The Silkroad Ensemble's New EP, "Phoenix Rising"

The release opens with Giddens’s arrangement of the traditional folk song “O, Death,” a nod to her North Carolina roots, with particular inspiration drawn from folklorist Bessie Jones. Giddens writes in her artist statement about the arrangement, “These traditional songs have a way of getting to the bones of humanity, showing the stark contrast of life and death, and I thought it might do the same in a new setting with Silkroad.”

Following is Sandeep Das’s arrangement of Rabindranath Tagore’s song “Ekla Cholo Re,” created in tribute to the many Indian lives lost to COVID—including some of the country’s most treasured musicians and artists. Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and “Ekla Cholo Re” in particular served as a refrain for India’s independence movement.

Kaoru Watanabe’s new work for the program is “Ho-Oh,” named after a phoenix from various Asian mythologies. The Ho-Oh is ubiquitous throughout Japan, including in Gagaku—Japanese court music originally imported from China and Korea in the 8th century. Watanabe writes, “One of the ideas behind this piece is to reunite Gagaku with its distant relatives and see what emerges.”

The EP closes with “Biko,” commissioned by Silkroad for the Phoenix Rising tour. The original song by Peter Gabriel was a eulogy for the Black South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died in police custody in 1977.