Silkroad Up-Close offers a closer look at some of the extraordinary artists who make up the Silkroad Ensemble and at the ideas, traditions, and relationships that shape their work. Created as an intimate counterpart to Silkroad’s large-scale concert presentations, this flagship series gives Ensemble members the space to lead: inviting collaborators, tracing musical lineages, and developing programs rooted in their own creative lives. The result is a portrait of Silkroad from the inside, revealing not only the breadth of traditions represented within the Ensemble, but the curiosity and exchange that continually transform them.
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PROGRAM 1
The Arch
Kaoru Watanabe brings a group of extraordinary musicians to perform music from his album The Arch, released in September 2026 on New Amsterdam and figureight Records. The music is a culmination of a lifetime of determined searching, fearless experimentation, and transformative discovery. Watanabe has immersed himself in jazz, traditional Japanese, Western classical, experimental, and improvisational music in equal measure over the last five decades, and the music on the album reflects this unique synthesis of disparate styles. His collaborators, Shahzad Ismaily, Shoko Nagai and Satoshi Takeishi are all acclaimed musicians, renowned for their wide-ranging and innovative artistry.
PROGRAM 2
Silkroad Up-Close featuring Layale Chaker
Ahl al Thara
Violinist-composer Layale Chaker’s new project, is rooted in song as inheritance and as offering. Drawing from melodies and recitations passed down through her mother and elders, alongside reimagined songs from South Lebanon and Galilee, Layale weaves an intimate songbook of remembrance, tenderness and return, received, reshaped in the present and offered onward.
Moving fluidly through jazz, Arabic maqam, contemporary classical textures, and polyphonic improvisational lineages, the work inhabits traditions that remain vibrant, shifting, and alive. New soundscapes celebrate the gifts by those who came before, carried forward as living testimony.
At its heart, the project reflects song’s enduring role in collective awakening. Music as the force that continues to accompany every revolution yet to come.
(Personnel to be announced from the stage)
Over five Wednesday evenings at National Sawdust, Silkroad artists and special guests come together in performances that cross generations and geographies, moving freely between inherited forms and new composition, improvisation and experimentation.
The intimate setting of National Sawdust brings audiences closer to the individual artists of the Ensemble, creating space for the musical connections, discoveries, and moments of spontaneity that can only emerge when artists and audiences share an intimate musical experience.
Join us for the other events in this series:
ABOUT SILKROAD
Yo-Yo Ma conceived Silkroad in 1998, recognizing the historical Silk Road as a model for cultural collaboration—for the exchange of ideas, tradition, and innovation across borders. In a groundbreaking experiment, he brought together musicians from the lands of the Silk Road to co-create a musical language founded in difference, thus creating the foundation of Silkroad: both a touring ensemble comprised of world-class musicians from all over the globe and a Boston-based non-profit organization working to make a positive impact across borders through the arts.
Today, under the leadership of Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens and President and CEO Ben Hartley, Silkroad leads social impact initiatives and educational programming alongside the creation of new music by the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble.
To learn more, please visit silkroad.org and @silkroadproject on social media.
This is a seated performance. If you require accessibility accommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.
ABOUT KAORU WATANABE
Composer and instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe's work is rooted in traditional Japanese performing arts and infused with experimental and improvisational elements. His signature skill of merging the music, literature, and aesthetic philosophies of Japan with disparate styles and mediums has made him a highly sought-after collaborator, working with such iconic artists as André 3000, Yo-Yo Ma, Wes Anderson, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Laurie Anderson, Jason Moran, and Japanese National Living Treasure Bando Tamasaburo. The son of two St. Louis Symphony Orchestra musicians, Watanabe studied jazz at the Manhattan School of Music before moving to Japan to study noh-kan flute with Matsuda Hiroyuki and Edo Matsuri Bayashi with Suzuki Kyosuke in Tokyo. He then moved to Sado, a remote island in the Sea of Japan, where he undertook a rigorous two-year apprenticeship with the groundbreaking Japanese taiko performing arts ensemble Kodo. During this time, he trained in traditional Japanese folk dancing, singing, drumming, woodworking, tea ceremony, rice farming, running, Noh, and Kyogen. Watanabe then became the first American to join the ensemble as a performing member, serving as an ambassador of Japanese music on the world's greatest stages and as artistic director of their annual music festival, leading collaborations with luminaries such as Zakir Hussain, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Tamangoh. After a decade in Japan, Watanabe returned to New York to pursue a solo career, performing with and composing for top artists of their respective genres, such as flamenco dancer Eva Yerbabuena, Mongolian Official State Morin Khuur player Tserendorj, multiple Grammy Award-winning rapper Residente, visual artist Simone Leigh, Rhiannon Giddens and the Silkroad Ensemble, and many others, all while championing the essential qualities of Japanese flutes and percussion. In 2024, Watanabe launched Bloodlines Interwoven, a multifaceted commissioning project, festival, and ensemble celebrating heritage, immigration, and diaspora through music, cuisine, and storytelling.
ABOUT SHOKO NAGAI
Shoko Nagai is a versatile musical artist who improvises and performs with world-renowned musicians on piano and accordion and composes original scores for films and live performances. Whether she is performing Klezmer, Balkan, or experimental music, Nagai is a charismatic presence onstage who hypnotizes audiences with her intense focus and virtuoso sound. Nagai has performed with Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn, Butch Morris, Erik Freidlander, Frank London, Elliot Sharp, and Miho Hatori (Cibo Matto)
ABOUT SHAHZAD ISMAILY
Shahzad Ismaily is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, and engineer, as well as one of the most sought-after collaborators in contemporary creative music. A master of electric bass, guitar, drums, percussion, synthesizers, and found sound instruments, Ismaily has a reputation for creating immersive, improvisational, deeply human music. It’s a career shaped in part by a lifetime with ectodermal dysplasia: a rare genetic disorder that profoundly influenced his relationship with sound and his approach to making music. Since arriving in New York City in 2000, Ismaily has collaborated with an extraordinary range of artists, including Laurie Anderson, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Feist, Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, Marc Ribot, Colin Stetson, Yoko Ono, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Beyond music, his work extends into film, installation, and performance art, including contributions to the Oscar-nominated Frozen River and Ragnar Kjartansson’s acclaimed installation The Visitors.
ABOUT SATOSHI TAKEISHI
Satoshi Takeishi, drummer, percussionist, and arranger is a native of Mito, Japan. While at Berklee College of Music in Boston, MA, he developed an interest in the music of South America, went to live in Colombia for four years, and forged many musical and personal relationships. His interest expanded to the rhythms and melodies of the Middle East, where he studied and performed with Armenian-American oud master Joe Zeytoonian. Since moving to New York in 1991, he has performed and recorded with many musicians such as Ray Barretto, Carlos “Patato” Valdes, Eliane Elias, Marc Johnson, Eddie Gomez, Randy Brecker, Dave Liebman, Anthony Braxton, Mark Murphy, Herbie Mann, Paul Winter Consort, Rabih Abu Khalil, Toshiko Akiyoshi Big Band, Erik Friedlander, and Pablo Ziegler to name a few. He continues to explore multi-cultural, electronic, and improvisational music with local musicians and composers in New York.
ABOUT LAYALE CHAKER
Composer and violinist Layale Chaker was raised on the verge of multiple musical streams in her native Lebanon.
Her complex sound universe, described by NPR as “beguiling” with “bright and beautiful strands… gorgeous, wine-dark swirls,” lies at the intersection of classical contemporary music, jazz, Arabic music, and improvisation.
Her practice is committed to art as both sanctuary and crossroads—a place where ancestral narratives meet contemporary voices in a continuous reimagination of the world we inherit, live in and bequeath. A 2026 USA Artist Fellow, and 2020-2022 Jerome Hill Fellow, Chaker is also recipient of the 2022 Opera America Discovery 2022 Award, among many other accolades.
Layale has recently premiered a commissioned evening-length work, Qarar/Jawab at the Venice Biennale, and the world premiere of her double concerto, “Dawning”, alongside Kinan Azmeh, for clarinet, violin and orchestra, co-commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Nebraska Crossroads Music Festival and Lincoln Symphony Orchestra.
Ruinous Gods, Chaker’s debut full-length chamber opera in collaboration with librettist Lisa Schlesinger, saw its world premiere at the 2024 Spoleto Festival, followed by its European premiere at Wuppertal Opera in the fall of 2024. Ruinous Gods uses elements from myths and fairy tales to create a 21st-century fantasia exploring how mass displacement triggers profound psychological trauma among its youngest sufferers. 2024 also marked the release of a new double portrait album on In a Circle Records, one disc featuring Chaker’s classical works performed by the ETHEL Quartet, and the other a complementary portrait with Chaker’s chamber jazz quintet, Sarafand.
Layale also recently completed a year-long residency at WQXR and premiered a new work for violin and choir at Morgenland Festival Osnabruck in Germany with the choral ensemble Capella Amsterdam. She has worked with Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Ziad Rahbani, Johnny Gandelsman, Holland Baroque, Oxford Orchestra, New World Symphony, London Jazz Festival, Alderburgh Festival, Junger Kunstler Festival Bayreuth, Lucerne Festival, Beethoven Festival Bonn, and Avignon Festival among others, with featured performances at the Berlin Philharmonic, Abbaye de Royaumont, Hancher, The Stone, National Sawdust, Royal Albert Hall, and Wigmore Hall.
Layale’s debut album Inner Rhyme (In a Circle Records, 2019) was named “Top of The World” by Songlines, ranked #1 on NPR’s 10 Best Releases, lived at #1 for several weeks on Amazon Music, and received rave reviews by the The New York Times, BBC Music Magazine, Strings Magazine, Jazz World and many others. Composed between Beirut, Paris and London from 2016-2018 and recorded in New York over the summer of 2018, the album unveils musical threads that are mapped through the rhythmical cycles of the twelve classical Arabic poetic meters, the fluidity of oral and free forms, the abstraction of language into the physical contour of verses and the percussive potential of words.
Layale Chaker commenced her musical training at the National Higher Conservatory of Beirut in her native country, before pursuing higher degrees at the Conservatoire de Paris and the Royal Academy of Music in London.
She is a Laureate of the 2019 Concours International Nadia et Lili Boulanger; Finalist of the 2018 Rolex Mentor & Protege Prize; winner of the 2017 Ruth Anderson Competition; and recipient of the 2019 and 2025 Diaphonique Franco-British Commission Prize, the 2018 Arab Fund for Arts and Culture Grant and the 2018 Royal Academy of Music Guinness Award.