The 42nd annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival kicks off in Telluride, Colorado, Thursday morning and continues through the weekend to coincide with the summer solstice, with performances from Rhiannon Giddens, Punch Brothers, Chris Thile & Edgar Meyer, and Ry Cooder with Sharon White and Ricky Skaggs, as well as a workshop from Punch Brothers. The festival will be streaming live from KOTO Community Radio at koto.org.

Before all of the festival music-making even begins, Rhiannon Giddens gives a preview of what's to come this weekend with a performance for FirstGrass—a free outdoor show in Mountain Village, a free gondola ride up from Telluride—this evening at 5 PM MT. She then helps get the festival itself under way with a set on the main stage Thursday at 3:45 PM. Giddens and the band, including her fellow members of Carolina Chocolate Drops, perform songs from her solo debut album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, which Rolling Stone just named among the year's best so far.

Punch Brothers are also on hand Thursday, for one of the festival's several workshops in intimate Elks Park. Theirs, titled, naturally, Happy Hour, takes place at 4:30 PM. The band's banjoist Noam Pikelny will have already played the very first main-stage set of the festival, with fiddle player Stuart Duncan, that morning at 10:45 AM. He and his Punch Brothers band mates play their own main-stage set, featuring songs from their new album, The Phosphorescent Blues, the following day, Friday, at 5:45 PM.

Chris Thile has a duo set on the main stage as well, with bassist Edgar Meyer. The pair—which has released two albums on Nonesuch, most recently the Grammy Award–winning Bass & Mandolin last September—plays on the festival's closing day, Sunday, at 4 PM.

The final main-stage performance of the festival comes from Ry Cooder and his current touring mates, singer Sharon White and country/bluegrass musician Ricky Skaggs, when they hit the stage on Sunday at 9:15 PM, just after the sun has set on the longest day of the year.

But not, just yet, on the music-making, for still to come that night is the final performance of the whole event: the last NightGrass performance in the Sheridan Opera House, at 10:30 PM, led, as has now become a Telluride Bluegrass Festival tradition, by Punch Brothers. The folks behind the festival call it "the festival's final epic jams," saying: "Many emotional notes will be played and sung deep, deep into this night as we bid farewell to another TBF. ... This show has become an essential part of the Telluride Bluegrass experience. The Punch Brothers are the soundtrack to our journey home; they are the musical guide to set us on our way toward the 43rd Telluride Bluegrass next Summer Solstice."

For more information on all of the Telluride Bluegrass Festival proceedings, visit bluegrass.com. And don't forget to tune in as it happens at koto.org!