NY Guitar Festival: Night Three - Derek Gripper and Rahim AlHaj


June 21, 2024 – Thursday, 8 PM | Doors 7:30 PM
Kaufman Music Center – 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan
Co-presented with NY Guitar Festival – Hosted by WNYC’s John Schaefer
Link to Night One – Bill Frisell and Skúli Sverrisson | Link to Night Two – Yamandu Costa
South African guitarist Derek Gripper and the Iraqi-American oud virtuoso Rahim AlHaj offer a kind of musical family affair, as the Arab oud is generally considered to be the ancestor of the modern guitar. Gripper earned international acclaim (and more than a few “how did he do that?” reactions) for his collection of West African kora music, transcribed from that 21-string harp to a standard 6-string classical guitar. AlHaj has taken the centuries-old tradition of Arab classical music and blended it with the sounds of contemporary Western music.
Both have long lists of collaborators, including Gripper’s album with American world music cellist Mike Block and AlHaj’s work with the Native American poet Joy Harjo. 2025 marks the first year that their global musical orbits come together. – John Schaefer

About 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.