The Alternative Guitar Summit, founded in 2010, is a yearly festival of daring, inventive players who emphasize new and unusual approaches to the guitar. The music we present celebrates the guitar’s enormous range, beyond style or genre.

The AGS seeks to commission new work, whether improvised, notated, or both, and is devoted to promoting new music through education and performance in the New York City metropolitan area and beyond. We specialize in creating opportunities for lesser known, non-commercial musicians.

Nels Cline official site | Nels Cline on Facebook | Nels Cline on Twitter

Guitar explorer NELS CLINE is best known these days as the lead guitarist in the band Wilco. His recording and performing career – spanning jazz, rock, punk, and experimental – is well into its fourth decade, with over 160 recordings, including at least 30 for which he is leader. Born in Los Angeles in 1956, Cline has received many accolades including Rolling Stone anointing him as both one of 20 “new guitar gods” and one of the top 100 guitarists of all time.

Beyond Wilco, he leads The Nels Cline Singers (featuring Scott Amendola and bassist Trevor Dunn), and plays with Fig (a collaboration with Yuka Honda), BB&C (a collective with Time Berne & Jim Black), Pillow Wand (duo with guitarist Thurston Moore), and a new duo project with jazz guitar prodigy Julian Lage. A few of the other musicians with whom he has performed and/or recorded include: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Yoko Ono, Jeff Gauthier, Mike Watt, Carla Bozulich, Vinny Golia, Marc Ribot, Tinariwen, Julius Hemphill, Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith, Lydia Lunch, and Lee Ranaldo.

Photo credit Yuka C. Honda

John Schott official site

Rafiq Bhatia official site | Rafiq Bhatia on Twitter | Rafiq Bhatia on Facebook

Marcus Gilmore on Facebook | Marcus Gilmore on twitter | Marcus Gilmore on Instagram

The music of composer, guitarist, and producer Rafiq Bhatia seeks to reconcile meticulously sculpted sound art with risk-imbued improvisation, communicating earnest emotional intensity through labyrinthine sonic complexity. His early explorations, documented on two critically-acclaimed recordings – Strata and Yes It Will – have been described by the New York Times as “transcending real sound in real time with the unexpected,” and by the Washington Post as “approximat[ing] life in the information age…profuse, immersive and immense.”

In 2014, Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang joined founder Ryan Lott as members of Son Lux, expanding the former solo project into a trio. They have since been heralded as “the world’s most lethal band” by NPR, and described as “thrilling… an ideal synthesis of contemporary forms” by the Wall Street Journal. In the past two years, Son Lux have written, recorded, and released an LP, Bones, and have given over 250 performances in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Bhatia has also worked with a breadth of creative musicians including improvisers Vijay Iyer, Billy Hart, David Virelles, and Marcus Gilmore; producers Valgeir Sigurðsson and Prefuse 73; vocalists Sam Dew, Olga Bell, and Moses Sumney; emcees Heems (Das Racist) and High Priest (Anti-Pop Consortium); members of the chamber ensembles ICE, JACK, and Alarm Will Sound; and numerous others. You can hear him on recordings featuring pop revisionists Lorde and Sufjan Stevens, and on the soundtracks to the films The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby, Air, and Afflicted.

Marcus Gilmore (born 1986) was inspired by the music of his grandfather, legendary jazz drummer Roy Haynes, who gave him his first set of drums at age 10. He is a graduate of the LaGuardia High School of Music, Art and Performing Arts in New York City and is currently attending the Manhattan School of Music. Marcus received the Wynton Kelly Foundation Award, the Wyoming Seminary PAI Best Instrumentalist Award, the Essentially Ellington Best Drum Solo Award, Vail Jazz Festival Ella Fitzgerald Scholarship, and the Brubeck Institute Summer Jazz Colony. He has performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Monterey High School Jazz Band Japan Tour and the Gibson/Baldwin GRAMMY High School Jazz Ensembles. In 2003, Marcus performed at the 28th International Jazz Festival in Bern, Switzerland, as part of Clark Terry’s “Young Titans of Jazz.” The same band gave its New York debut at Birdland last fall. Gilmore also loves Afro-Cuban jazz and plays timbales and Latin percussion. He has performed with Steve Coleman, Ravi Coltrane, Vijay Iyer, John Clayton, Najee and others, and has sat in with Chick Corea, Ray Barretto, Branford Marsalis, Jimmy Heath, Wycliffe Gordon, and Roy Hargrove.

Rashaan Carter grew up in the Washington D.C. area. It was there, with the nurturing of his father, a saxophonist, and his mother, a jazz radio programmer, Rashaan forged an interest in music. After stints with various instruments, the bass became the voice for his musical expression. Rashaan worked and gained experience in the local scene in Washington D.C. and after high school, moved to New York City to attend the New School University. At the New School, Rashaan studied with Buster Williams and Reggie Workman. While attending the New School he also began to work with many of the faculty including Joe Chambers and Jimmy Owens, among others. Since moving to New York Rashaan has become entrenched in the jazz scene and has worked with Benny Golson, Curtis Fuller and Louis Hayes, Wallace Roney, Marc Cary, Cindy Blackman, Doug and Jean Carn, Antoine Roney, Sonny Simmons, and many more. He’s also studied with one of his prime influences, Ron Carter. Rashaan regularly performs with a myriad of artists in and outside of New York and can be found on various recordings as well.

GO ORGANIC GUITAR ORCHESTRA composed and improvisationally conducted by Adam Rudolph
featuring Rez Abassi, Damon Banks, Marco Capelli, Nels Cline, Liberty Ellman, David Gilmore, Joel Harrison, Jerome Harris, Miles Okazaki & Kenny Wessel

Go Organic Guitar Orchestra on metarecords.com | Go Organic Guitar Orchestra on cuneiformrecords.com | Adam Rudolph on metarecords.com

“The Go: Organic Orchestra sounded unbelievable. But it was believable because we were listening to it.” – Yusef Lateef

Rudolph grew up and began playing music on the South Side of Chicago, performing with artists like Fred Anderson. By 1978 he was touring Europe with Don Cherry. Hailed by the New York Times as “a pioneer in world music”, in 1977 Rudolph began his collaborations with kora player Foday Musa Suso, followed by his work with the Gnawa musician Hassan Hakmoun, L. Shankar and other musicians from around the globe. His longest and most significant collaboration was with the great Yusef Lateef; from 1988 until Yusef’s passing in 2013 they performed as a duet and collaborated as composers on many large ensemble projects. “Even when I started focusing more on my own music projects in the early 1990’s, I would always make the time to tour and record with Yusef. I learned so much from him not only about music, but how to live a deeper more spiritual life.”

Since 1992, Rudolph’s primary outlet for his unique compositional vision has been his Moving Pictures ensemble. But in 2001, he founded Go: Organic Orchestra to expand his instrumentation. “I had always been interested in the idea of an orchestral concept of world music, and fascinated not only with the sounds but also with the organizing concepts that structure orchestrations from around the world. …the colotomic structure of Javanese Gamelan or the thematic fibers of a Bantu drum and trumpet orchestra are all valid ways of organizing orchestra. At the same time my approach to orchestra comes out of my work since 1974 in electronic music. With Go: Organic Orchestra, I feel the resonance of iconic electronic music composers such as Pierre Schafer, Stockhausen or Subotnick. And of course I am, like many creative musicians today, a student of the great 20th Century composers of the European tradition – Messian, Carter, Ligeti, Bartok and my personal favorite, Toru Takemitsu.”

Rudolph has integrated and transformed these influences into a highly personalized language, a language whose rhythmic component, which he calls “Cyclic Verticalism,” combines polyrhythms (from African music) and rhythm cycles (from Indian music). Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra has performed worldwide at music festivals and served residencies in such countries as USA, Turkey, Mexico, Italy, Finland, Denmark and Norway.

Photo Credit: Scott Friedlander