Southern Fried, Punch Brothers/Rhiannon Giddens, Perth Concert Hall
Rob Adams
FIVE STARS
The word doing the rounds was that this year’s Southern Fried festival lacked big name attractions yet this Nonesuch Records package drew close to a full house to the 1200-capacity concert hall and either one of the acts involved would have merited headlining status.
Carolina Chocolate Drops singer Rhiannon Giddens is fast creating a solo career that’s eclipsing her band. A stage-commanding figure who applies her opera training in a similar way to her forebear, Odetta, in projecting music with honesty and majesty, Giddens took her superb musicians and the audience on an American roots music tour, incorporating such diverse aspects of North Carolinan culture as Gaelic mouth music and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which developed from the funkiest melodica solo you’re ever likely to hear from cellist Malcolm Parsons.
Her whole set, including Patsy Cline country, Jean Ritchie Appalachian folk and Sister Rosetta Tharpe tear-up gospel, was sensational and delivered with great warmth and disarmingly friendly authority. In a healthier music industry she’d be massive and she might yet become so.
Persistent sound problems threatened to sabotage Punch Brothers’ set but if the quintet has taken bluegrass’ standard instrumentation of mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar and double bass way beyond its natural heartland, it hasn’t forgotten the virtues of performing traditional style, grouped round one mic, if the need arises. Sublimely orchestrated musicianship, be it on Familiarity’s ultra-sophisticated pop or Debussy’s Passepied, and wonderfully dovetailing vocal harmonies that can run the gamut from choirboy sweetness and near silence to thigh slappin’ beer cellar raucousness flowed despite the distractions, and the individual instrumental breaks were breath-taking in their fluent, inventive musicality.
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