New York Guitar Festival: Califone & Howard Fishman

Watch an interview with upcoming New York Guitar Festival performer Howard Fishman!

Silent Films/Live Guitars: Groundbreaking guitarists premiere original film scores for silent films
by Buster Keaton.

Califone premieres a new score for Buster Keaton's Go West (1925), in which a small-town young man, overwhelmed by a brief taste of life in New York City, tries his luck as a cowboy on a ranch. “Califone scoring music for a Buster Keaton film makes almost too much sense," says band member Tim Rutili. "We will try to capture the inner stillness and the outer chaos on Buster’s migration west. Perfect.”

Califone, the Chicago-based experimental rock band whose music the New York Times called “enthralling,” are known for their 11 albums and the independent film All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, which premiered at Sundance in 2010.

The “infectious…ingenious” (Wall Street Journal), “scintillating…gritty…brilliant” (Washington Post) guitarist/singer/composer/bandleader Howard Fishman has actually been called "an unsettling combination of Buster Keaton and Lou Reed" by Edge NY. No stranger to dramatic musical storytelling, Fishman's oeuvre includes the multimedia song cycle No Further Instructions about roughing it through rural Romania; "we are destroyed," a folk-jazz oratorio about the Donner Party; and his recently-released Moon Country, an album featuring his acclaimed quartet's interpretations of Hoagy Carmichael songs. He will perform a score to Buster Keaton’s 1922 comedy The Frozen North, in which a spectacularly unlucky Keaton tries to rob a group of gamblers with a wanted poster of a man holding a gun and shoots a couple he mistakes for his wife and her lover.