At Union Station in Los Angeles last week, I noticed a poster advertising a free performance by the Silkroad Ensemble’s special new project American Railroad in this historic site. Ironically, Union Station is also presenting an exhibition detailing the thriving parts of L.A.’s Chinatown uprooted by the Station and its intricate rail complex, opened in 1933.
Silkroad’s gig here in Santa Barbara seems to make for an interesting and loaded juxtaposition, given that the project — conceived and guided into being by current director Rhiannon Giddens — is hardly a ringing endorsement of the subject of America’s railroads. Embedded in the musical-visual project is a sympathetic accounting of the roots and damage done along the way of the railroad’s intercontinental enabling of the American adventure.
Needless to say, it’s a complicated story, lined with displacement, racist exploitation (of Chinese, Black and other workers), tragedy, Machiavellian ambition, and explorer zeal attached, and it’s a tale poetically told via the new Silkroad venture. Way out west, the natural end of the line for the railroad’s expansionism in America, Silkroad’s project had its west coast debut at The Granada Theatre on November 9.
