Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi

Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi recorded an album last summer, produced by Joe Henry.

They are currently touring in Ireland and have given some info for this record in a few interviews.

Photo : Karen Cox

The duo have a forthcoming album, recorded with Joe Henry at Windmill Lane, and it is a musical voyage of discovery from Africa and the Middle East across to Europe and the Americas. They discovered a shared creative ground after their paths crossed a few years back, spanning gospel, jazz, blues, country and folk, but this is their first nationwide tour of Ireland.(source)

What we can expect from this voyage we can read in another interview. In this interview they speak about the current tour.

"We’ll play an Appalachian ballad with an Iranian frame drum normally used by Sufis for trance,” Turrisi says, “but you know, there’s almost a trance element to the ballad singing and the resonance of the large frame drum gives a kind of a drone effect. And we have a minstrel tune on the banjo with a Sicilian tamburello [an Italian tambourine]. And an old time American tune connected to a Brazilian forró sound. They seem to go hand in hand: we’ve discovered improbable connections that somehow work.”

further on in the interview Rhiannon explains :

I’m discovering so much about how invisible, othered and dismissed the Islamic world is, in terms of the massive effects it had on European music and culture,” Rhiannon continues. “For example, the massive impact it had on the African continent, the number of Muslim enslaved people there were in the Americas: way more than people think. It’s a really huge topic and we’re barely scratching the surface. But even having some of the rhythms and modes that Francesco has been working on through his music for so long match up so well. The way that both of us approach music is very similar because we’re both very educated about where the music is coming from. But when it comes to playing, we’re both just playing what we feel.

The interview for the Irish Times announces 'an' album for the coming month of May.
I must admit.
I'm intrigued by all of this, and looking forward to it.

Greetings,
Stefan.