Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens – You’re the One (2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/44,1kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · September 13, 2023 · Comments off

The MacArthur-winning singer, composer, and instrumentalist’s third solo studio album and her first of all original songs; her last solo album was 2017’s critically acclaimed ‘Freedom Highway’. This collection of 12 songs written over the course of Giddens’ career bursts with life-affirming energy, drawing from the folk music that she knows so deeply, as well as its pop descendants.

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Rhiannon Giddens – Tomorrow Is My Turn (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 18, 2023 · Comments off

Stepping away from the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Rhiannon Giddens teams up with producer T-Bone Burnett for her 2015 solo debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn. Giddens previously worked with Burnett on Lost on the River, an album where musicians added new music to lyrics Bob Dylan left behind during The Basement Tapes, and she also appeared in a concert he shepherded for the Coen brothers’ folk revival opus Inside Llewyn Davis — two projects steeped in history, as is Tomorrow Is My Turn. Here, Giddens expands upon the neo-string band of the Carolina Chocolate Drops by crafting an abbreviated and fluid history of 20th century roots music — along with the older forms that informed it — concentrating on songs either written or popularized by female musicians. As a torchbearer, not a revivalist, Giddins isn’t concerned with replicating either the sound or feel of the past, so she comfortably slips a subdued hip-hop drum loop into “Black Is the Color,” a standard here credited to Nina Simone, and blurs country and soul boundaries on Patsy Cline’s “She’s Got You.” These two are the most overt tamperings with tradition but Giddens is sly throughout Tomorrow Is My Turn, giving Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree” a deceptively lively little lilt and casting Dolly Parton’s “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind” as a rolling progressive folk tune that creates an invisible bridge between past and present. Much of Giddens’ work on Tomorrow Is My Turn demonstrates the benefits of such careful, deliberate sculpting, making it a nice fit for Burnett’s handsome acoustica. Thankfully, the austereness that sometimes creeps into T-Bone’s new millennial work is nowhere to be found; there’s a warmth that radiates from Giddens, which is crucial to the success of the record. Her easy, welcoming touch is a balm every time Tomorrow Is My Turn is played, but it’s upon successive spins that the intricacies of Giddens’ construction — not to mention her subtle political messages — begin to take hold. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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Rhiannon Giddens – They’re Calling Me Home (with Francesco Turrisi) (2021) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 18, 2023 · Comments off

Rhiannon Giddens’ new album They’re Calling Me Home, recorded with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, will be released April 9 on Nonesuch Records. Giddens and Turrisi, who both live in Ireland when they aren’t on tour, have been there since March 2020 due to the pandemic. The two expats found themselves drawn to the music of their native and adoptive countries of America, Italy, and Ireland during lockdown. Exploring the emotions brought up by the moment, Giddens and Turrisi decamped to Hellfire, a small studio on a working farm outside of Dublin, to record these songs over six days. The result is They’re Calling Me Home, a twelve-track album that speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis.

They’re Calling Me Home features several traditional songs that Giddens hasn’t played for years, including some of the first old-time pieces she ever learned: “I Shall Not Be Moved,” “Black As Crow (Dearest Dear)” and “Waterbound.” The album also includes a new song Giddens wrote, “Avalon,” as well as an Italian lullaby, “Nenna Nenna,” that Turrisi used to sing to his infant daughter that took on new resonance during the lockdown.Giddens says of Alice Gerrard, the folk music pioneer, who wrote “Calling Me Home”: “Some people just know how to tap into a tradition and an emotion so deep that it sounds like a song that has always been around — Alice Gerrard is one of those rarities; ‘Calling Me Home’ struck me forcefully and deeply the first time I heard it, and every time since. This song just wanted to be sung and so I listened.”They’re Calling Me Home also includes two well known songs about death: “Amazing Grace” and “O Death.”The minstrel banjo, accordion and frame drums that have become characteristic of the pair’s sound are well represented on the album, but it’s the viola and cello banjo combination that captures unexpected emotion and intensity. Joining them at key moments are Congolese guitarist Niwel Tsumbu and Irish traditional musician Emer Mayock on flute, whistle, and pipes. Engineer Ben Rawlins was key to the shape and sound of the record while Giddens and Turrisi produced and Kim Rosen mastered.

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Rhiannon Giddens – there is no Other (with Francesco Turrisi) [Deluxe Version] (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 18, 2023 · Comments off

“It’s the diversity in America that makes the music so powerful!”. Rhiannon Giddens, Gaelic first name, white father, mother of black and Native American (Occaneechi) ancestry, embodies the melting pot that is North American culture. The coloratura soprano that delivers an impenetrable folk, soul, blues, and bluegrass voice more than an opera one, has released her third record. She was discovered by the Coen brothers (Inside Llewyn Devis alongside Elvis Costello) and has collaborated with T-Bone Burnett. She has passed by Carolina Chocolate Drops and the White House and is the author of two acclaimed solo albums and one as Our Native Daughters (with Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell and Amythyst Kiah). The forty-year-old has, indeed, already done a lot.

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Rhiannon Giddens – There is No Other (with Francesco Turrisi) (2019) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 18, 2023 · Comments off

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Rhiannon Giddens – Freedom Highway (2017) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 18, 2023 · Comments off

Grammy Award–winner and 2017 Grammy nominee, Rhiannon Giddens is a folk revivalist who knows that old stories can still have a powerful and painful relevance, and on her second solo album since leaving the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she sings about the history of America’s fight against racism, in order to warn of current dangers. Her last album was an adventurous covers set, but here she matches her own powerful compositions based on vivid, true stories from the slavery era against classic blues, and civil rights songs from the 60s.

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Rhiannon Giddens – Factory Girl (2015) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Studio Masters By admin · August 18, 2023 · Comments off

On the heels of her highly acclaimed solo debut Tomorrow Is My Turn, Rhiannon Giddens’s five-song EP Factory Girl is released on Nonesuch Records.

As with Tomorrow Is My Turn, Giddens again records traditional songs and rethinks ones written or made famous by her musical heroes Ethel Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharp. Giddens co-wrote, with her sister Lalenja Harrington and Burnett, “Moonshiner’s Daughter,” which draws inspiration from family lore about her great-grandfather, a notorious rum-runner. A traditional Gaelic mouth music tune also is featured, along with the title track, a traditional Irish song for which Giddens, deeply troubled by the 2013 factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed 1,100 workers, wrote additional lyrics.

The sessions for the album and EP took place in Los Angeles and Nashville, with a multi-generational group of players assembled by Burnett. Musicians on Factory Girl include Burnett; fiddle player Gabe Witcher and double bassist Paul Kowert of label-mates Punch Brothers; percussionist Jack Ashford of Motown’s renowned Funk Brothers; drummer Jay Bellerose; guitarist Colin Linden; veteran Nashville session bassist Dennis Crouch; and Giddens’s Carolina Chocolate Drops touring band-mates, multi-instrumentalist Hubby Jenkins and beat-boxer Adam Matta.

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