Rhiannon Giddens' Personal Best

Rhiannon Giddens has never been particularly interested in sticking to any one musical lane or building a career – if we must insist on calling it that – that follows modern logic. She describes herself instead as an artist of the 1960s, in reference to how many musicians of that time were creatively unconstrained, free to follow their curiosity wherever it might lead, even if their audiences didn’t always tag along. Think Van Dyke Parks moving promiscuously between baroque parlour songs, psychedelic pop, and The Jungle Book soundtrack, or Frank Zappa using rock as a gateway to just about everything else, from orchestral work and jazz to musique concrète, high satire, and other avant-garde experiments.Giddens’ discography may be less unruly than Zappa’s – let’s face it, whose discography isn’t? – but a restless curiosity is one of its bold-type characteristics. Having trained at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio as a classical singer before pivoting to old-time stringband music with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, her work now spans eight albums bearing her own name, including collabs with Francesco Turrisi, Silkroad Ensemble, and Justin Robinson (a fellow Chocolate Drop), plus film, ball...