New York City Summer Jazz and Blues Season
The Summer Series Worth Planning Around
"A venue that speaks only one musical language eventually stops having anything new to say. We deepen the conversation." — Grace Blake, Programming Director, City Winery NY
Some seasons have a shape to them. This one does.
From June through September, City Winery NYC's jazz and blues programming traces a kind of survey. Not the kind that fills a syllabus, but the kind that makes you realize how much ground a single summer can cover when the room is right. Three album releases. A 25-year anniversary celebration. An Indian jazz ensemble. A Japanese pianist who has spent decades making the genre her own. A two-time Latin Grammy winner who helped bring Afro-Peruvian music to the world. And the full range of blues guitar, from Nashville-forged rock instincts to NYC street-level virtuosity.
If you've been looking for an excuse to get in here multiple times this summer, this is it.
June 1: Where America's Music Began
WQXR, WBGO, and WSHU Present A Classical and Jazz Celebration of America at 250
Monday, June 1 at 7:00 pm, The Loft at City Winery NYC
The summer opens with a collaborative presentation from three of New York's most trusted public radio voices: WQXR, WBGO, and WSHU. Together they mark America's 250th anniversary through the twin traditions of classical and jazz. These are not separate programs politely sharing a bill. They're in conversation with each other, the way the music always has been. The Loft is the right room for it: intimate enough that the music lands close, considered enough that it demands your full attention. Start here.
June 8: New Album, New Sound
Jarrod Lawson with Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez
Monday, June 8 at 7:30 pm, Main Stage, City Winery NYC
Jarrod Lawson makes the kind of soul-jazz that doesn't announce itself. It builds. His songwriting sits somewhere between the classic Blue Note catalog and a current you can actually feel: patient, specific, warm without being easy. This is an album release show, which means you're hearing it the way it's meant to be heard first. Live, in a seated venue, with good wine in front of you. Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez joins him, and the combination is worth the early-summer date on your calendar. This is the kind of dinner and a show night City Winery was built for.
June 21: Father's Day Blues
Father's Day Show with Popa Chubby
Sunday, June 21 at 7:00 pm, The Loft at City Winery NYC
Popa Chubby has been one of New York's most reliable and fiercely independent blues guitarists for three decades. His blues is full-body: loud when it needs to be, surgical when it matters. The Loft on Father's Day is, frankly, exactly the right pairing. An intimate concert experience for the person in your life who wants to hear the real thing played by someone who's been doing it long enough to make it look effortless. A group dinner before the show, a seat close to the stage. That's the evening.
June 28: The Back Burners with Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar
The Back Burners ft. Danny 'Kootch' Kortchmar, Rocco DeRosa, Joel 'Harpo' Latulippe, Marty Balou, and Vinny Pagano
Sunday, June 28 at 7:30 pm, The Loft at City Winery NYC
Danny Kortchmar's name belongs on a very short list of guitarists whose fingerprints are on American music at the highest level. James Taylor, Carole King, Don Henley, Jackson Browne. The Back Burners bring that sensibility into a live setting that doesn't feel like a tribute or a retrospective. It feels like a band. June closes the way the best jazz and blues shows tend to: with a room full of people who already knew this was going to be good, and weren't wrong.
July 27: The Voice That Changed What Peru Sounded Like
Susana Baca
Sunday, July 27 at 7:30 pm, Main Stage, City Winery NYC
Susana Baca spent decades doing something harder than making music: she helped rescue an entire tradition. Afro-Peruvian music had been largely overlooked within Peru itself until Baca, along with a small group of dedicated collaborators, began the work of bringing it back into the culture's awareness. When David Byrne included her on the 1995 compilation The Soul of Black Peru, the world caught up quickly. Two Latin Grammys followed. Then Peru named her Minister of Culture. The recognition was earned, but the music was always the point.
Live, Baca performs with a backing band that includes the cajón, the udu, and the quijada — instruments whose sounds are not quite like anything else you'll hear on a New York stage this summer. Her voice is the kind that makes a room go quiet without asking. This is a show that earns the Main Stage and then some.
August 19 & 20: Twenty-Five Years of Tanto Tempo
Bebel Gilberto, Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Tanto Tempo
Wednesday, August 19 at 7:30 pm, Main Stage, City Winery NYC
Thursday, August 20 at 7:30 pm, Main Stage, City Winery NYC
When Tanto Tempo was released in 2000, it landed as something almost impossible to categorize. Bossa nova and electronic production somehow in perfect alignment, and Bebel Gilberto's voice at the center of it sounding like neither influence and entirely herself. Twenty-five years later, the album has only gotten more interesting. Two nights on the Main Stage means two chances to be in the room for it. The first night will go fast. Don't wait on the second.
August 26: Liquid Reality
Liquid Reality
Wednesday, August 26 at 7:30 pm, The Loft at City Winery NYC
Liquid Reality brings Indian classical traditions into a jazz ensemble context. Not as a fusion experiment, but as a genuine musical conversation between two forms that share more than most listeners realize: both prize improvisation, both reward extended listening, both earn their depth slowly. The Loft setting here is deliberate. This is the kind of live music experience that asks something of the room, and a smaller room asks better.
September 7: Keiko Matsui
Keiko Matsui
Monday, September 7 at 7:30 pm, Main Stage, City Winery NYC
Keiko Matsui closes the summer series the way you'd want any great meal to end: with something that stays with you. The Tokyo-born pianist has been one of contemporary jazz's most distinctive voices for more than three decades, and her playing has a quality that's rare: it's complete. Not busy. Not spare. Each piece exists at exactly the right density, and you leave feeling like you heard everything she intended. It's a new album cycle, which means the Main Stage set will include work most audiences haven't heard live yet. That's worth Labor Day weekend.
The Full Picture
This summer at City Winery NYC takes you from New York blues to Peru to Brazil to India to Japan. All within the same intimate concert venue, all in a seated room where the food and wine program is as considered as the programming. That combination is specific to this place.
Wine and live music aren't separate activities here. They're the same evening.
If you're the kind of person who plans ahead, and everyone who buys tickets to Bebel Gilberto's 25th anniversary show is, the smart move is to put the full series on your calendar now and treat it as a summer of live music worth organizing around. New York has no shortage of concerts. It has a shortage of rooms where all of this fits together the way it does here.