Dear listeners,
As all those ecstatic celebrations of the Knicks’ championship win this weekend reminded us, there’s nothing like quite like a bunch of New Yorkers gathering outdoors for some communal joy.
Luckily, every summer the city gives us plenty of opportunities to experience live music outside. The eclectic, long-running concert series SummerStage, which hosts concerts (most of them free) in Central Park and various other locations across the five boroughs, celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. My colleague Ben Sisario reported a piece about the series’ history, for which he interviewed producers of the event and musicians who had performed there over the years including Patti Smith, David Byrne, Youssou N’Dour, Thurston Moore and Jon Batiste.
I loved reading these artists’ memories of their SummerStage concerts and their experiences being an awed audience member at a great show themselves. For once, I also enjoyed reading the comments section, which is unusually harmonious — just a bunch of readers sharing their own favorite SummerStage stories. (Mine would have to be the evening in July 2023, when a sudden but brief downpour interrupted a performance by the ambient folk duo Meg Baird and Mary Lattimore — because once it ended, they got to finish their appropriately celestial set under a rainbow.)
In honor of SummerStage’s 40th anniversary, and the arrival of outdoor-concert weather, today’s playlist spotlights some of the artists who are playing this year. They include bona fide living legends (the American soul survivor Mavis Staples; the adventurously innovative Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo) as well as promising up-and-comers (the Chicago indie-pop outfit Sharp Pins). I didn’t include every artist performing this year, but you can check out the full list here.
Even if you can’t make it to New York this summer to catch some free live music, you can still enjoy this playlist — preferably in the open air.
Mother Nature has a way of warning us,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. Sharp Pins: “I Don’t Have the Heart”
One of the first free SummerStage shows of the season, on June 24, features performances from the spirited English rockers Black Country, New Road and the delightfully spiky indie trio Horsegirl. But I’d get there early to catch the first act on the bill, Sharp Pins — the infectious project helmed by the 21-year-old Chicago musician Kai Slater. The jangly melodicism of Sharp Pins’s most recent album, “Balloon Balloon Balloon,” proves Slater to be an ace student of power-pop past.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Spoon: “Sister Jack”
The perennially excellent Spoon will headline SummerStage on July 8, and over three decades into the band’s existence, the frontman Britt Daniel and company have certainly amassed a deep enough catalog to put together an all-killer, no-filler set. Spoon’s most recent album, “Lucifer on the Sofa,” from 2022, was quite strong, but let’s instead hear a throwback from the band’s fifth album, “Gimme Fiction,” which received a whole lot of play on my iPod when it was released in 2005.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Bilal: “Soul Sista”
When he wowed viewers of this year’s Grammy Awards back in February with a gorgeous performance of “Untitled (How Does It Feel?)” in honor of his late friend and collaborator D’Angelo, the singer-songwriter Bilal made it clear that his voice remains in fine form. You can hear it live when he headlines a free SummerStage show on July 12 in Brooklyn’s Herbert Von King Park, but in the meantime, revisit this single from his 2001 debut album “1st Born Second.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Mavis Staples: “Human Mind”
I was bummed to miss Mavis Staples, 86, when she played the Beacon Theater in February, so I’m glad I’ll get a chance to catch her when she returns to SummerStage on July 16. She brings gravitas and grit to this highlight from her lovely 2025 album “Sad and Beautiful World.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. De La Soul: “Sunny Storms”
Long Island’s own De La Soul will headline a SummerStage show in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens on July 17, though they’ll be without one of their founding members, David Jolicoeur, known as Trugoy the Dove, who died in 2023. His legacy is celebrated throughout De La Soul’s most recent album, last year’s “Cabin in the Sky,” which features this laid-back, wisdom-spouting track.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Susana Baca: “Negra Presuntuosa”
The renowned Peruvian singer-songwriter Susana Baca leads a stacked bill honoring Afro-Latina musicians on July 26; Luedji Luna ft. Liniker, Lady G, Mai-Elka Prado ft. Lush Song Collective and DJ DMZ will also perform. To get in the spirit, here’s Baca’s defiant and sensual 1997 ode to the power of Black women, an Andrés Soto composition that she transformed into one of her signature songs.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
7. Angélique Kidjo: “Mother Nature”
Finally, since releasing her debut album in 1981, the Beninese musician Angélique Kidjo has enjoyed a wonderfully prolific and varied career: In the last decade alone, she’s released a full reworking of Talking Heads’ album “Remain in Light,” a Grammy-winning tribute to Celia Cruz and, just a few months ago, the galvanizing album “Hope,” which finds her collaborating with musicians like Pharrell Williams, Arya Starr and Nile Rodgers. In anticipation of her SummerStage performance on Aug. 23, let’s go out with the soulful title track from her 2022 album of the same name — in hopes that Mother Nature blesses all these SummerStage performances with beautiful weather.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Amplifier Playlist
“7 Great Artists Playing SummerStage ‘26” track list Track 1: Sharp Pins, “I Don’t Have the Heart” Track 2: Spoon, “Sister Jack” Track 3: Bilal, “Soul Sista” Track 4: Mavis Staples, “Human Mind” Track 5: De La Soul, “Sunny Storms” Track 6: Susana Baca, “Negra Presuntuosa” Track 7: Angélique Kidjo, “Mother Nature”
A highlight of SummerStage past
Ben Sisario spent so much time asking artists about their favorite SummerStage memories, but I was curious to hear about his. Below, he reminisces on his pick for the best SummerStage show he’s seen.
I’ve seen lots of great shows at SummerStage over the years, but the most transcendent happened on a breezy July afternoon in 2002: the Senegalese act Orchestra Baobab, offering a lesson in the hidden crosscurrents of global music and also just a perfect New York City musical idyll.
The group’s history is fascinating. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Orchestra Baobab demonstrated how nimbly musical traditions can bounce back and forth across the planet. African rhythms, carried to the Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade, helped create the rich heritage we now call Afro-Cuban music, giving us the son and the mambo. By the mid-20th century, these immensely popular styles had traveled back to West Africa, where groups like Orchestra Baobab tinkered with it further. The band’s awesome guitarist Barthélémy Attisso, for example, was famous for adding gorgeous melodic latticework.
In the abstract, that may sound a little academic. But in Central Park, it was pure pleasure — just Latin rhythms and West African melodies floating weightlessly through the park and making every body sway. When I was interviewing Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend for my oral history of SummerStage, he also talked about some of the great shows he had seen there, and seemed to be searching his memory for something. A few minutes after the call ended, I got a text message: He and his bandmates had seen Orchestra Baobab there, too.
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