Songs of Protest: Bruce Cockburn

Updated March 16, 2020: In response to domestic coronavirus developments, Stanford University is strongly discouraging all large-scale university gatherings, effective March 4 through May 15. Stanford Live, in compliance with the university’s decision, is moving to cancel large-scale performances within this time frame. This performance has been canceled—read more.

For 50 years, Bruce Cockburn’s music has embraced folk, jazz, rock, and global sounds that reflect his travels as an activist and artist everywhere from Guatemala and Mali, Mozambique and Nepal. He describes his signature guitar style as “a combination of country blues fingerpicking and poorly absorbed jazz training,” and it’s proven to be the perfect accompaniment to his lyrics about joy, pain, fear, faith, and the world around us. At the Bing, Cockburn will ignite the concert hall space with his signature sounds in a special program highlighting songs of protest.

Opening for Cockburn will be multi-instrumentalist and singer Nano Stern—a Chilean-born musician with a style that is indie-folk-rock-jazz fusion. Protest-legend Joan Baez has called Nano “the best young Chilean songwriter of his generation.”