Rhiannon Giddens With Francesco Turrisi - There Is No Other review | Jude Rogers' folk album of the month

The Guardian 100

(Nonesuch)
Stellar folk musician joins forces with Italian multi-instrumentalist to connect African and Arabic sounds with traditional forms – it’s stunning

Folk music shouldn’t have stars, but Rhiannon Giddens’ illuminating charge is hard to ignore. This February, she led the brilliant Our Native Daughters project, collaborating with US musicians Allison Russell, Amythyst Kiah and Leyla McCalla to recover and reinstate some of the African American histories buried in folk music. Three months later comes another album of far-reaching curiosity with a solid purpose: exploring how sounds and rhythms from Africa and the Arabic world connect with the traditional music of Europe and America. Francesco Turrisi is Giddens’ collaborator this time, a Dublin-based Italian multi-instrumentalist usually working in jazz, improvisation and early music. The project could have got suffocated in impossible worthiness, but fear not – it’s wonderful.