Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center Presents
NEW YORK GUITAR FESTIVAL Silent Films/Live Guitars
Groundbreaking Guitarists Perform Original Scores for Silent Films by the Legendary Buster Keaton.
Performers include Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Dan Zanes, Shara Worden, Buke & Gase, Redhooker, Gyan Riley, Keller Williams, Kaki King, Califone, Howard Fishman & Twi the Humble Feather
January 10, 12, 17 & 19, 2012
Born at Merkin Concert Hall more than 10 years ago, the city-wide New York Guitar Festival (NYGF) explores the many aspects of the guitar’s musical personality through commissioning new work and supporting innovative, multi-media collaborations among outstanding artists. Described as "an epic event" in The Wall Street Journal and "a veritable guitar orgy" by Jazz Times, the NYGF is hosted by festival co-founder John Schaefer and broadcast on WNYC’s New Sounds® Live.
Building on the success of the 2009 NYGF at Merkin Concert Hall, which featured Marc Ribot, David Bromberg, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and others premiering scores to classic silent films by Charlie Chaplin, the 2012 festival pairs performers with silent films by one of the greatest comic actor-directors in the history of cinema: Buster Keaton (1895-1966). This January, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Dan Zanes, My Brightest Diamond (Shara Worden), Buke & Gase, Keller Williams, Kaki King, Califone, Howard Fishman and Twi the Humble Feather will give WORLD PREMIERES of film scores commissioned by the NYGF. Silent Films/Live Guitars gives audiences a rare opportunity to see classic Keaton comedies on a big screen, accompanied by some of today’s most distinctive and influential guitarists.
“In his own time he may not have been as famous or financially successful as Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, but critics have come to call his the most ‘modern’ silent film clown,” says NYGF founder and artistic director David Spelman. “These films are nearly a hundred years old, but their humor and visual poetry is still startlingly fresh and vibrant. As for the music we’ve commissioned, I’m excited that artists will be carefully scoring and rehearsing their music, although I also anticipate a good deal of improvisation. This seems utterly appropriate, as Keaton was such a firm believer in improvisation.”
In addition to the four Silent Films/Live Guitars concerts at Merkin Concert Hall, the NYGF will also include concerts at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden, The 92nd Street Y and Rockwood Music Hall.
Tue, 1/10/12 at 7:30 pm Dan Zanes (Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928, 71 min.) Gyan Riley (Buster Keaton’s The Goat, 1921, 27 min.) Grammy winner Dan Zanes, a member of the 80s band the Del Fuegos and current front man for Dan Zanes and Friends, is equally at home with rock, Broadway tunes, Latin American music and the gospel tradition among other genres and has collaborated with artists ranging from Lou Reed and Roseanne Cash to Carol Channing and the Pilobolus Dance Company. His wildly popular family concerts regularly sell out venues like Carnegie Hall. For the NYGF, Zanes premieres his original score for Buster Keaton’s 1928 silent film Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which a young Mississippi steamboat captain falls in love with the daughter of his father’s business rival. “Buster Keaton’s movies always look to me like the most graceful sculpture I’ve ever seen but which upon close examination is only a pile of driftwood and bent nails. I hope to reflect that in my music,” comments Dan Zanes.
Gyan Riley, whose diverse work focuses on his own compositions, improvisation and contemporary classical repertoire, performs as a soloist and in various ensembles, including performances with Zakir Hussain, Dawn Upshaw, the San Francisco Symphony, the Falla Guitar Trio, the World Guitar Ensemble and his dad, the composer/pianist/vocalist Terry Riley. At Merkin he will premiere a score for Buster Keatons' The Goat (1921), in which Keaton's character gets mistaken for a murderer with a price on his head.
Thu, 1/12/12 at 7:30 pm Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth (Buster Keaton’s Cops, 1922, 18 min.) Kaki King (Buster Keaton’s The Scarecrow, 1920, 19 min.) Buke & Gase (Buster Keaton’s The General, 1926, excerpts) Twi the Humble Feather (Buster Keaton’s The Garage, 1920, 25 min.) Co-founder of the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo is #33 on Rolling Stone's list of “Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” He will perform the New York premiere of an original score (commissioned by the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts) to Buster Keaton’s 1922 silent film Cops, a short comedy about a young man who gets on the bad side of the Los Angeles Police Department during a parade and is chased all over town. Keaton’s response to the 1921 Fatty Arbuckle scandal – the actor/director was accused of assaulting and accidentally killing a woman, a charge that ended his career even though he was eventually acquitted by a jury – Cops portrays a well-intentioned man who just can’t win, no matter hard he tries. "Normally I couple my abstract guitar explorations with equally abstract films,” says Ranaldo, “but in this case I'm really looking forward to applying the sounds I make to the magical world of Buster Keaton film and his distinctive brand of physical comedy. It should be an interesting and unexpected combination..."
The sole woman and youngest artist on Rolling Stone's 2006 list of "The New Guitar Gods," Kaki King collaborated with Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder on the Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. She will perform an original score to Buster Keaton’s 1920 short comedy Scarecrow, in which Keaton plays a young man whose pursuit of a farmer’s daughter takes an unexpected turn when he falls into a hay thresher and ruins his clothes.
The Brooklyn-based Buke and Gase – Arone Dyer on the “buke” (a self-modified six-string baritone ukulele) and Aron Sanchez on the “gase” (a guitar-bass hybrid of his own creation) will perform a score to excerpts from Buster Keaton’s Civil War adventure classic The General (1926), which is famous for its locomotive chase.
Twi the Humble Feather compose within a spectrum of influences from film and architecture, to dreams and nature. Cousins and close friends since childhood, Anthony Lebron and Hektor Fontanez aim to create timeless and imaginative music for a multi-generational audience. They will perform a score to Buster Keaton’s The Garage (1920), a short comedy starring Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle about two inept firemen.
Tue, 1/17/12 at 7:30 pm Keller Williams (Buster Keaton’s One Week, 1920, 19 min.) My Brightest Diamond (Shara Worden) (Buster Keaton’s Balloonatic, 1923, 22 min.) Redhooker (Buster Keaton’s The Neighbors, 1920, 18 min.) Music's "mad scientist" Keller Williams will perform an original score to Buster Keaton’s One Week, a short comedy about newlyweds who receive a build-it-yourself house that can supposedly be built in one week. “In my two decades of making music, I'm not sure that I've ever felt quite so challenged and inspired,” says Williams of this project. Most often performing as a one-man band (a stage show constructed around Keller singing his compositions and choice cover songs while accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar connected to a Gibson Echoplex delay system that allows him to simulate a full band), Keller always reveals himself as an artist of great stylistic breadth and infinite imagination.
My Brightest Diamond (Shara Worden), hailed for her mystical voice and mythic storytelling, premieres a score to Buster Keaton’s Balloonatic, which chronicles a young man’s misadventures with a hot air balloon and a young outdoorswoman. “I’ve always had a romantic fascination with hot air balloons,” says Worden. “They exemplify freedom and lightness of being to me. I am enchanted by Buster Keaton’s humor, darkness, lightness, romance and sorrow. This will be a delight to score and give me the opportunity to think about dreams and about believing in the impossible.”
Redhooker is a "dreamy mixed consort" (New York Times) led by the classically-trained guitarist Stephen Griesgraber. He will be joined by band members Maxim Moston, Ben Lively and Peter Hess in the performance of a collaboratively composed score for guitar, violins, bass clarinet and electronics for Buster Keaton's Neighbors, a comedy about young lovers and a family feud.
Thu, 1/19/12 at 7:30 pm Califone (Buster Keaton’s Go West, 1925, 69 min.) Howard Fishman (Buster Keaton’s The Frozen North, 1922, 17 min.) Califone, the Chicago-based experimental rock band whose music the New York Times called “enthralling,” are known for their 11 albums and the independent film All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, which premiered at Sundance in 2010. They will perform an original score to Buster Keaton’s 1925 film Go West, in which a small-town young man, overwhelmed by a brief taste of life in New York City, tries his luck as a cowboy on a ranch. Tim Rutili, Califone’s singer/guitarist/lyricist, explains that “Califone scoring music for a Buster Keaton film makes almost too much sense. We will try to capture the inner stillness and the outer chaos on Buster’s migration west. Perfect.”
The “infectious…ingenious” (Wall Street Journal), “scintillating…gritty…brilliant” (Washington Post) guitarist/singer/composer/bandleader Howard Fishman has actually been called "an unsettling combination of Buster Keaton and Lou Reed" by Edge NY. No stranger to dramatic musical storytelling, Fishman's oeuvre includes the multimedia song cycle No Further Instructions about roughing it through rural Romania; we are destroyed, a folk-jazz oratorio about the Donner Party; and his recently-released Moon Country, an album featuring his acclaimed quartet's interpretations of Hoagy Carmichael songs. He will perform a score to Buster Keaton’s 1922 comedy The Frozen North, in which a spectacularly unlucky Keaton tries to rob a group of gamblers with a wanted poster of a man holding a gun and shoots a couple he mistakes for his wife and her lover.
Tickets 4-concert subscription: $80 Single tickets: $25 Students with ID: $15 (in person sales only) Tickets at 212 501 3330 or http://www.kaufman-center.org
Press information Joan Jastrebski, 212 501 3386, [email protected] Press releases and hi-res images: http://kaufman-center.org/press
Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center 129 West 67th Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam)
WNYC is the media sponsor of the New York Guitar Festival.
Kaufman Center presentations in Merkin Concert Hall are made possible, in part, with institutional support from The Amphion Foundation, The Edward T. Cone Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, The Barbara Bell Cumming Foundation, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, the Open Society Foundations through the Fund for the City of New York ,The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, celebrating 50 years of building strong, creative communities in New York State’s 62 counties. Select Merkin Concert Hall concerts have been awarded support from the National Endowment for the Arts.