Look at the lineup once and the names stack up like the spine of a guitar magazine collection. John Scofield. Bill Frisell. Al Di Meola. Mike Stern. Vernon Reid. Eric Gales. Alex Skolnick. Andy McKee. Greg Koch. Jackie Venson. Look again — these are not casual co-billings on a multi-genre festival weekend. This is a guitar festival in the most literal sense of the term, two days curated for the people who think about pickup configurations on the train ride home. The inaugural Brooklyn Guitar Festival arrives June 12 and 13, 2026, with the kind of player-first lineup that does not exist anywhere else in the Northeast.
The festival splits across two Brooklyn venues, one of them a 1,000-capacity Polish heritage ballroom in Greenpoint that has been serving pierogi alongside live music since the early 2000s, the other an open-air venue inside Prospect Park itself. Friday’s program runs evening sets at Warsaw, the storied room inside the Polish National Home at 261 Driggs Avenue. Saturday spans an entire day across two stages at the LeFrak Center at Lakeside, the modern outdoor pavilion at 171 East Drive in Prospect Park. Tickets — single-day and two-day passes — are on sale now through Universe.com.
This is the festival’s debut year. There is no past lineup to compare it against, no historical attendance to cite, no anecdote about how it started small and grew. What there is, instead, is a programmer’s argument made in the booking itself: that a serious guitar festival, anchored by tribute concerts to two of the form’s giants, can find an audience in the borough that has spent two decades reshaping what an American music scene looks like.
The Music
The structural centerpieces of the weekend are two all-star tribute concerts, and they tell you most of what you need to know about the festival’s curatorial intent.
Friday night at Warsaw closes with a tribute to Jeff Beck, who died on January 10, 2023, at the age of 78 from bacterial meningitis. Beck’s death left an absence that has not yet been filled — there is no other rock guitarist working in the same conversation about tone, phrasing, and the physical relationship between hands and instrument. The tribute lineup is built for that vocabulary: Vernon Reid, founding guitarist of Living Colour and one of the most fearless rock improvisers of his generation; Alex Skolnick, who has spent three decades moving between Testament’s thrash metal and the harmonic territory of his own jazz trio; Eric Gales, a blues-rock virtuoso whose left-handed, upside-down playing belongs in a permanent loop on any serious guitar-fan’s phone; and Greg Koch, the Wisconsin-based player and educator whose YouTube presence and Fender clinics have made him one of the most recognizable working players in the country. The promise is not an impersonation. It is a community of players reaching for the same notes Beck reached for, in front of a Brooklyn audience that knows the difference.
Saturday’s centerpiece is the tribute to John Scofield, which is unusual in that Scofield himself is alive, well, and playing the same festival the night before. Scofield — Berklee class of 1973, three and a half years in Miles Davis’s band from 1982 through 1985, nine Grammy nominations and three wins, more than thirty albums as a leader — is not the kind of artist who normally receives a tribute set. That the festival’s producers have programmed one anyway, with Bill Frisell, Nir Felder, and David Gilmore among the players honoring his catalog, suggests an understanding of what Scofield has actually meant to two generations of guitarists who came up after him. The Berklee cohort that included Scofield, Frisell, Joe Lovano, and George Garzone is one of the most influential graduating classes in jazz education history. Watching Frisell play Scofield’s compositions, with Scofield himself headlining the same stage the previous evening, is the kind of programming move that justifies the festival’s existence.
Friday’s full Warsaw bill is built as a build-up to the Beck tribute. Jackie Venson opens at 7 PM — the Austin-born, Berklee-trained blues and soul guitarist whose 2025 album The Love Anthology extended her run as one of the most compelling young guitar voices in American roots music. Adam Rogers brings his DICE project at 8 PM with Nate Smith on drums and Fima Ephron on bass, a contemporary jazz unit working in territory that overlaps with Scofield’s and Frisell’s late-period output. The John Scofield Trio plays at 9 PM. The Beck tribute closes the night at 10:15 PM.
Saturday at the LeFrak Center runs two stages from noon until past 10 PM. The Mainstage opens with the Greg Koch Trio at 1 PM, followed by the Ally Venable Trio — the young Texas blues guitarist whose career trajectory in the past five years has been one of the more notable in the blues-rock world. Mike Stern, the Berklee-trained fusion player who came up through Miles Davis’s electric bands in the early 1980s and has been a New York jazz fixture ever since, brings his group at 3 PM. Bill Frisell’s trio takes the stage at 5 PM, followed by the Scofield tribute at 6 PM and Al Di Meola headlining at 8:30 PM. Di Meola — who joined Chick Corea’s Return to Forever at age nineteen in 1974 and recorded the Friday Night in San Francisco trio album with Paco de Lucía and John McLaughlin in 1980 — is a fitting closer for the weekend. The 2nd Stage runs in parallel with Andy McKee at noon, Joel Harrison at 2 PM, Alex Skolnick at 4 PM, and Vernon Reid at 7:30 PM.
The Experience
The two venues are doing very different things, and that contrast is part of the festival’s appeal.
Warsaw is one of New York’s genuinely irreplaceable music rooms. Built in 1914 as the Polish National Home, the building has served Greenpoint’s Polish-American community for more than a century. The Live Nation-operated music venue inside opened in 2001, and the room developed a reputation almost immediately — first for hardcore and punk bookings, then for the broader indie and rock scene as the neighborhood gentrified around it. The pierogi are not a joke. The Warsaw Bistro inside the venue serves them by the dozen, alongside kielbasa, blintzes, and hunters’ stew, which means a Friday night show at Warsaw is, structurally, a meal and a concert in one building. For a guitar festival aimed at people who care enough to make a trip to Brooklyn for it, the room reads as exactly right: storied, character-rich, and built for the kind of attentive listening these players deserve.
The LeFrak Center at Lakeside is a different proposition entirely. The 26-acre complex, built as part of the most ambitious renovation Prospect Park has undertaken since its 19th-century construction, opened in 2013 and operates as an ice rink in winter and a roller-skating, boating, and music venue in summer. The architecture is modern, the setting is parkland, and the festival’s choice to program a daylong outdoor guitar event here is genuinely savvy — Prospect Park in mid-June offers shade, open lawns, sightlines from the surrounding park trails, and the kind of casual passing audience that an indoor venue cannot generate. People will encounter this festival who did not buy tickets to it, which is part of how festivals like this build the audiences they need to come back in year two.
Brooklyn in mid-June is approaching its peak: warm days in the 70s and low 80s, long evenings, the parks at their fullest use. Greenpoint and Prospect Park are accessible by subway from anywhere in the five boroughs, which makes the festival a realistic day trip for the regional guitar community that stretches from the Hudson Valley through Westchester, Long Island, and into northern New Jersey. The audience for this kind of programming exists. The question the inaugural year will answer is whether the festival can find them at scale.
Getting There and Know Before You Go
Warsaw is at 261 Driggs Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The G train to Nassau Avenue puts you within a few blocks of the door. The L train to Bedford Avenue is a longer walk but workable. For drivers, street parking in Greenpoint on a Friday night is challenging — rideshares or transit are the move.
The LeFrak Center at Lakeside is at 171 East Drive in Prospect Park. The B and Q trains to Prospect Park station drop you at the park’s southeast corner, a short walk from the venue. The F and G trains to 15th Street-Prospect Park or the 2 and 3 to Grand Army Plaza are also options depending on where you are coming from. The park itself is a destination — pack a light bag with sunscreen, a water bottle, and a layer for the evening sets. The festival runs rain or shine; the LeFrak Center has covered areas, but anyone planning to spend most of the day outdoors should prepare accordingly.
Tickets are sold through Universe.com — Friday-only at Warsaw, Saturday-only at the LeFrak Center, or a two-day pass covering both venues. The festival’s site at bklynguitarfest.com is the source of truth for pricing tiers, set times, and any lineup updates closer to the date.
Why This Festival Matters
Multi-genre festivals have to be everything to everyone — the lineup is curated to spread risk across audience segments, the genre programming is broad by design, the headliners are booked to move tickets, not to make a musical argument. A guitar festival has a different job. Every name on the bill speaks to the same audience, which means the bookers can program for depth instead of breadth. The Scofield tribute, scheduled the day after Scofield himself plays the festival, is a programming choice that would not survive a meeting at most multi-genre events. Here, it is the entire point.
What the Brooklyn Guitar Festival is attempting in its first year is closer to what a thoughtful jazz festival or a specialty bluegrass gathering does — programming for the players and the listeners who follow players, not for the people who came for the food trucks. The fact that it is happening in Brooklyn, the same borough that has reshaped American indie rock, jazz, and singer-songwriter scenes over the past two decades, gives it a built-in audience that no other city in the Northeast can match. Whether it works as a sustainable annual event will depend on what year two looks like. The lineup for year one suggests the people running it know what they are doing.
The Brooklyn Guitar Festival runs June 12-13, 2026, at Warsaw in Greenpoint and the LeFrak Center at Lakeside in Prospect Park. Lineup and tickets at bklynguitarfest.com.
