Members event: Steve Gunn + Ryan Sawyer

To culminate our summer membership drive, Blank Forms and Grimm Artisanal Ales invite members to gather for drinks and a rooftop performance by Steve Gunn and Ryan Sawyer.

Steve Gunn is a New York-based guitarist and songwriter whose career has spanned nearly twenty years, producing volumes of critically-acclaimed solo, duo, and ensemble recordings that represent milestones of contemporary guitar-driven music. His wildly varied discography has built upon a panoply of far-flung influences, from country blues and Gnawa to free jazz and Carnatic music. The results are often filtered through his own syncretic lens, usually landing somewhere between the familiar and the idiosyncratic: acoustic drone with the trio GHQ; fuzzed-out guitar deconstruction with the Gunn-Truscinski Duo; and the inwardly-drawn balladry of his solo singer-songwriter albums. His most recent record Let the Moon Be a Planet (RVNG Intl.), a collaboration with pianist David Moore of Bing & Ruth, was released in March. A record with John Truscinski and Bill Nace, Glass Band (Three Lobed), will be released later this month in July. 

Born in 1976 in San Antonio, Texas, Ryan Sawyer started playing drums at 11, learning his craft through an early exposure to not only rock and jazz but also the colloquial conjunto, zydeco, and punk rock musics of his hometown. He moved to New York in 1997 to pursue his interest in improvised music. He has been called a "free jazz superstar" by the New York Times.