Beginning Saturday and stretching through February 6, some 60 musicians will converge on our city for more than two-dozen performances at venues ranging from Merkin Concert Hall to the Apple Store in SoHo as part of the 7th New York Guitar Festival.

“It’s a monthlong series of events, some of which are free, some of which aren’t, some that are purely entertainment, and some that have educational aspects,” a festival participant, the country singer, songwriter, and sadly lapsed WFMU DJ Laura Cantrell, said. “It’s really cool to be included as an artist because, playing around New York City, there aren’t always that many artist-friendly gigs out there.”

Though for some the words “Guitar Festival” may conjure visions of unending noodling and solo heroics, the festival, according to Ms. Cantrell, is a celebration of the instrument’s egalitarian nature as much as its ubiquity.

“I am not a ‘shredder,’ nor any kind of picker,” she said. “I just love that the guitar enables me to play with the band. There are great artists of the guitar in all different types of American music, and I think that’s what makes it interesting to use the instrument as a taking-off point.”

Despite the presence of such revered six-string icons as Jorma Kaukonen (ex-Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna) and jazz-rock great Larry Coryell, the New York Guitar Festival’s brain trust, according to Ms. Cantrell, “are not just searching out the super pickers. They have a real range of types of musicians and people who approach music with very different goals.” This year’s event will feature free concerts, a new artists-in-residence program, guest curators, multimedia works, as well as tributes to such guitar heroes as Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, and Lefty Frizzell.

Ms. Cantrell initially became involved in the New York Guitar Festival via the centerpiece show of 2006, in which different guitarists played songs from Bruce Springsteen’s seminal acoustic record, “Nebraska,” in album order. The festival organizers “wanted to pick artists that had different points of view and different backgrounds, to see what they could do with the material of one songwriter,” Ms. Cantrell said, adding that the idea was to interpret Mr. Springsteen’s folk dirges “in a way that was not just a re-creation of the music.” Except in one case. The event’s concept lured Mr. Springsteen himself to the stage for an unannounced performance.

Tomorrow night, Ms. Cantrell will be on hand at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden as part of a similar and arguably more ambitious non-re-creation entitled “The Royal Albert Hall Project.” For the free show, Ms. Cantrell and a series of invited artists will perform Bob Dylan’s infamous electric set from May 1966 in Manchester, Britain (but forever misidentified as having taken place in London’s Royal Albert Hall), at which Mr. Dylan and an electric backing group (three of whom would shortly be christened the Band) tore through the singer’s repertoire with a clanging, guitar-driven ferocity that infuriated vocal audience members and even prompted one to shout out “Judas!” The artist-audience confrontation made the show a treasured bootleg staple among Mr. Dylan’s fans until it was finally released legitimately in 1998.

“Any Dylan song is kind of intimidating,” Ms. Cantrell said, “so it’s a great artistic exercise to figure what will I bring to this, how close to the original will it be, how far will I go to find my own perspective, and how will I get in there. I’m still kind of wading through that at the moment.”

Ms. Cantrell is also mindful of the intense fascination and resulting pressure that Mr. Dylan’s music exerts on her fellow performers. “Stevie Jackson from Belle and Sebastian is coming from Glasgow,” she said. “He’s a complete Dylan nut and part of what I call the worldwide Dylan underground.” Asked whether she is equally fixated, Ms. Cantrell described her Dylan cult connection as more of “an observer of this phenomenon, and not so much a participant,” she said. “I got stuck in a rut, when I was young, of paying attention mostly to hillbillies. I was immersed in a totally different style of stuff.”

Taking the Winter Garden stage tomorrow night to reinterpret a moment from one of American popular music’s most revered documents, Ms. Cantrell said, carries “a mystery to it that I find very exciting. If you’re going to have a guitar festival, you can go in so many different directions and have interesting tangents and the echo of influence of one different group of musicians on another.”

The New York Guitar Festival runs from Saturday through February 6. For information, call 212-945-2600.