Bill Frisell and Luke Bergman, Gyan Riley

Overview

Join us for the second of four nights celebrating spectacular guitar talents features American jazz (and country, West African, classical, improvisatory) guitarist, composer, and bandleader Bill Frisell, together with bassist, guitarist, and pedal steel player Luke Bergman. Also joining on night two is the guitarist and composer Gyan Riley, whose talent also ranges and roams, spanning jazz, world music, new music, and post-minimalism. John Schaefer hosts.

ABOUT NEW YORK GUITAR FESTIVAL

Since its founding in 1999 by David Spelman, the Artistic Director of the festival, and WNYC’s John Schaefer, host of the “New Sounds” radio series, the NYGF has taken advantage of the instrument’s unique ability to find a way into almost every kind of music we make. That includes places where you expect to find the guitar – Glenn Jones, for example, keeps alive the tradition of the path-breaking American folk guitarist John Fahey – and places where you don’t, as in the contemporary post-Minimalist music of Gyan Riley. So whether you’re a fan of William Tyler’s cosmic brand of country/folk or Badi Assad’s Brazilian-inflected jazz/pop, we’ve got a guitarist for you. A bunch of them, in fact. Two a night for four nights of live, in-person, in-front-of-real-people guitar playing.

Credit: Photo by Monica Jane Frisell

Wikipedia says Bill Frisell “is an American jazz guitarist.” Well they got “American” and “guitarist” right. Frisell has indeed played jazz, but also country, rock, West African, classical, and lots of less easily defined styles of music. Widely considered to be one of the great guitarists of our time, he is the subject of a new biography called Bill Frisell: Beautiful Dreamer.

Credit: Photo by Robin Hanley

From his beginnings in his father’s band, Terry Riley and The All Stars, Gyan Riley has branched out into classical music (both his own and that of composers like John Zorn), spacey electric guitar excursions, and Eastern-influenced collaborations with a wide range of artists, including recent Grammy winner Arooj Aftab.