Last weekend, the Ojai Music Festival descended on its idyllic host town — idyllic even in gray-to-drizzly weather — and proved once again why it remains one of the greatest and most significant cultural events in the 805. By design, this festival, now up to its 77th edition, is built on strengths of both consistency and diversity, and this year's model, boldly designed and led by the radiant and exploratory Rhiannon Giddens, pushed the diversity button more than usual.
OMF 2023 is ultimately best appreciated for what it was, not what it wasn't. The four-day program gleamed in terms of supporting the view of Giddens as a still-rising national treasure. She was primarily showcased in a duet concert with her partner (in life and music) Francesco Turrisi on Friday night and with Saturday night’s Omar's Journey, a chamber-ized new version of her recent opera Omar, which earned the Pulitzer Prize for her and her composer collaborator Michael Abels. The Pulitzer now shares her mantle with a 2018 MacArthur Grant.
Giddens also showed up for brief onstage moments throughout the festival, with her powerful presence as impassioned genre-hopping vocalist, banjo player, and fiddler. She even wowed the overpacked Chaparral Auditorium crowd of young and old at the reading/song event for her new children's book, Build a House. Among the jewels of her pop/blues-oriented duet concert were blues outings by Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters, her stunning take on Paul Simon’s Bach-inspired “American Song” (her version should be considered among the best interpretations to date), and Shawn Okpebholo’s haunting beauty of an art song, “Ahmaud,” about the cruelly murdered Georgian runner Ahmaud Arbery.