The full listings aren’t up yet, but after a quiet 2020, summer in New York in 2021 is going to ring to the sounds of outdoor concerts.
The BRIC
Celebrate Brooklyn Festival series has so far only announced its
kick-off concert, Ari Lennox with Kamauu and Nesta on July 31, and
will also offer a digitally streamed version of concerts via YouTube.
Central
Park SummerStage is trickling out its schedule, notably
still-not-retired George Clinton leading Parliament Funkadelic bring
their space-age funk to the park on June 27. In August, Allison Russell, Native Daughter and Bird of Chicago, open for Lake Street Dive. There’s also a sort of Lilith Fair Lite when Ani DiFranco
and Indigo Girls play, but that’s a bit outside our wheelhouse.
Lincoln
Center, which runs a few different outdoor series, is leading
strong with a
June 5th Eddie Palmieri concert at Damrosch Park, which should
attract dancers and listeners alike; he’ll have his absolutely
dynamite band with him. They also have a
promising children’s concert and celebration
for Juneteenth.
But Carnegie
Hall’s Citywide series so far has the most thorough schedule
online at this point, with a Los
Hacheros concert on June 12 at Denny Ferrell Riverbank State
Park—an adapted sewage treatment plant in the Hudson—and the
Afro-Colombian outfit Grupo
Rebolu in the Queens Botanical Garden July 1. Toshi
Reagon plays a free show in Bryant Park on July 9.
We’ll be keeping an eye out for more upcoming free concerts, as well as the in-person gigs that are popping up like dandelions, all listed on Afropop.org, so keep an eye on the site.
It’s a good feeling—a plucky Knick squad is in the playoffs, there is music on the horizon—New York’s back, baby.
