Jorge Glem and Sam Reider Bring Brooklyn-Cumaná to the Stissing Center

August 1, 7:30pm | Pine Plains, NY

Jorge Glem and Sam Reider play the Stissing Center's Banning Hall on August 1, bringing a collaboration built from a chance meeting at a New York City house party in 2016. Glem is a GRAMMY-nominated cuatrista and founding member of the Venezuelan ensemble C4 Trio; Reider is an American accordionist, pianist, and composer. Their duo has taken them from public parks and subway stations to Lincoln Center, SFJAZZ, and NPR's Tiny Desk.

Glem, born in Cumaná, has spent his career pushing the Venezuelan cuatro—a small, four-stringed instrument central to the country's folk tradition—into territory it was never meant to occupy, performing solo cuatro concertos with Gustavo Dudamel and orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony. With C4 Trío, he's won two Latin GRAMMYs and earned a US GRAMMY nomination, sharing stages with Rubén Blades, Calle 13, and Paquito D'Rivera along the way. Reider grew up in San Francisco in a family of Jewish-American musicians, trained as a jazz pianist, and picked up the accordion almost by accident while writing his Columbia University thesis comparing Woody Guthrie and Ira Gershwin—a detour that reshaped his entire career. He's since toured internationally as a US State Department musical ambassador and leads The Human Hands, a Brooklyn-based acoustic ensemble the New York Times has described as modern folk music with saxophone and accordion.

Their debut album together, Brooklyn-Cumaná, came out in November 2022 and earned a nomination for Best Instrumental Album at the 2023 Latin GRAMMY Awards. The record moves through Venezuelan merengue, joropo, and other traditional rhythms alongside original compositions drawing on American jazz and roots music—two distinct musical languages meeting in the middle rather than one accommodating the other. NPR has called it a rare case of two musical cultures coming together to make something that didn't exist before.

Banning Hall, The Stissing Center, 2950 Church St., Pine Plains, NY. Tickets at thestissingcenter.org.