Ojai music director Rhiannon Giddens knows the 2023 festival program sounds risky — that's the point

Rhiannon Giddens is maxed out. She recently spent a weekend in Knoxville, Tenn., performing a series of concerts with Yo-Yo Ma and Chris Thile. She has a new album, her first collection of all-original songs, coming out in August. She’s music director of the Ojai Music Festival this weekend. And she just won a Pulitzer.

Giddens remembers meeting the late banjo player Mick Moloney several years ago, and his very first words to her were not “Hello,” or “How are you,” but — she says, imitating his Irish brogue — “Have you learned to say no yet?”

The Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, banjo player, children’s author, actor, opera composer is, indeed, saying no to more and more potential opportunities these days, and she appreciates how good of a problem that is. But she also knows how being a journeyman musician in today’s world makes saying no almost impossible.

“The way that we’ve set up freelance artists is ridiculous,” Giddens says, “because to get anywhere, you have to say yes to everything. It’s part of your psyche, and so you get to the point where you don’t have to say yes to everything but you don’t know how to stop.”

Giddens is tireless in her work. A founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, for more than a decade she’s been illuminating the unsung Black history of the banjo and bluegrass music — most recently as host of a 10-part educational series, “Banjo,” for the streaming service Wondrium.

In 2020, she inherited Yo-Yo Ma’s mantle as artistic director of Silkroad, a music project that smashes cultural and genre boundaries. Her upcoming album, “You’re the One,” is a manifestation of her belief that “borders and genres are ridiculous, because you’ve got a Patti Page kind of thing next to a doo-wop ’60s thing.”

Her opera “Omar” — which she composed with Michael Abels — is now a Pulitzer-winning work. Although she is a classically trained opera singer, Giddens has no formal composition training, and she wrote “Omar” with her banjo and voice, which Abels then arranged and enriched for orchestra. It’s the first time a music Pulitzer has gone to a collaborative pair. For Giddens, the prize declared to the world that “this could be the future of opera. It doesn’t have to be a little man in a garret, composing based on compositional techniques that have been taught in the academy. This too can be opera.”

Giddens was at a house party in Ojai two years ago, where she was a visiting artist at the Ojai Music Festival, and “I was just talking about my love for blasting down genre walls and the early music I’ve been experimenting with my partner Francesco, and world music, and classical, and ‘What does classical mean?’” Ara Guzelimian, the festival’s artistic and executive director, was there and the next day he sent Giddens a text: “What do you think about coming back here in a couple years and actually putting this to the test?”

Working with her partner Francesco Turrisi, an Italian multi-instrumentalist, Giddens began assembling an international dream team for this year’s festival that included members of Silkroad such as Wu Man, the Chinese pipa virtuoso, and Kayhan Kalhor, a kamancheh player from Iran.

Wu saw Giddens perform at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville a few years ago, and “it touched me very, very deeply,” she says. “It’s just amazing, like, where does the energy come from? ... It’s giant. And also the presence on the stage — very few artists are like that, to me."

The opening-night program will feature the aptly titled “Liquid Borders” composed by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by the percussion quartet Red Fish Blue Fish. The rest of the weekend, between morning meditations and moon viewings — and all of the “liminal spaces” where Giddens says so much magic can happen — will include an eclectic brew of chamber works, solo improvisations, pipa tunes from the 7th century and ancient Persian music, and newer works by Chinese composers and several pieces by Iranian women, such as Aida Shirazi and Nina Barzegar.

A centerpiece is Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera,” which Wu made famous with the Kronos Quartet in the 1990s and will perform here with the Attacca Quartet — accompanied by a dance choreographed by PeiJu Chien-Pott, a Martha Graham alumna from Taiwan.

Another highlight is a new 70-minute, chamber-sized concert adaptation of Giddens and Abels’ opera. In “Omar’s Journey,” Giddens herself will sing the important role of Julie.

The opera has now been staged in South Carolina, L.A. and Boston, with future productions scheduled in San Francisco and Chicago — but so far there has been no recording. When it won the Pulitzer, Giddens’ first thought was: “Maybe we can get the recording made now!”

The festival will culminate in an improvised concert where string players — including Giddens, Wu and Kalhor — will bring their respective instruments and just jam. Wu is excited: “Finally we get the chance to 'Let's party together!'" she says. Kayhor sounds a tad more nervous. “That’s not usually what I do,” he says, laughing. “But I think this is one of the specialties of Ojai, and I welcome it.”

In her mission to erase old concepts and divisions, Giddens expects to make people just a little uncomfortable.

“There is an element of uncertainty about a program like this,” she says, “which is the point. There will be years where everything has been written out, and every concert has all pieces programmed, and they’ve been practiced and everything. This is not that year. ... I think everybody will have moments of, like, ‘I’m not sure what’s going to happen right now.’ But I think that’s powerful.”

Giddens is perpetually jet-lagged. She used to drag her kids around the world with her — “I was like 250 days a year with an infant,” she says, “I mean, hardcore” — but not so much now that they’re both in school. Though her daughter, who just started playing the cello, will join Giddens in Ojai as a gofer.

The 46-year-old says she would have quit the music industry years ago if it weren’t for what her ancestors went through, and she didn’t have that “flame to take care of.” But she’s also inspired by other tireless musicians including Ma and Dolly Parton, who parlay their fame into “trying to make the world a better place for as many people as they can.”

While flying around — and her flight ever higher in acclaim — Giddens is starting to ask herself bigger questions: “What is music for? How have we caged it and commodified it?”

“And it’s not to say that you can’t do both,” says Giddens, “but we’ve leached the everyday art out of our lives, and then packaged it up. What does that mean that you have writers and musicians, who are ostensibly doing the thing that humans have been needing for, like, millennia for their mental health, but they’re making kajillions of dollars? Whereas the vast group of people — journeymen — who are doing this as well are making peanuts? And then you have the majority of people in general who aren’t doing any of it. That seems like a balance that’s not right to me.”

So her mission continues.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.