A Rhiannon Giddens concert can be enjoyed on several levels. You can concentrate on the voice, the banjo and the sheer quality of the musicianship and have a great night. You can follow the songs through folk, blues, soul, country, gospel and jazz. Or you can listen to the stories behind them and start tracing connections across centuries of American history. At the Maison des Arts in Créteil, all of those things were happening at once.
Giddens is a musician, but she's also a musicologist, historian and activist, and those different parts of her work have become impossible to separate. The traditional songs she chooses, the stories she tells between them and her own compositions are all part of the same conversation. History isn't background material here. It explains why these songs exist and why they still matter.
That could make for a heavy evening, especially considering some of the subjects involved. It doesn't. Giddens can talk about slavery, racial injustice, women's lives and the systems that shaped American culture without turning the stage into a lectern. The history is there if you want to follow it. If you don't, the music still works.
Her latest album, You're the One, is a good example. On the surface, it's simply one of the best Americana records of the past year, although even that label feels increasingly inadequate for what Giddens does. Dig deeper and the record moves through questions of race, gender, history and identity while jumping freely between musical idioms. And, importantly, it's pretty funky too.
That last part becomes particularly obvious in Créteil. This may be as close to a rock-band format as Giddens has come. Attis Clopton's drums give the music a funky, propulsive backbone, while guitarist Niwel Tsumbu seems able to draw lines between Ireland, Africa and America within the same song. Francesco Turrisi moves between keyboards and accordion, Dirk Powell adds guitar and fiddle, and Jason Sypher's bass quietly holds the whole thing together.
It's a formidable band, and Giddens sounds liberated by it. Her voice remains the obvious focal point, capable of remarkable delicacy and then sudden power, but this is very much an ensemble performance. The arrangements leave room for the musicians to respond to one another, and songs that can feel carefully constructed on record acquire more muscle onstage.
"We Could Fly" is magnificent, Giddens' voice soaring over an arrangement that gives the song plenty of room to breathe. "You Louisiana Man" comes from somewhere earthier, driven by a relentless rustic funk that shows just how physical this music can be.
There is also a lovely moment when Leyla McCalla, Giddens' former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate and frequent collaborator, returns after performing the evening's opening set. Their voices settle together naturally, two musicians with years of shared history needing very little to find each other again.
All evening, the music keeps crossing the boundaries that are supposed to separate genres and cultures. Folk becomes funk. African and European traditions meet inside American songs. A fiddle or banjo can carry centuries of history and still make somebody want to move. Giddens explains some of those connections, but the band demonstrates them more effectively than any lecture could. By the end, the audience is doing considerably more than listening.
Sister Rosetta Tharpe's gospel classic "Up Above My Head, I Hear Music in the Air" closes the show, and the band hits it hard. What began as a seated concert in a municipal theatre in a southeastern Paris suburb suddenly turns into something resembling a Southern church service. People are out of their seats, the room is moving and the historical distance between the music being discussed all evening and the people experiencing it has disappeared.
That's what makes a Rhiannon Giddens concert such a rich experience. The scholarship matters. The politics matter. The stories matter. But they reach people because the music is good enough to carry them. And on this particular night, it absolutely cooks.
