Of Roots and Forward Motion at the Ojai Music Festival

The annual Ojai Music Festival runs from Thursday to Sunday in California, and this year's program includes a Chinese pipa master and an Iranian-born kamancheh player, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Rhiannon Giddens, the folk-roots singer-songwriter who will be musical director for the first time, tells the Times that she's looking forward to "bringing up chance-taking" at the 77-year-old festival, which "is at once a long-established cultural fixture and a young-minded enterprise open to change and chance-taking."

The program includes the classic east-meets-west piece, Ghost Opera, written by Tan Dun for Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet in 1994, and a fresh version by the Attacca, with Wu.

The program also includes members of the Silkroad Ensemble, hip percussion ensemble red fish blue fish, and the Brooklyn-based Attacca Quartet, which recently had its Santa Barbara premiere.

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