would have it in the bag. The two musicians released a joint album earlier this year, “there is no Other” , that puts a whole new spin on global music, or at least covers a spectrum few other singular collections have ever recorded — closing the gap between her American milieu and his Mediterranean one with lots of stylistic zig-zags into the African and Arabian worlds that already bridge them.
That’s saying something for someone who, at 42, has already made as many different recordings with as many different collaborators as Giddens has. She’s already had a Grammy in her arsenal for some time, having won best traditional folk album in 2011 for “Genuine Negro Jig,” the third album by her African-American traditional string band, the Carolina Chocolate Drops.
“When I first got in touch with Rhiannon,” said Turrisi, whose family hails from Sicily, “I wondered if all these sounds that I have would work with her sound. Because on the paper, they don’t make sense. I was fascinated by what I call early African American sounds – the fretless banjo and all these things that come from the other side of Africa, a lot of my connections come from this top side . Then we discovered that they do sound really good together.
Engineer Ryan Freeland never stopped recording; he would just creep into the room as quietly as possible to move the mics every time someone picked up a different instrument. That’s why they all say there’s not a clean beginning on the record.