The LA Phil's West Coast, Left Coast festival concludes tonight, after more than two weeks of performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall, with a celebration of the Beat poets featuring Joshua Redman, among others. The Los Angeles Times praised Kronos's "enthusiastic" Friday performance and the LA Phil's Sunday performance of Adams's "ecstatic" Dharma at Big Sur, led by the composer, in which Leila Josefowicz "played brilliantly ... rising to heights of rapture."

The nominations are in for the 52nd Grammy Awards and include five Nonesuch artists: Allen Toussaint for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, The Bright Mississippi; Wilco for Best Americana Album, Wilco (the album); Shawn Colvin for Best Contemporary Folk Album, Live; and, for Best Contemporary World Music Album, both Amadou & Mariam (Welcome to Mali) and Oumou Sangare (Seya). Steven Epstein was nominated as Producer of the Year, Classical, for work including John Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony.

John Adams and Kronos Quartet return to Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles tonight for another concert in West Coast, Left Coast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music festival curated by Adams. Tonight, they'll join the LA Phil for the world premiere of Thomas Newman's new piece, It Got Dark. An encore performance will be given at the Hall tomorrow night.

West Coast, Left Coast, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's festival curated by John Adams, continues tonight with the composer and Kronos Quartet performing California-inspired music at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Adams will lead the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group in performances of Ingram Marshall's Fog Tropes and selections from Frank Zappa's Yellow Shark; Kronos performs Harry Partch's U.S. Highball.

The Times (UK) has had its say on the best albums of the decade, covering the best in classical, jazz, world music, and pop, and Nonesuch artists are represented in every one: John Adams at No. 1 on the classical list with Doctor Atomic Symphony; Brad Mehldau and Bill Frisell in jazz; Youssou N'Dour, Orchestra Baobab, "Cachaíto" Lopez, and Amadou & Mariam in world; the Malian duo in pop as well, along with Brian Wilson and Wilco.

John Adams's Naive and Sentimental Music will be featured as part of the New York City Ballet's Opening Night Benefit performance at Lincoln Center tonight. The piece serves as score and title to a new work by Peter Martins, the company's ballet master in chief. "New York City Ballet’s opening-night benefit was obviously planned by someone who threw away the Classic Guide to the Boring Gala handbook," says the New York Times. "Put on your finery and go."

This weekend marks the start of West Coast, Left Coast, the LA Philharmonic festival curated by John Adams, its creative chair. The festival, which celebrates the unique spirit of California's creative renegades, kicks off on Saturday with a special Opening Event titled Eureka!, featuring Kronos Quartet's premiere of a new work by Thomas Newman.

NPR's All Songs Considered has compiled a list of The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings. Among them are three Nonesuch recordings: John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté's In the Heart of the Moon (World Circuit/Nonesuch), and Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. "These are the game-changers," says NPR of the 50, "records that signaled some sort of shift in the way music is made or sounds, or ones that were especially influential or historically significant."

John Adams will be at the Art Institute of Chicago this evening to give the Chicago Humanities Festival's President's Lecture: Where Music and Literature Collide. On Saturday, he will be at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, to receive the 2009 NEA Opera Honors Award at a ceremony hosted by actor/singer Brian Stokes Mitchell and soprano Shirley Verrett.

John Adams's new blog, Hell Mouth, has been given a "cheers" in The Guardian, which describes the blog as both "hilarious" and "brilliant." The St. Lawrence String Quartet continues its world tour with the String Quartet Adams wrote for the group in 2008, in concerts in Des Moines and Ann Arbor this weekend. The Detroit Free Press says "the appearance of a new Adams string quartet is big news."

John Adams gives the first of two Tanner Lectures on Human Values this afternoon at Yale University this afternoon, with the second to follow tomorrow afternoon. "Perhaps the most celebrated living American composer," writes the New Haven Advocate, "John Adams is nearly as adept with the English language as he is with musical notation." What's more, "Adams has created some of the most essential classical music of our age."

Earbox.com has long been the go-to source for information on the works of composer John Adams and has now received a makeover, including the addition of a blog from the composer. The first few posts have already caught the attention of The New Yorker's Alex Ross, who writes, "Few artists are as engagingly forthright in their interviews and writings. Adams has now started up a blog on his home site, with the promising name Hell Mouth."