Soul of the City: Juneteenth with Queen Esther

Celebrate Juneteenth at MCNY with a live performance by Queen Esther and her band. Hailed as "a Black Lucinda Williams” and a “brutal, original, explosive singer…” (Vanity Fair, Spain), Queen Esther's music fuses the sounds of jazz, the blues, and rock 'n roll into what she describes as Black Americana.

Queen Esther will perform works from her latest album Rona that features rangy alt-Americana songs written in Harlem during the early months of the Pandemic lockdown. With Brandi Disterheft on bass, Jeff McLaughlin on guitar, J. Walter Hawkes on ukulele, and Sharp Radway on piano.

Soul of the City: Live @ MCNY is a series of intimate concerts featuring a wide range of New York artists, both upcoming and veteran, performing acoustic sets and sharing the personal stories behind their music.

Queen Esther is a vocalist, lyricist, songwriter, musician, producer, solo performer, playwright and librettist. Raised in the unapologetically Black bastion of Atlanta, Georgia – ensconced in the vibrancy of the Black Arts Movement and the sonic undertow of the Black church – and rooted in Charleston, South Carolina's culturally rich and enigmatic Lowcountry, a region with African traditions and Black folkways that span centuries and deeply inform her work, Queen Esther embraces lost American history along with her wide-ranging and ever changing aural influences, as she leans heavily on the bluing of the note to create reclamation-driven Black Americana. Her Southern penchant for storytelling entwines historical truths with personal anecdotes that reinterpret traditional and original songs, blurring the past and present, and embracing the connectedness of the human spirit.