I REMEMBER the first time I was blown away by Rhiannon Giddens. It was December 31 2015 and Jools Holland’s Hootenanny was on TV.
Rhiannon sang a temendous version of Waterboy and then St James Infirmary (with Tom Jones) and finally the 1949 Gospel song Up Above My Head and I thought, wow.
Then I heard her albums, which ranged from a 13th century Sephardic song, the gorgeous A La Una, Yo Nací, to black American spirituals and even some Scottish Gaelic mouth music.
“My God, this woman can sing anything,” I thought.
Francesco Turrisi is an Italian who has been living and making and composing music in Dublin since 2006. The first time I became aware of Francesco was when he and others formed the group Tarab who gave my concert of the year in the Crescent Arts Centre six or seven years ago, six consummate musicians mixing the various musics of the Mediterranean with the music and song of Ireland. (Tarab is a difficult-to-translate Arabic word meaning something like the ecstacy you feel when listening to great music.)
The good news is that Giddens and Turrisi have got together to tour with a show that, to me, is fascinating because of its utter unpredictablity. So how did the unconventional musical partnership arise, I ask Francesco during a phone call to his Dublin home.
“Well, I had heard Rhiannon’s work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops and I thought, as someone interested in jazz, that it was very interesting how they spoke of the contribution of black musicians to the string band repertoire," he says.
“I had been researching musical connections within the Mediterranean, from north Africa to Italy and elsewhere, and I knew that she had done the same with early African-American music and its connections with Africa, and I thought it would make a very interesting project for the both of us to work together. So I got her email address and sent information about myself, and I told her I’d be very curious to see if there were any points of contact between what she was doing and what I was doing. I don’t think anyone had ever done anything like it before."
That was four years ago but neither had the time to bring the project to fruition, until last year when the pair cleared the decks to look seriously at what they could bring together. Research has always been a large part of what they did individually and now they were able to come up with some new musical relationships.
“One of these was the connection between the early banjo and the southern Italian tambourine,” Francesco explains. “I wasn’t aware of this but in 19th century African-American bands, the tambourine was commonly featured. Rhiannon showed me some pictures and the way they held the tambourine was exactly the same way they hold it in southern Italy. That is not true for all the tambourine styles you find in America.
“That led us to do a little bit of research – which we are still doing – but we think that the Italian tambourine style of playing probably went first to London in the 19th century, became a trend and then got exported to America where it became popular among black musicians.”
Francesco’s own journey is equally convoluted. Although his parents were from Sicily, they moved north to Turin where he grew up and, as there wasn’t a tradition of music in the family, Francesco came to music “a little bit by myself”.
He also came late to traditional music as he left Italy to study jazz at the Conservatory in The Hague in Holland when he was 19. (I should say at this point that Francesco is a fabulous jazz pianist and composer. All that Jazz has called him “an individual voice on the jazz scene” and I’d highly recommend you look him up on soundcloud.com).
But back to the trad…
“Like many people, you discover where you’re from when you leave the place,” he rightly says and he started learning about folk music back in Italy and learning various folk instruments. But, Francesco being Francesco, he expanded his vision to the music of the whole Mediterranean area and then further afield to the music of Iran and the Middle East and so on.
“What Rhiannon and I are trying to say is that we are all connected. Humankind shares a lot of experiences, we possess the same set of emotions and those same emotions are expressed in music or in song so it is not surprising that people across the world find resonances on hearing different types of music that might be separated by thousands of miles and/or by two or three centuries or more and played on exotic instruments,” he says.
Francesco worked with Connemara sean-nós singer Róisín Elsafty on the stunningly beautiful Eileanóir a Rúin, and he admits to having been scared at the beginning.
"To me, sean-nós singing with all its beautiful ornamentation, seemed almost like a sacred music,” he recalls. “But I found a way of putting sounds around it without taking away from the essence and that’s the way I approach things.”
And if that isn’t intriguing enough, Rhiannon and Francesco supplied the soundtrack to a ballet, Lucy Negro Redux which is based on a book of poetry by Caroline Randall Williams which suggests that Shakespeare’s 'Dark Lady' was in fact a black woman.
However, for the sold-out Moving On Music show at the Black Box on March 15, it’s best to expect the unexpected.
“We’ve been touring as a duet for a while now and we’ve recorded an album that will be coming out in May but for the live show you can expect an Appalachian ballad, you could hear a 19th century banjo tune, or you could hear a 20th century opera aria arranged for voice and piano," Francesco says.
“Another thing is that Rhiannon likes to tell the stories behind the tunes so there is a lot of interesting information there as well."
Sounds like my kind of gig.
