7 great artists playing SummerStage this year7 songs, 25 min 17 sec
Dear listeners,As all those ecstatic celebrations of the Knicks’ championship win this weekend reminded us, there’s nothing like quite like a bunch of New Yorkers gathering outdoors for some communal joy. Luckily, every summer the city gives us plenty of opportunities to experience live music outside. The eclectic, long-running concert series SummerStage, which hosts concerts (most of them free) in Central Park and various other locations across the five boroughs, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. My colleague Ben Sisario reported a piece about the series’ history, for which he interviewed producers of the event and musicians who had performed there over the years including Patti Smith, David Byrne, Youssou N’Dour, Thurston Moore and Jon Batiste. I loved reading these artists’ memories of their SummerStage concerts and their experiences being an awed audience member at a great show themselves. For once, I also enjoyed reading the comments section, which is unusually harmonious — just a bunch of readers sharing their own favorite SummerStage stories. (Mine would have to be the evening in July 2023, when a sudden but brief downpour interrupted a performance by the ambient folk duo Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore — because once it ended, they got to finish their appropriately celestial set under a rainbow.) In honor of SummerStage’s 40th anniversary, and the arrival of outdoor-concert weather, today’s playlist spotlights some of the artists who are playing this year. They include bona fide living legends (the American soul survivor Mavis Staples; the adventurously innovative Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo) as well as promising up-and-comers (the Chicago indie-pop outfit Sharp Pins). I didn’t include every artist performing this year, but you can check out the full list here. Even if you can’t make it to New York this summer to catch some free live music, you can still enjoy this playlist — preferably in the open air. Mother Nature has a way of warning us, Lindsay
Listen along while you read.1. Sharp Pins: “I Don’t Have the Heart”One of the first free SummerStage shows of the season, on June 24, features performances from the spirited English rockers Black Country, New Road and the delightfully spiky indie trio Horsegirl. But I’d get there early to catch the first act on the bill, Sharp Pins — the infectious project helmed by the 21-year-old Chicago musician Kai Slater. The jangly melodicism of Sharp Pins’s most recent album, “Balloon Balloon Balloon,” proves Slater to be an ace student of power-pop past. ▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
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“7 Great Artists Playing SummerStage This Year” track list
Track 1: Sharp Pins, “I Don’t Have the Heart”
Track 2: Spoon, “Sister Jack”
Track 3: Bilal, “Soul Sista”
Track 4: Mavis Staples, “Human Mind”
Track 5: De La Soul, “Sunny Storms”
Track 6: Susana Baca, “Negra Presuntuosa”
Track 7: Angélique Kidjo, “Mother Nature”
Ben Sisario spent so much time asking artists about their favorite SummerStage memories, but I was curious to hear about his. Below, he reminisces on his pick for the best SummerStage show he’s seen.
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| Orchestra Baobab performing in Britain in 2002. Jon Lusk/Redferns, via Getty Images |
I’ve seen lots of great shows at SummerStage over the years, but the most transcendent happened on a breezy July afternoon in 2002: the Senegalese act Orchestra Baobab, offering a lesson in the hidden crosscurrents of global music and also just a perfect New York City musical idyll.
The group’s history is fascinating. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Orchestra Baobab demonstrated how nimbly musical traditions can bounce back and forth across the planet. African rhythms, carried to the Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade, helped create the rich heritage we now call Afro-Cuban music, giving us the son and the mambo. By the mid-20th century, these immensely popular styles had traveled back to West Africa, where groups like Orchestra Baobab tinkered with it further. The band’s awesome guitarist Barthélémy Attisso, for example, was famous for adding gorgeous melodic latticework.
In the abstract, that may sound a little academic. But in Central Park, it was pure pleasure — just Latin rhythms and West African melodies floating weightlessly through the park and making every body sway. When I was interviewing Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend for my oral history of SummerStage, he also talked about some of the great shows he had seen there, and seemed to be searching his memory for something. A few minutes after the call ended, I got a text message: He and his bandmates had seen Orchestra Baobab there, too.
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