Since 2014, the annual Uncharted concert series at Greenwich House Music School (GHMS) has been an invaluable resource for New York-based musicians to develop original material, foster new collaborations, and premiere first-look projects in an intimate concert setting. Now in its ninth year, Uncharted returns to GHMS over six Thursdays in the spring with live events exclusively from musicians and composers based in New York City.
Featured dates include concerts from Endea Owens and The Cookout (April 6), Keyanna Hutchinson (April 13), Mafer Bandola (April 20), Nour Harkati (April 27, presented with Habibi Festival), Dana Lyn’s Animal Revenge (May 4) and Oran Etkin Duo with Sasha Berliner (May 11).
General entry tickets to all shows are $20 or less with 100% of sales going directly to the artists. Advance ticket sales include an open wine and beer bar.
Rachel Black, Uncharted co-founder and Director of Greenwich House Music School, says, “This year’s cohort of musicians represents some of the most genre diverse and creatively original performers to take part in our program. Every artist is taking advantage of this opportunity to try something unique and outside the boundaries of what they are used to making. Hearing those risks come to life at these one-night-only performances in our Recital Hall is what makes Uncharted’s programming so reliably exciting.”
Thanks to a generous multi-year grant from the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, all of the artists in this season’s cohort will have access to a multitude of resources through a paid residency that provides free rehearsal space along with technical assistance and backline, compensation for rehearsal time, individual marketing assistance, and unrestricted use of high-quality audio, video, and photographic records of their performance to further develop and promote their work.
“We consider ourselves to be as much an artist career development program as we are a concert series,” explains Uncharted co-founder and Curator Jennie Wasserman (NJPAC, The Kennedy Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall). “These events are always audience-pleasers, but they also provide musicians with a potentially career-enhancing opportunity. Uncharted performers receive free rehearsal space, one-on-one support from marketing and publicity professionals, a sizable residency honorarium, 100% of ticket and on-site merchandise sales, full video and audio of their performance to use for future promotion, and a platform to perform in front of the programming staff from major venues around the city. Many of our artists over the years have credited Uncharted as having long-ranging impact to their creative and financial sustainability.”
The 2023 Uncharted lineup of performers joins a growing alumni of popular artists from across the musical spectrum; including jazz pianists Aaron Diehl and Dan Tepfer; guitarist Binky Griptite of The Dap-Kings; vocalist Michael Mayo and Deva Mahal; the founding member of Grammy-award winning Flor de Toloache, Mireya Ramos; vocalist, pianist and Broadway composer Shaina Taub; acclaimed jazz harpist Brandee Younger; composer/performer Val-Inc; jazz trumpeter and composer Steven Bernstein; avant-cabaret performers Migguel Anggelo, Molly Pope and Erin Markey; bassist Adi Meyerson; guitarist and singer/songwriter Celisse; Broadway’s Grace McLean; saxophonist and bandleader Camille Thurman; composer Raquel Acevedo-Klein; guitarist Marc Ribot; sound artist Bora Yoon; performance artist Cynthia Hopkins; and many more. The full series performance history is available at greenwichhouse.org/uncharted.
In 2019, as an outgrowth of the Uncharted series, Black and Wasserman founded the New York Presenters Consortium (NYPC) to leverage the collective resources of a network of New York City non-profit arts organizations in support of New York-based performing artists and the cultural ecosystem. In addition to GHMS, this year’s NYPC partners include Joe’s Pub, the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, National Sawdust, and Bryant Park Corporation.
Since 1905, Greenwich House Music School (GHMS) has provided high-quality, affordable arts education for New Yorkers of all ages. The distinguished faculty teach students the beauty and transformative power of music, art, dance and theater through private lessons, classes, workshops and monthly recitals. GHMS is a member of the New York City Coalition of Community Schools of the Arts and The National Guild of Community Arts Education.
2023 Uncharted Artist Information
Endea Owens and The Cookout
Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:00pm
$20
Known as one of jazz’s most vibrant emerging artists, Endea Owens is a Detroit-raised recording artist, bassist, and composer. She has been mentored by jazz icons the likes of Marcus Belgrave, Rodney Whitaker, and Ron Carter. She has toured and performed with Wynton Marsalis, Jennifer Holliday, Diana Ross, Rhonda Ross, Solange, Jon Batiste, Jazzmeia Horn, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Steve Turre, to name only a few. In 2018, Endea graduated from The Juilliard School and quickly joined The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as a member of their house band, Stay Human. Since then, Endea has won an Emmy, Grammy Award, and a George Foster Peabody Award. Endea’s work has appeared on Jon Batiste’s Grammy Award-winning album We Are, the Oscar-nominated film Judas and the Black Messiah, and H.E.R’s widely acclaimed Super Bowl LV performance. Endea has a true passion for philanthropy and teaching. She has taught students across the United States, South America, and Europe. In 2020, Endea founded the Community Cookout, a non-profit organization birthed out of the COVID-19 pandemic, that has provided meals and music to underserved neighborhoods in New York City. To date, Endea’s organization has helped feed close to 3,000 New Yorkers and has hosted over a dozen free concerts. In 2022, Endea composed an original piece about the life of Ida B. Wells entitled Ida’s Crusade for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which was also performed by the NYO Carnegie Hall Orchestra. Endea has written for brands such as Pyer Moss and Glossier. She is set to premiere a newly commissioned work with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and will also serve as the 2023 MAC Music Innovator with that organization. In addition to her work with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Endea is the curator for the National Arts Club and a fellow for “Jazz is Now!” with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, where she presents original compositions, curates series, and headlines performances for their 2022-23 season. Endea’s debut album, Feel Good Music, is set for release in 2023.
Keyanna Hutchinson
Plugged and Unplugged
Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:00pm
$15
Instagram / YouTube / Soundcloud
Keyanna Hutchinson is a versatile musician from Brooklyn whose multivalent influences can be traced to her Caribbean lineage, her love for popular music, her conservatory training, and a remarkably busy touring and recording schedule supporting performers in the fields of rock, jazz, R&B and experimental composition. Though perhaps best known for her fluency as a guitarist, Hutchinson is also a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer. She counts Terri Lynne Carrington, Lizz Wright and Brandon Ross of Harriet Tubman as mentors and is a recent awardee of the prestigious Next Jazz Legacy fellowship through New Music USA. Hutchinson composes and plays to pay homage and to propagate the roots of black and indigenous sound. For her Uncharted concert, “Plugged and Unplugged,” she will focus her many talents for a new project, intended to be eventually released as her debut album, that combines her love of live performance with recent explorations into electronic composition and remix culture.
Mafer Bandola
Pipiris Nights – Mi vida y tiempos
Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:00pm
$15
Website / Instagram / YouTube / Soundcloud
Mafer Bandola takes the last name of her alias from her instrument of choice, the heavy-bottomed, four-string bandola llanera, played throughout the African and Latin diasporas but indigenous to Venezuela. In addition to being one of the most active and fluent bandola players in the world, Mafer is also a community organizer, self-taught composer, and educator. She brings a unique perspective and direction to the traditionally male-dominated performance of the bandola llanera, imbuing her playing with fresh energy over original joropos that draw from oral traditions and modern influences, peppered with spirited improvisations in Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Mafer is a co-founder and performer with the band LADAMA, a collective of four female musicians each from a different Latin and North American country. She currently hosts Pipiris Nights, the first recurring, community-focused series of Venezuelan joropo music and dance in New York. For this Uncharted Pipiris Nights event, Mafer will transplant this rich cultural export from the Venezuelan llanos to downtown Manhattan for a special gathering and introspective storytelling session that explores her own and other contemporary narratives about Venezuelan immigrant life.
Nour Harkati
Mawwal
*Co-Presented with Habibi Festival*
Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:00pm
$20
Website / Instagram / YouTube
Singer/songwriter Nour Harkati draws creative inspiration both from his birthplace of Tunisia and from his nomadic exploration of the lands and disparate sounds of North Africa, Europe and New York City. His music transliterates Tunisian lyrics into the beautiful and familiar language of a busker’s entreaty to stop and empathize. With help from his collaborators Uran Kamper on saxophone and Khalil Lajmi on frame drum and bendir, Harkati presents Mawwal, a show that takes its name from the traditional Arabic genre of sentimental songs of loss and desire that shares some of the emotional weight of the Portuguese concept of saudade. For this concert, Harkati will present new experimentations that blend ambient spiritual sound with heavily rhythmic and unusually structured vocal lines. These wistfully nostalgic tracks provide insight into Harkati’s journey and the future of global folk music.
Nour Harkati’s performance is co-presented with Habibi Festival. Created with the goal of giving a snapshot of contemporary and traditional musics of the South West Asia North Africa (SWANA) region, Habibi Festival aims to take listeners on a journey of the sounds wafting through the airwaves and living rooms of cities spanning Marrakech to Baghdad. Habibi events, while secular in nature, give artists and audiences the space to engage directly or indirectly with the intersectionality of Arab and Muslim identity.
Animal Revenge
Music by Dana Lyn
Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:00pm
$20
Website / Instagram / Soundcloud
Brooklyn-based visual artist and composer Dana Lyn has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, the National Arts Council of Ireland, the Apple Hill String Quartet, violinist Johnny Gandelsman, violist Nicholas Cords, A Far Cry, Palaver Strings, and the New Orchestra of Washington. She has made eight albums as a bandleader or co-bandleader; her musical projects include the sextet Mother Octopus; collaborations with actor Vincent D’Onofrio, guitarist Kyle Sanna, and poet Louis de Paor; and a string trio with cellist Marika Hughes and violinist Charlie Burnham that was scheduled as part of the 2022 Uncharted series. She has written music for short films, New York Times’ audio stories, and for dance, and her contributions to the Ken Burns documentary American Holocaust were called “sublime” by The Boston Globe. As a visual artist, Lyn has made stop-motion animations for her own music as well as for performance artist Taylor Mac, Slim Bone Head Volt (her collaboration with Vincent D’Onofrio), children’s artist Elena Moon Park, her duo with Sanna, and acclaimed woodwind players Ben Goldberg and Mike McGinnis. She has performed with Ethan Hawke, D’Angelo, Bruce Springsteen and Natalie Merchant, among others, and regularly performs with Stew, avant cellist Hank Roberts, and Taylor Mac. Lyn was an artist-in-residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in the Spring of 2017, a member of the Joe’s Pub Working Group in 2018, and was a 2018 awardee of the American Composers Forum Create Commission. Most recently, she was a recipient of a 2020 NYFA Women’s Fund Award for Media, Music and Theater and a Sundance Composer Lab Fellow in 2021. Her radio play with de Paor received a Gold Award at the 2022 New York Festivals Radio Awards. Her recently released album, A Point on a Slow Curve, is a suite of music for septet and four voices inspired by visual artist Jay Defeo and her monumental work, The Rose; it has since been featured on WNYC’s New Sounds program and noted for its “singular expressionism, incorporating forms common to the modern jazz idiom alongside chamber, choir, folk, and avant-garde (Dave Sumner, The Bird is the Worm).” Lyn currently plays in the band of the Tony and Grammy Award-winning musical, Hadestown and is also a well-versed fiddle player in the Irish tradition.
Oran Etkin Duo with Sasha Berliner
Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 8:00pm
$15
Oran Etkin’s constantly evolving practice originates from his openness to collaboration and to forging deep musical connections that transcend traditional boundaries. For his 2023 Uncharted concert, Etkin has enlisted the young vibraphonist Sasha Berliner (Downbeat Magazine’s 2020 Critics Poll “Rising Star”) to join him in the premiere of their new and as-yet-unnamed duo, employing electronics and mixers to accentuate the merger of Oran on multiple woodwinds – including clarinet, bass clarinet, and tenor saxophone – with Sasha on vibraphone. Etkin and Berliner first performed together in the summer of 2021 at the Hamptons Jazz Festival, laying the groundwork for this project. Now, through their Uncharted residency, they will delve even deeper into the unique sounds their instruments can create in tandem. Their bold compositions, intended for eventual recording, will take inspiration from the natural cycles of decomposition and regeneration, explicitly riffing off motivic and textural development and disintegration. Etkin and Berliner will transform the Greenwich House Music School’s Recital Hall into a custom-built laboratory, aiming to build something absolutely original and truly “uncharted”. Don’t miss this chance to see their experiment come to life for the first time!
About Greenwich House
Greenwich House Music School is a part of Greenwich House. Founded in 1902 as a settlement house, Greenwich House today offers innovative programs and services in arts and education, older adult services, behavioral and mental health, and workforce development. Greenwich House responds to evolving community needs by taking thoughtful risks, piloting new models and approaches, and implementing effective solutions. The Greenwich House Music School is proud to be part of this caring community of friends and neighbors in New York. For more information, visit www.greenwichhouse.org.
About Greenwich House Music School
Website: GreenwichHouseMusicSchool.org
Twitter: @GHMusicSchool
Instagram: @GHMusicSchool
Facebook: GreenwichHouseMusicSchool
For additional information and up-to-the-minute performance updates, call 212-242-4770 or visit the Greenwich House website at greenwichhouse.org.
Uncharted is made possible by the generous support of the Baisley Powell Elebash Fund.
Uncharted is also supported, in part, by NYU, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
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