Rhiannon Giddens

The prodigiously talented Rhiannon Giddens returns to the NCMA in a remarkable collaboration with acclaimed Italian pianist and percussionist Francesco Turrisi. The unlikely partnership was sparked by a chance meeting between the two musicians in Ireland, where they discovered that early American banjo and Sicilian tamburello (tambourine) rhythms are surprisingly compatible. Their performance will span multiple musical genres, including gospel, jazz, blues, country and folk.

Giddens is a North Carolina and national treasure; NPR recently named her one of the 25 most influential women musicians of the 21st century. A founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, she’s undertaken a breathtaking array of creative endeavors: songwriting, acting, scoring an original ballet, and producing the podcast Aria Codewith the Metropolitan Opera and WQXR (Giddens was trained in opera at the Oberlin College Observatory). It’s of little wonder she was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017.