. “I’m really looking forward to that,” she says. As for opera, Giddens says: “The world of opera and being a bandleader are kind of incompatible from a time point of view but I keep practising and it’s not to say that I wouldn’t consider opportunities.”

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