Tag archives: Rhiannon Giddens

If the Music Academy’s eight-week summer festival (see separate feature) is the main course on the current classical calendar, the equally venerable Ojai Music Festival is a savory and sumptuous appetizer as the already contemporary boundary-pushing fest takes a further step afield with the highly-decorated roots music superstar Rhiannon Giddens as 2023’s musical director and […]

It’s doubtful we’ll hear Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style,” which Rhiannon Giddens covered so memorably a decade ago as part of a genre-busting, talent-bursting display by her then-band The Carolina Chocolate Drops, the Grammy Award-winning outfit that blended acoustic instruments with a decidedly modern approach. Indeed, Giddens, an operatically trained singer, songwriter, fiddler and […]

Planning for future events in the face of the pandemic continues to be a major challenge for all arts organizations. Some have chosen to sit out the upcoming 2020-21 season (among them Camerata Pacifica) while others are cautiously rejiggering their bookings in hopes of being able to stage socially distanced performances after the first of […]