If you’re on your way to Ojai today—or if you’re reading this while already there, glass of wine and concert tickets in hand—lucky you. A riveting sonic voyage around the globe and across time awaits.
This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday.
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The Ojai Music Festival, which begins today and closes Sunday (June 8–11), is an annual pilgrimage for the musically open-minded. The nearly 80-year-old event, held in the valley city of Ojai in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, has proved chameleonlike, adopting a new tone every year thanks to its tradition of selecting a new music director annually. What remains consistent, however, is the dedication to experimental, boundary-pushing art that challenges listeners’ ears and minds.
This year, the festival is led and curated by 46-year-old musical polyglot Rhiannon Giddens. As music director, she will bring to Ojai’s stages her distinctive and powerful voice (literally and figuratively), a torrent of talent, a storyteller’s knack for programming, and more than a few of her closest collaborators from around the globe.
The diversity of the musicians joining Giddens in Ojai reflects her musical virtuosity and dexterity as well as her worldview, which is historically informed and intently focused on abolishing borders and arbitrary categories of every kind.
“The first Ojai concert is called ‘Liquid Borders,’ and that reflects this idea that my team conceived of [for the festival] of resetting our notions,” Giddens says. Speaking from Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was performing at a sold-out show, the Ireland-based musician and mother of two said she is excited to present Ojai’s attendees with a borderless, category-flouting experience. “Look at the globe from Australia’s point of view. Everything looks familiar and unfamiliar. Sometimes shifting perspective is all you need to do,” she says.
While Ojai has a long history of innovative, forward-thinking music directors, like Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Pierre Boulez, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and John Adams, it has also followed in the classical tradition of viewing music primarily through a white, male, Eurocentric lens. In recent years, this has started to shift with the appointment of music directors like Vijay Iyer, an American jazz musician of South Asian heritage who led the festival in 2017, and now Giddens, who grew up in North Carolina and is of mixed race.
Giddens’s long list of Ojai collaborators offers a snapshot of the breadth of her remarkable career as a classically trained vocalist, banjo-playing folk singer-songwriter, and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer.
In addition to singing onstage with friends she’s known since her college days studying opera at Oberlin College & Conservatory in Ohio, Giddens will reunite with fiddler and vocalist Justin Robinson for Sunday’s finale. Robinson is from Gastonia, North Carolina, not far from where Giddens grew up in Greensboro, and was one of Giddens’s first significant musical collaborators; both are disciples of the late Black American fiddler Joe Thompson, who died in 2012.
In their 20s, Robinson and Giddens were founding members of the old-time string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops. The group won a Grammy in 2010 for its album Genuine Negro Jig and dedicated itself to carrying on the traditions of Black American string bands. At Ojai, expect to hear some toe-tapping Joe Thompson tunes as well as music from Nigeria that reflects Robinson’s current musical endeavors.
Also performing this weekend is Wu Man, a master of the pipa, a pear-shaped, four-stringed Chinese lute. She is a founding member of the global collective Silkroad Ensemble, which was once led by Yo-Yo Ma and is now helmed by Giddens. Kayhan Kalhor, another founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble performing in Ojai, will showcase the hypnotic sounds of the kamancheh, a Persian bowed string instrument.
Another highlight of this year’s festival will occur on Saturday night on Ojai’s main stage, the Libbey Bowl, a breezy outdoor venue nestled in a centrally located downtown park. The concert, which is sold-out, will showcase Giddens’s recent operatic collaboration with Michael Abels, an American composer perhaps best known for contributing the score to Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning film, Get Out.
Abels and Giddens cowrote the 2022 opera Omar, which premiered in Charleston, South Carolina, last spring and tells the story of a Muslim African man enslaved in the Carolinas. The much-lauded opera, which had its West Coast premiere at LA Opera last fall and will open at San Francisco Opera this November, was recently awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in music. This weekend, Abels and Giddens will premiere a paired-down version for chamber ensemble and singers, with Giddens singing the role of Julie for the first time.
During a recent conversation, Abels described how he and Giddens incorporated musical traditions from the Carolinas and from Senegal, Omar’s home country, into the opera’s score. To approximate the sound of the Senegalese kora, Abels used a flute and a harp. “But in Ojai, our Senegalese cred will be sky-high,” he says. “Seckou Keita, possibly the preeminent kora player in the world, will be sitting in on our Senegalese-inspired piece. It’s going to be pretty incredible.”
Playing on Friday is multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, who, Abels says, “plays more instruments than any other person I’ve met.” With a background in jazz piano and early classical music, Turrisi is one of Giddens’s most significant current musical collaborators—as well as her life partner.
When talking about the wide-ranging musical styles that will be on display this weekend, Giddens says she thinks that “the difference between so many types of musics is just words.” Gatekeepers worry about categories and labels, she says, because “then they keep their job of being a gatekeeper.”
Beyond these gatekeepers, “there is a world where the Iranian kamancheh and the Piedmont-style fiddle and the Western classical cello and the theorbo are just instruments being played by people,” Giddens says.
This weekend, among the orange blossoms of Ojai, that world exists.
Livestreams of some Ojai Music Festival performances will be available. Check the official website for times.
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L.A.-based pianist turned writer Catherine Womack covers classical music and the arts for the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine, Alta Journal, and more. Dog lady. Will travel for opera.
