Album Review: There is No Other by Rhiannon Giddens

Often, the phrase "there is no other" carries an air of romanticism, but Rhiannon Giddens turns its conventional meaning on its head on her collaboration with Francesco Turrisi. The pair focus directly on "othering," the process of identifying different cultures as alien from a person's own experience -- a phenomenon that the pair refute not only with the title of their 2019 album but the very music it contains. Giddens claims classical music and old-timey folk as her musical heritage; Turrisi is a jazz musician who studied early music -- backgrounds that provide a considerable amount of common ground, something that is evident throughout the restless, haunting There Is No Other.

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there is no Other, the sparse collaborative album by Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, doesn't shine a light on old music; it blocks out the sun entirely, scavenging the darkness for deeper understanding. Giddens is a MacArthur Fellow, a conservatory-trained opera singer, and a multi-instrumentalist with a knack for finding uncanny harmony among distant generations and geographies of music. Turrisi is a jazz composer with concentrations on early baroque and Mediterranean music.

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