Get the latest gossip
Rhiannon Giddens’ All-Star Roots Revue at the Bowl Has Steve Martin, Our Native Daughters and Others Covering the Full Banjo Spectrum, From Black Consciousness to Comedy: Concert Review
Rhiannon Giddens led a mostly Black, mostly banjo-driven night at the Hollywood Bowl that included Steve Martin and an Our Native Daughters reunion.
It’s a crusade that has been both joyful and solemn, leading to untold hours of pure picking entertainment on concert stages as well as sobering reminders of how the antecedents of the modern-day banjo arrived in America, on slave ships. Giddens did more than her part for that later on, too, in her solo-artist headline set with her riveting signature number “At the Purchaser’s Option.” But during this Native Daughters performance, the quartet had the phenomenal group co-write “We’ll Be Dancing,” which makes it clear right from the outset whose party this is: “You put the shackles on our feet, but we’re dancing.” A few numbers later, Russell was singing an emotionally raw lead vocal on the OND track that has made it into a lot of her solo shows, “Quasheba, Quasheba,” named for an enslaved person that the Canadian native found in her ancestry. But otherwise, this set was streamlined toward the bygone style recaptured in the recent album release “What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow,” which she recorded as a fiddle-and-banjo duo project with Justin Robinson, her former cohort in the groundbreaking group the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
Or read this on Variety
