New York Guitar Festival: Night Two
New York Guitar Festival – 25th Anniversary
Program:
Medicine Singers with Yonatan Gat and Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth)
Yonatan Gat and Maalem Hassan BenJaafar (Innov Gnawa)
Lee Ranaldo and Laraaji
Laraaji and Mamady Kouyaté (Mandingo Ambassadors)
Co-presented with New York Guitar Festival and Kaufman Music Center
Hosted by WNYC’s John Schaefer
June 15, 2024 – Saturday, 8 PM
Kaufman Music Center – 129 W 67th Street, Manhattan
Doors: 7:30 PM | Show: 8 PM
$45 | $55 | $65 – WMI Members: $36 | $44 | $52
Medicine Singers is the name of an ongoing collaboration between Yonatan Gat, the wildly virtuosic Israeli-born, New York-based guitarist, and the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Eastern Algonquin powwow group from Rhode Island. Now joined by the legendary Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Medicine Singers combine ancient trance and spirituality with modern psychedelia, and make inventive use of the similarities – and differences – between the steady pulse of Indigenous American drumming and the rhythms of rock.
Joining Medicine Singers, Lee Ranaldo, and Yonatan Gat are ambient legend Laraaji and Guinean guitarist Mamady Kouyaté of the legendary Bembeya Jazz National band, playing as a duo. The night will also feature premieres of collaborations between Lee Ranaldo and Laraaji, as well as Yonatan Gat and Maalem Hassan Benjaafar from the Grammy Award-nominated Moroccan gnawa group Innov Gnawa. The evening is curated by the label and collective Stone Tapes, with an overriding mission of manifesting a space for radical experimental and radical traditional musicians to collaborate.
WMI is pleased to co-present the 25th anniversary New York Guitar Festival, and spotlight the wealth of international talent and diverse guitar styles that the festival has brought to NYC for over two decades.
JOHN SCHAEFER Executive Producer, Music Programming, WNYC Radio
John Schaefer is the host and producer of WNYC’s long-running new music show New Sounds (“The #1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard), founded in 1982, and its innovative Soundcheck podcast, which has featured live performances and interviews with a variety of guests since 2002. He created the New Sounds Live concert series in 1986, which features new works, commissioned pieces, and a special series devoted to live music for silent films.
About New York Guitar Festival
Exploring virtually every aspect of the guitar’s personality, the New York Guitar Festival, since 1999, has presented many of the world’s most influential guitarists at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Sawdust, (Le) Poisson Rouge, 92nd Street Y, Brookfield Place Winter Garden and other iconic venues, large and small. From multi Grammy-winners to emerging artists, NYGF performers have included masters of the classical repertoire (Pepe Romero, Christopher Parkening, Ana Vidović, Nigel North) as well as blues & jazz (Taj Mahal, Bucky Pizzarelli, Bill Frisell, Sonny Landreth), pop & indie rock (Vernon Reid, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Iver, Andy Summers, Thurston Moore), and folk & Americana (Levon Helm, Emmylou Harris, Cindy Cashdollar, Leo Kottke) as well as sounds of Central & South America (Badi Assad, Yamandu Costa, Vinicius Cantuária) and genre-defying innovators (Kaki King, David Torn, Daniel Lanois, Bryce Dessner). The New York Guitar Festival: music from across the centuries. . . and music yet to be.
The New York Guitar Festival is made possible by the generosity of a grant from the Augustine Foundation.