Silkroad Ensemble
Guthrie Green
June 19, 2026
In 2012, I was living in a dark, dank apartment in a Stillwater alleyway. I had graduated from college, but what next? I had no idea. I spent my days writing the purplest prose you can possibly imagine, and my nights waiting tables at Mexico Joe’s. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time on YouTube.
It was in these meek—but not entirely undesirable—circumstances that a video by the group Carolina Chocolate Drops slid across my timeline. By that time, the video for “Cornbread and Butterbeans” (from their 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig), performed live for a Knoxville radio station, was four years old, but it felt as fresh as if it had emerged out of the Appalachians that very day. It’s a simple love song about eating honest food with someone you love. I must have watched that video over 50 times.
In it, along with American songbook luminary Don Flemons and fiddler Justin Robinson, is Rhiannon Giddens. In a video from the same series, Giddens sings a folk rendition of Blu Cantrell’s 2001 song “Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" so earnest and easy that I swore it was the first time I’d heard the song.
Even then, it was obvious that Giddens (along with the rest) possessed multitudinous chops, from vocal to instrumental, able to capture an audience on violin and banjo, and able to accentuate her fast and catchy vocal melodies with dense and complicated scale runs. For an alumna of Oberlin’s opera program, the Grammy that Genuine Negro Jig received for Best Folk Album seemed like a cosmic inevitability. Her career has since spanned folk, jazz, and classical, culminating in (among a zillion other accolades) a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and her appointment as the Artistic Director of the cross-cultural music program Silkroad, in which she succeeded none other than Yo-Yo Ma.
So it was no small thing when Giddens, along with Silkroad’s touring ensemble, stepped onto the Guthrie Green stage last week to deliver their new show “Sanctuary: The Power of Resonance and Ritual,” a set of global jam-band-adjacent songs featuring 13 instrumentalists and far more instruments, in multiple languages and, indeed, time signatures. The show was as gorgeous as it was uplifting.
After opener Barron Ryan brought the sitting crowd to its feet with his Suite Thing for solo piano—his set full of puns and absolutely electric swinging pop piano arrangements of his own tunes—Silkroad Ensemble started humbly, with each member of the group coming onstage to contribute their own voice to an a cappella piece. Soon enough, Giddens donned her signature fretless banjo (recently heard on Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em”), modeled off of a 19th-century model, and the vocalists began to trade verses in different languages as they sat down to their instruments.
Giddens, the leader of the group but by no means the sole draw, stayed true to her roots, breaking out of a tender, in-the-round song into a driving, stomp-clap hootenanny, bringing many listeners back to their feet. Children and their parents danced hand in hand. From the steps of the stage to the far back of the lawn, the entire crowd clapped along.
It’s notable that there was no banter between these songs; they quite literally spoke for themselves. “Sanctuary” as a live concept promised to share the connective possibilities of the world’s music, and it nailed that objective without saying a word. The show’s mission statement calls it a response to division and dissonance, and it proved its mettle by letting these visionary artists be themselves—and at the same time, letting them be each other.
True to their word, Silkroad Ensemble’s music quilted a wild patchwork of styles and traditions, blending African funk into Indian drone, Appalachian folksong into Celtic lilt. Even Giddens’ dancing, which erupted spontaneously throughout the show (to much delight among the crowd), harmonized elements of everything from Irish jig to Sufi whirling.
Each artist was featured in a solo celebrating their own style of music. Mauro Durante, an Italian percussionist, spent much of the show striking the tamburello, a massive progenitor of the standard tambourine surrounding a resonant frame drum, used in Italy’s traditional pizzica music. American-Japanese percussionist Kaoru Watanabe stunned me with a bass drum solo which, while being simple—only straight eighth notes and dotted eighth notes—was so perfectly played that it seemed to invent a whole new approach to the instrument. Sandeep Das’s tabla solos wove complex rhythms inside gentle melodies, while the Congo’s Niwel Tsumbu’s perfectly jangly guitar held down the entire group for long passages of 7/8 grooving. And when they took up the baton to conduct the group in a singalong with the audience, violinist Mazz Swift got the crowd to do The Wave.
video by Alicia Chesser
I would have been deeply satisfied to witness even one of these songs live. Instead, the ensemble played for over an hour and a half, concluding with a massive group jam that brought the crowd, once again, to its feet. As I walked to my car at the end of the night, I reflected on how lucky Tulsa often is to receive world-class shows like this, shows that you could see at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, in the open air, downtown, for free.
That might be the real message of “Sanctuary”: music, and all of its attendant perks—community, attention, enjoyment—is a gift, and not one that should be taken lightly. Considering the enthusiasm of the crowd, I’d say the message was heard as clearly as the music.
