Set 1: Kyle Sanna: live coding set with Kinan Azmeh (clarinet), Lily Holgate (violin), Nathan Koci (accordion)

Kyle Sanna performs music from his algorithmic electronic-meets-chamber orchestra album, Everything Again Is New, with an ensemble of clarinet, violin, and accordion. Sanna will use live coding to improvise in real time with recorded fragments of his own composition, and will be joined by instrumentalists Kinan Azmeh, Lily Holgate, and Nathan Koci, who will play newly composed and improvised parts with the electronics, creating more layers of iteration and continuing a dialogue between performance and recorded media.

Set 2:

Elsa Saade: original songs in Arabic, with Kinan Azmeh (clarinet) and Kyle Sanna (guitar)

In conversation with poets and serenaders from the South West Asian and North African world, home of the Palestinian Sunbird, Elsa’s music and voice holds the listener on a journey of migration across oceans, love despite a monstrous world and disobedience as a means to emancipation. The sunbird is a territorial bird, an important pollinator in an ecosystem and is very resistant to change in habitat. He could never be made to live in a cage and will keep with the tradition of flight under the sun, like her music and voice.

Kyle Sanna is a Brooklyn-based guitarist and composer whose work spans four divergent disciplines: contemporary composition, jazz and improvisation, the traditional music of Ireland, and music technology and production. Hailed by The New Yorker as a “first-rate, versatile musician”, Sanna releases music ranging from solo guitar and orchestral works to algorithmic electronica and conceptual improvisations, and collaborates widely as a performer and arranger with artists around the world, including ongoing projects with Kinan Azmeh, Maeve Gilchrist, Dana Lyn, Seamus Egan, Martin Hayes and his band Ground Patrol.

Elsa Saade is a multidisciplinary artist, doula, and community mobilizer whose work pulses at the intersection of protest and art. For over a decade, she has wielded music, puppetry, and street performance as tools of dissent. Her artistry lands on her immigration route between Beirut and New York City. She is currently in the pre-production phase for her first album “Songs of the Sunbird” and her debut Living Room puppet show with Kuzbara Collective Collective, which she co-founded in 2024.

Hailed as a “virtuoso, intensely soulful" by the New York Times and "spellbinding" by the New Yorker. Syrian-born, Brooklyn-based genre-bending composer and clarinetist Kinan Azmeh has been touring the globe with great acclaim as a soloist, composer and improviser. He has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, Marcel Khalife, John McLaughlin, Daniel Barenboim, Aynur and Djivan Gasparian, among others. He leads his own bands Hewar and the Kinan Azmeh CityBand. He is also a Silkroad ensemble artist with whom he won a Grammy in 2016. His recent orchestral album Uneven Sky with the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra Berlin has won Germany’s OpusKlassik Award in 2019.

Recent commissions include works for the New York Philharmonic, Robert Wilson, Carnegie Hall and the Morgenland Festival where he premiered his opera Songs For Days To Come, which is fully sung in Arabic.

He is a graduate of The Juilliard School, the Damascus High Institute of Music, and Damascus University’s School of Electrical Engineering, Kinan holds a doctorate in music from the City University of New York.

Kinan serves on the United States National Council For the Arts.