While organizing an eclectic, daylong celebration of guitar music at the 92nd Street Y, it occurred to me that an accompanying exhibit of guitar-related photography would further engage the audience for an extraordinary array of guitarists from around the world.
Here’s an odd thing. The New York Guitar Festival includes a Guitar Marathon in the 917-seat Kaufmann Concert Hall at the 92nd Street Y, an all-afternoon-and-after-a-short-intermission-all-evening event that throws every kind of guitarist at the audience until even the most desperate guitar addict leaves feeling as if he’s just about had enough for now, and maybe he’ll go home and lie down with a cool cloth on his face and listen to some Enya.
When he died last November at the age of 58, George Harrison was hailed as "the quiet Beatle," the guy who successfully managed a graceful transition from the global megastardom of the 1960s to a second career as a movie producer (whose Handmade Films banked such Monty Python comedies as "Life of Brian" and 'Time Bandits," and did much to goose the British film industry to its 1980s renaissance); he never tilted at the zeitgeist, like the "martyred Beatle," John Lennon, or persisted in recording mediocre solo albums for years on end, like the "cute Beatle," Paul McCartney. And, well, he wasn't Ringo, either.
