New York Guitar Festival – 25th Anniversary: Medicine Singers ft. Lee Ranaldo & Yonatan Gat
Laraaji & Mamady Kouyaté (Bembeya Jazz)
Maalem Hassan Benjaafar (Innov Gnawa)
Co-presented with New York Guitar Festival and Kaufman Music Center
Hosted by WNYC’s John Schaefer
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.
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.
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.
