Nonesuch Records

The Nonesuch Story

By Michael Hill

The sound of Nonesuch Records has never been easy to encapsulate. Its enduring strength lies in its diversity and ability to embrace the unexpected and the new, regardless of genre. The roster includes traditional and contemporary classical, world music, jazz, bluegrass, folk and rock, musical theatre, and film scores, along with work that thrillingly crosses and intermingles disciplines. The performers and projects that join this deep and wide-ranging catalog simply, intuitively, fit.

Founded as a budget classical label in 1964 by Jac Holzman, head of the then-independent Elektra Records, Nonesuch Records has grown over the last six decades to pursue a broad mission. In a business filled with constant change, its leadership has been remarkably stable. Two people—the late Tracey Sterne and Robert Hurwitz—were at the helm for 48 of those years: Sterne led Nonesuch from its founding until 1979, and Hurwitz ran the label for 33 years, essentially relaunching Nonesuch in 1984 and overseeing its evolution until becoming Chairman Emeritus in 2017. David Bither, who joined Nonesuch in 1995 as Senior Vice President, took over as President in 2017. This continuity of vision has allowed Nonesuch to maintain a singular place within the music industry.

“What is a Nonesuch record?” asks Bither. “It’s not at this point a particular genre or style but maybe it represents a kind of ambition and originality. We are part of a community that we helped to create, that we are supportive of and supported by. We are trying to uphold and preserve that environment and to continue to be a home for artists who have something original to say. This is why we are here and what we will continue to do.”

One testament to the label’s continued vitality and diversity is the strong showing Nonesuch makes in the annual Grammy nominations. Its records are often nominated in numerous categories, typically in the double digits, ranging from classical to jazz to Americana to rock to folk. Nonesuch composers are also the recipients of multiple Pulitzer Prizes in Music, and the label is home to seven MacArthur “Genius” Award winners.

In 2024, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, which has routinely featured Nonesuch artists in its adventurous programs, celebrated the label’s 60th Anniversary with appearances by a dozen Nonesuch artists. This event was yet another spotlight on this thriving musical community, one that has grown from relatively humble origins in the 1960s to the vital, world-renowned label it is today.

From its beginnings, Nonesuch has been at the forefront of contemporary classical music. During Sterne's tenure, Nonesuch launched the Explorer Series, the most ambitious series of world music recordings in the commercial record business up to that point; Nonesuch has since worked with many leading artists from around the world, maintaining a robust catalog of eclectic, international music. Under Hurwitz beginning in the 1980s, the label expanded its repertoire to incorporate an evolving roster of jazz artists and has taken an active role in American musical theater. The company has also been selectively involved with the soundtracks for many acclaimed films.

In the mid-nineties, Nonesuch entered the adult and alternative pop worlds. The label also began recording a new generation of musicians and continues to attract adventurous young talent from various genres. As newer artists join the roster and build their careers with Nonesuch, listeners have the opportunity to watch them mature in plain sight. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Rhiannon Giddens, who has enjoyed one of the widest-ranging recording and performing careers of any contemporary Nonesuch artist, told Billboard in 2023: “The label is the most old-fashioned, in a very good way—one that seeks to follow an artist as they grow and change. It’s hard to imagine another home that would let me be me so completely.”

“Our mission as a label has always faced commercial headwinds, but these are especially challenging times for the business,” Bither admits. “We’re all struggling to be heard over the din of the 100,000 tracks a day being uploaded. But I think there will always be a place for what we do. We’ve never looked at it as being a niche, we’ve looked at it as being about a certain kind of quality. And the world of music is a big world.”

Nonesuch Records remains a thriving community, a refuge, a home, or, as Mojo has said, “a haven for iconoclasts fond of blurring genre boundaries.” And for some artists, being there has been a dream come true. As Alynda Segarra, leader of Hurray for the Riff Raff, said: “Nonesuch was everything I was looking for. It’s a prestigious label with a roster of artists that … I want to have a career like that, a career that’s long, that is inspired and takes chances, where the art is first.” Two-time Grammy winner Molly Tuttle told MBW: “When I was starting out, I looked at what labels my favorite albums were on and a lot were on Nonesuch. It was always a range of different styles, but the throughline was really good and super interesting music. Artistic integrity is really important and that comes down to who you record with, the album artwork, everything. Everyone Nonesuch works with has this high standard for what they want to put out.”

"I’ve always admired Nonesuch and the wide variety of recordings the label releases,” says guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson. "One of the things I’ve always appreciated is how open the label is to, really, all types of music. I like the idea of being on a label that seems to take a broad view of music. It’s not a jazz label, and my music is less likely to be pegged as such when it may be on other labels."

“I always looked at it as a place where you could go and be defined by your work and not by other people’s work,” Chris Thile says. “There are just a lot of tremendous artists who are most at home not having a home. So it just feels great to me to be here. There’s encouragement to just see whatever that idea is that I just can’t see past. Whatever it may be ... they always seem to encourage me to just take that to the mat to figure out what’s there.”

Introduction 

In a 1998 article, Boston Globe reporter Ed Seigel called Nonesuch "an oasis of artistic excitement”—and the same holds true today. With each new release, said Seigel, “there is a sense of occasion, the feeling that the artists in question have been assembled not only as an exercise in star power, but as an exercise in artistic exploration." Now, of course, one can find the work of Nonesuch artists on streaming platforms, as digital downloads, on CDs and vinyl—with older titles available, often for the first time, in LP form as part of an ongoing reissue program.

Though the face of Nonesuch has changed dramatically in the years since Tracey Sterne was leading the company, the label has maintained its focus in key musical areas throughout its history. Nonesuch was at the forefront of contemporary classical music during the Stern era (George Crumb, Elliott Carter, Morton Subotnick, William Bolcom) and during Hurwitz’s thirty-three-year tenure (John Adams, Steve Reich, Kronos Quartet, Philip Glass, Louis Andriessen, Frederic Rzewski, Henryk Górecki, Timo Andres, Donnacha Dennehy). That commitment has continued to the present day with such artists as Caroline Shaw, Dylan Mattingly, and Julia Bullock, and a collaborative relationship with vanguard contemporary-classical label New Amsterdam.

During Sterne's tenure, Nonesuch began the ambitious Explorer Series of world music recordings, ultimately issuing more than 100 titles; Nonesuch has since worked with many leading artists from around the world, including legendary Brazilian singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso; the late Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla; Senegalese icon Youssou N'Dour; Cape Verdean singer Cesária Évora; Malian-born singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré; Romani band Taraf de Haïdouks; Portuguese fado singer Carminho; and, through a seventeen-year relationship with World Circuit Records, the unforgettable recordings of the Buena Vista Social Club and Ibrahim Ferrer from Cuba, Senegal's Orchestra Baobab and Mali's Toumani Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré. Nonesuch is again working with Nick Gold of World Circuit on a series of projects from Mali including the visionary balafonist Neba Solo and the last recording from kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate and his sons.

In its early days, Nonesuch released landmark recordings of Scott Joplin's music that reached wide audiences and commissioned new recordings of songs by composers like Charles Ives and Stephen Foster. In the 1990s, the label made important historical contributions with its George and Ira Gershwin Library of Congress series, classic piano roll recordings of George Gershwin and Jelly Roll Morton, and the theater songs of Kurt Weill, Rodgers and Hart, Leonard Bernstein, and Vernon Duke.

Classical music has always been a major foundation of the label. During its early years significant recordings were made by Jan DeGaetani, Paul Jacobs, and Gilbert Kalish, among others; in later years, Nonesuch has released many memorable albums by Richard Goode, Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Gidon Kremer, Jeremy Denk, and Julia Bullock.

In more recent decades, Nonesuch has expanded into new areas of repertoire. It started recording jazz in 1984, with the now-classic World Saxophone Quartet Plays Duke Ellington, and through the years has worked with such artists as Bill Frisell, Tigran Hamasyan, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau, Pat Metheny, Joshua Redman, and John Zorn. The label continues to boast a diverse roster of contemporary jazz artists, including Ambrose Akinmusire, Mary Halvorson, Darcy James Argue, and Cécile McLorin Salvant, as well as collaborating with the visionary label International Anthem on projects by Makaya McCraven, Jeff Parker, and others.

The company has long taken an active role in American musical theatre, including seven recordings of shows and soundtracks by Stephen Sondheim and all three major works by Adam Guettel. David Byrne’s Here Lies Love started out as a Nonesuch recording with an all-star cast of guest vocalists, had its stage premiere with successful runs at Manhattan’s Public Theatre in 2013 and London’s National Theatre in 2014, and was mounted on Broadway in an acclaimed 2023 production. In 2021, Byrne won a Tony Award for his Broadway hit American Utopia, which artfully blended theatre with concert presentation. It had also begun its life as a Nonesuch recording. The show was preserved in an exuberant, Emmy Award-nominated film version by director Spike Lee, featured on HBO, and on an original Broadway cast album on Nonesuch.

During Hurwitz’s tenure, the company worked closely with the New York City Ballet and The George Balanchine Trust, co-producing the filmed version of their beloved The Nutcracker and releasing videos of many of Balanchine's most seminal ballets, as well as important works by Mark Morris, Paul Taylor, and Twyla Tharp. The company has been selectively involved with the soundtracks of a number of acclaimed television programs (Ken Burns’ The Civil War and Baseball, Angels in America, The Wire, Leonardo da Vinci) and films (Powaqqatsi, Wings of Desire, Requiem for a Dream, Kundun, The Hours, The Thin Blue Line, There Will Be Blood, Sweeney Todd, Revolutionary Road, I Am Love, True Grit, Norwegian Wood, Inside Llewyn Davis, Boyhood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread). The company also made landmark recordings, cherished by cinephiles, of film scores by Georges Delerue, Alex North, Toru Takemitsu, and Leonard Rosenman. This work notably continued in 2025 with Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and the soundtrack to Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, prominently featuring the music of John Adams.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Nonesuch entered the adult and alternative pop worlds. Many of the world's leading singers and songwriters—including Emmylou Harris, Randy Newman, Robert Plant, Natalie Merchant, k.d. lang, Joni Mitchell, and Brian Wilson—made important albums for Nonesuch during this period. The label also began recording a new generation of musicians, including Wilco, The Black Keys, Punch Brothers, Chris Thile, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Rhiannon Giddens, Conor Oberst, Nickel Creek, Sam Amidon, Devendra Banhart, Lake Street Dive, and, later, Molly Tuttle and Hurray for the Riff Raff.

"When a label is hot,” said Uncut in 2004, “you can buy almost any record on it and know you’re getting a guarantee of quality. Elektra had it in the ’60s and Island in the early ’70s. Today, without any hype or hoopla, Nonesuch Records has quietly taken up a similar position.” 

Early History 

Nonesuch Records was conceived as an experiment in hip, '60s-style entrepreneurship. In 1964, Jac Holzman came up with an idea to create a budget classical music label aimed at the same youthful audience that was buying classic literature in paperback editions. As Holzman told the New York Times, "Classical records went for $5, and I put them out for $2.50. I liked $2.50 because it was the price of a trade paperback." Holzman didn't commission new recordings; instead, he licensed existing albums from small European labels and repackaged them for a US audience, commissioning artfully groovy covers regarded by some to be as collectible as the albums they contained. 

To bolster his operation, Holzman brought over Teresa "Tracey" Sterne from Vanguard Records, where she'd worked alongside label head Seymour Solomon. The Brooklyn-born Sterne had been a child prodigy. (In 2000, on the album A Portrait, Nonesuch paired a recording of performances she made as a teenager with a selection of recordings she supervised during her time at the label.) She pursued an adult career as a concert pianist before deciding to shift her focus to the business side of the classical music industry, first as a publicity assistant with Sol Hurok's concert-producing organization and then with Columbia Records, before moving over to Vanguard. Sterne brought as much passion and drive to her work behind the scenes as she did to her concert appearances; she was a brilliant, uncompromising executive who bonded deeply with the artists she signed, doggedly championed their music, and insisted that each element of a Nonesuch release adhere to the highest of standards. 

Composer George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children, inspired by the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, sold more than 70,000 units, a remarkable feat for a challenging and brilliant modern piece from an avant-garde source. It was performed by the Contemporary Classical Ensemble (CCE) and featured mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani, a close colleague of Sterne's who displayed an unflagging commitment to such work. (DeGaetani was also an influential teacher; Nonesuch artist Dawn Upshaw was one of her students.) CCE co-founder Charles Wuorinen was commissioned by Sterne to create a piece for synthesized instrumentation; his resulting Time's Encomium won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1970. And a young musicologist who worked with Sterne, Joshua Rifkin, introduced Scott Joplin's music to a vast audience with his album, Piano Rags by Scott Joplin, resulting in the company's first million-selling record and igniting a passion for ragtime jazz in a mainstream audience. 

Perhaps most significantly, Sterne established the Nonesuch Explorer Series, which presented indigenous music from around the world, beginning with field recordings brought to Sterne by inveterate traveler-musicologist David Lewiston and produced for disc by Peter Siegel. This was "world music" at its purest—much of it, like the Balinese sounds on Music from the Morning of the World and Golden Rain, hitherto unheard in the West. (The former was inducted into the National Recording Registry of "culturally significant" sound recordings in 2008.) The Explorer Series was not simply an anthropological mission: Sterne considered the work to be on the same aesthetic level as that of any Western Nonesuch artist. The series found enthusiastic followers, including a counter-cultural listenership that employed pieces like the 22-minute long "Monkey Chant" from Golden Rain as a soundtrack for their chemically altered armchair travels. 

Holzman sold Elektra to Warner Communications in 1970. When Nonesuch turned 15 in 1979, critic Peter G. Davis wrote, in a New York Times article entitled "The Special Touch of Nonesuch," that the label "has always been run with the kind of personal touch that creates a flavor of autonomy and generates quality. Warner's enlightened 'hands off' policy has no doubt helped encourage this salutary effect, for it means that Teresa Sterne, who has guided Nonesuch's fortunes for most of its 15 years can more or less do things her way." 

Sterne's strong guiding hand had cemented the reputation of Nonesuch with savvy listeners and critics, but her fastidious approach held less sway with the corporate heads. In December of 1979, mere months after Davis had lavished such praise on her stewardship, Sterne made headlines in the Times again: she had been abruptly dismissed from her job at the behest of Elektra chairman Joe Smith. Sterne expressed "complete surprise and shock" to a reporter, though she did speculate that weaker sales might have prompted the move. Her firing prompted an outcry from the label's artists and New York City's creative community at large. More than 2,000 people wrote to the head of Warner Communications in protest, and all the artists on the label sent a signed petition to the New York Times objecting to her ouster. 

Change in Leadership 

The label operated from Los Angeles for the next four years under the direction of Keith Holzman, Jac's younger brother. Many of the artists Sterne had signed, though disgruntled, chose to remain on the label without their mentor, perhaps because Sterne had done her job so well: there simply was no other label for these iconoclastic artists to go to.  The singular reputation that Nonesuch accrued under Sterne—and the tremendous potential it still held—was not lost on Warner Bros. Records executive and former Blue Thumb Records chief Bob Krasnow when he took over the chairmanship of Elektra Records in 1983. He decided to hire 34-year-old Robert Hurwitz to run Nonesuch. Hurwitz was the head of American operations for the German-based jazz and new-music label ECM, which at the time was being distributed by Warner Bros., a deal Krasnow had brokered.  Hurwitz, a Los Angeles native raised, as he told the New York Times, in "a fairly evolved household as far as music was concerned," was himself a pianist who came to New York City at the age of 21, determined to either pursue a career as a musician or break into the record business. His first job was at Columbia Records, where he was hired as a publicity writer.

He met Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records, when Eicher came looking for a distribution deal at Columbia; they hit it off immediately and Eicher told Hurwitz that he wanted him to run ECM's American company as soon as he could find someone to release the records.

True to his word, in 1975 Eicher hired Hurwitz, then 25, to run ECM in America. They worked together for nine years, and during that time Hurwitz began relationships with four musicians who would ultimately join him at Nonesuch: Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Steve Reich, and John Adams. During Hurwitz's first years at ECM, the company was wildly successful (it was the time of Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert, Chick Corea's Return to Forever, and the launch of Metheny's career), and by the late 1970s, every important American company was interested in distributing the label. In 1978, ECM was brought to Warner Bros. by Krasnow. 

Krasnow took over Elektra in 1982 and brought Hurwitz to Nonesuch in the fall of 1984. (He had made the offer to Hurwitz 20 years to the day after Nonesuch's founding.) Hurwitz was refreshingly low-key in his approach and demeanor, though his passion, knowledge, and authority were immediately evident, no matter how soft-spoken the conversation might be. Krasnow, confident in his hire, encouraged Hurwitz to view Nonesuch as a tabula rasa; he would be free to pursue his own vision for the label. "Talk to me in five years," Krasnow, only somewhat facetiously, told him. 

Perhaps Krasnow simply anticipated how busy Hurwitz would be. As Hurwitz recalls, "The first two years were incredibly fertile. We were able to sign Steve Reich and John Adams, and start working with Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet, and John Zorn. It was a time when most of the classical divisions of major labels were asleep. They were so busy devising genre ‘crossover’ projects and re-issuing catalog on CD, still a new technology at the time, that few people were doing anything from an A&R point of view." In 1985, Nonesuch released Reich's Desert Music and Adams's Harmonielehre. A year later came Kronos Quartet's self-titled debut, Zorn's The Big Gundown, World Saxophone Quartet's Plays Duke Ellington, and Sérgio and Odair Assad's debut recording. Of the label's past roster, only classical pianist Richard Goode and soprano Teresa Stratas remained. 

Hurwitz's initial signing of new-music mavericks mirrored the adventurous spirit that Sterne had established. But their sound and sensibility were radically, almost defiantly, different. The recordings of Adams, Glass, and Reich, as well as the new-music aesthetic of Kronos, seemed to contrast sharply with the more cerebral, European-influenced new music favored in the early days of Nonesuch.

At the revitalized Nonesuch, these artists found a record-buying audience. "I think it's a wonderful irony," muses Hurwitz, "because the recording of new music is possibly the least commercially viable aspect of anything one can do in the record business. But all of our initial successes came out of that area." The first three Kronos albums sold close to 100,000 copies, an unheard-of result from a string quartet playing modern music; their fifth, Pieces of Africa, sold close to 400,000 and was the number one record on Billboard's classical and world music charts simultaneously. Early Glass soundtracks for Mishima and Powaqqatsi sold more than 100,000, as did Different Trains and Desert Music by Steve Reich. 

This remarkable commercial success culminated with the London Sinfonietta’s recording of Polish composer Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony, featuring singer and Nonesuch artist Dawn Upshaw, which sold more than one million copies, the bestselling album ever by a contemporary composer. Górecki's solemn and moving symphony is a minimalist hymn to the suffering of his native people in World War II. The reclusive Górecki had composed the piece in 1976, but it was relatively unknown until the Nonesuch recording was released in 1992. Repeated exposure on Classic FM radio in London helped to propel Gorecki’s Third into the unprecedented #6 spot on the British pop charts. Emotionally affected listeners turned the symphony into a cultural phenomenon. Górecki himself speculated, "Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music … Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing." 

"These kinds of records not only gave us credibility," says Hurwitz, "they sent a signal out to the musical community about what we were doing. We got caught up in a wave at absolutely the right moment." 

New Directions 

During the first few years under Hurwitz's leadership, Nonesuch also began recording jazz musicians and composers who were part of the burgeoning downtown New York scene, like John Zorn and Wayne Horvitz. The company released four acclaimed recordings from Zorn (Naked City, Spillane, The Big Gundown, and Spy vs. Spy) and a half-dozen recordings from the World Saxophone Quartet, and began a long relationship with guitarist Bill Frisell. 

The signings of Adams and Reich (who were both given exclusive composer contracts, which continue to this day) could be seen in the context of a time-honored tradition of the record business. Goddard Lieberson at Columbia, still running the company during Hurwitz’s tenure there, had signed Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky; Decca had signed Benjamin Britten; Deutsche Grammophon had signed Karl Stockhausen and Hans Werner Henze. But the introduction of Kronos, Zorn, and soon afterwards, the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, all symbolized the greatest break from Nonesuch's past, and opened opportunities that would emerge in the future. 

As prescient as these signings seem now, Hurwitz believes "those things at the time were obvious and easy to do. But for me, the most dramatic turning point was when the opportunity came to work with Caetano Veloso. That was a moment when we could do something really different." 

Signing the Brazilian singer-songwriter, a founding member of the voraciously eclectic, politically subversive late-'60s Tropicalismo movement, asserts Hurwitz, "turned everything on its head." As he recalled, “I inherited a company that was beloved by many for its rich classical music tradition, and suddenly one day there is a genuine pop musician like Caetano. In one respect, he did not fit in any of the criteria that were established for the company, and yet he was artistically on as high a level as anyone performing music at that time. It broke down a wall, and perhaps at that moment, Nonesuch ceased to be ‘a classical label’. Suddenly, so much more was now possible. Years later, hearing Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sing Caetano's ‘Tradicão’ as beautifully as she had sung Bach, Handel, Peter Lieberson, or John Adams, my initial instincts were reaffirmed.” 

With Veloso, Hurwitz had ventured into intriguingly uncharted territory for the label, with an artist who was, for an audience outside the US, a genuine pop star. This wasn't world music, just worldly, and that sensibility informed subsequent international deals at the label. In 1987, Nonesuch released Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a collection of a cappella performances by the Bulgarian State Television female choir that was as entrancingly strange as it was beautiful, full of otherworldly harmonies. The album was a press sensation and a left-field commercial hit, despite its Bulgarian lyrics. Like so many Nonesuch releases, it became a cultural event. A year later, Astor Piazzolla, elegant master of the Argentine nuevo tango, made his first of two recordings for the label, both of which sold in the hundreds of thousands. Violinist Gideon Kremer would later achieve similar success with his Hommage à Piazzolla recordings. 

The Bulgarian choir album began a new period of commercial prosperity for the company. Soon after the Bulgarian success, Hurwitz brought the Gipsy Kings to Nonesuch; the group's self-titled debut became a grown-up pop hit, selling more than a million copies and launching a career that has thrived for more than 30 years. The 1997 landmark Buena Vista Social Club became a sales phenomenon, reaching three million units in the U.S. alone, and Nonesuch sold hundreds of thousands of albums by musicians attached to that project, including Ibrahim Ferrer, Rubén González, and the Afro-Cuban All-Stars. The label also had notable success at that time with the great Senegalese artist Youssou N'Dour. 

Leaving Elektra 

Nonesuch became caught up in all the changes that began to affect the record business in the early 1990s. The 1980s had been a boom time in the business; the coming of the CD was a transformative period in which record companies' profits reached record highs. But it was also a time of corporate upheaval, and in 1994, Bob Krasnow, who was so important in supporting Hurwitz in his early years at Nonesuch, left the company. Warner Music Group decided that Nonesuch should be moved from its longtime home, Elektra Records, to Warner Music International, where it would be teamed with the recently acquired Teldec and Erato Records. The German Teldec and the French Erato were well-respected European classical labels; the corporation wanted to be in the classical business, and even though at this moment Nonesuch was moving further away from that older role, it would now be attached to more traditional classical companies. It also gave Nonesuch, for the first time, much more of a foothold in the European market. 

It was also an important moment for the company as Hurwitz hired the highly respected David Bither, the general manager of Elektra Records, to become senior vice president of Nonesuch. This was especially significant for it marked the first time in the ten years Hurwitz had been at Nonesuch that there would be a second A&R voice in the company. 

Hurwitz met Bither a few years before Hurwitz was offered the Nonesuch job. Bither, who had experience as a musician, music journalist, and arts administrator, was working for Steve Ross, the legendary head of Warner Communications. Nonesuch, beginning in Tracey Sterne's day, had always had a staff of less than five; when Hurwitz took over, he knew that he would be able to only hire one other executive. Realizing the critical importance of the choice, he met with at least 40 qualified people in the music business, and it came down to a choice of two: Bither and Peter Clancy, who was then head of publicity and promotion at Philips Records. Hurwitz ultimately chose Clancy because of his classical music knowledge and music business experience. Clancy, who proved indispensable and served as the senior vice president for marketing until his retirement in 2018, started the same day as Hurwitz, September 4, 1984; the two had an extremely fruitful relationship for 34 years. 

Bither, who had not previously worked in the record business, was very supportive of the decision and he was able to carve enough time out of his job at Warner to happily accept Hurwitz's offer to become a dollar-a-year consultant. His “consultancy” lasted two years, until Krasnow brought Bither directly to Elektra, where in rapid succession he served as Elektra's vice president of international (his first job in the record business, where he helped launch the careers of Tracy Chapman and 10,000 Maniacs), head of domestic marketing, and, ultimately, senior vice president and general manager. During his years at Elektra he also brought his first artists to Nonesuch: Texas singer-songwriter Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Seattle-based composer and songwriter Robin Holcomb, and New York composer Robert Ashley. 

With the changes at Elektra following Krasnow’s departure, Hurwitz saw an opportunity to bring his friend and colleague aboard full-time. The first project Bither brought to Nonesuch as a member of its staff was the Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora, whose US debut sold 200,000 copies and continued Nonesuch's prosperous run with world music. Soon after, he landed a deal with World Circuit Records, the esteemed London-based world music company. Within a few years, Bither had brought Emmylou Harris to the label. Other important signings would include the bands Wilco and The Black Keys, Youssou N'Dour, Laurie Anderson, Ry Cooder, Robert Plant, Allen Toussaint, Sam Phillips, Sam Amidon, Conor Oberst, and Carolina Chocolate Drops. He was also responsible for bringing to Nonesuch Brian Wilson's long-awaited SMiLE, a project he had followed closely and pursued since his arrival at the label. 

"David's coming to Nonesuch was an important moment in our company's history,” Hurwitz noted. “Though we share many things in common in terms of our musical taste, David also brought in a different and highly evolved perspective that was invaluable in terms of our growth and development as a label. We became a much stronger company after he joined Nonesuch's staff." 

The best-selling Buena Vista Social Club was the unexpected result of the deal Bither had brokered with World Circuit Records. He’d pursued the label on the strength of an album World Circuit head Nick Gold had made with the young Malian singer Oumou Sangare.

"Bob and I invited Nick to come to New York," recalled Bither, "and we spent a day together. It was clear we shared similar ideas about what we were doing as labels, and during the conversation, Nick mentioned that he had recently come back from Cuba where he had made three records with Ry Cooder and a group of older Cuban musicians. 'I'll send them to you soon,' he said. That was one of those impossible-to-predict moments of great fortune. We actually made the World Circuit deal knowing nothing about the Buena Vista Social Club record." 

The initial trio of Buena Vista records—Buena Vista Social Club, Afro-Cuban All-Stars, and Introducing Rubén González—started out with great word-of-mouth buzz and a unique back-story concerning art, politics, and dreams deferred. Clancy promoted the discs with the same level of taste and sophistication that went into their making, targeting the magazines, newspapers, and National Public Radio stations that appeal to the perceived Nonesuch audience. Hurwitz, Bither, and Clancy flew to Amsterdam to see a concert that Gold and Cooder had organized with the Cuban musicians, and they decided that Nonesuch had to find a way to bring the show to Carnegie Hall. In July of 1998, almost a year after the albums were released, the one-night-only gathering at Carnegie Hall was captured on film by German director Wim Wenders and it served as the climax to his documentary about the Buena Vista sessions, helping to spread the music and the story even further.

The Business of Nonesuch 

During this period, Nonesuch repeatedly hit the right note, though successes like the Górecki Third or Buena Vista Social Club were often serendipitous in nature, a triumph of taste and continued commitment to quality more than any premeditated marketing blitz. Nonesuch had become, as the UK’s Independent wrote, "America’s most idealistic record label whose ambitions lie in creating trends, not cloning them, whose dictum is, and always will be, that you can’t like what you don’t hear." 

As Hurwitz has explained, “One of the things I brought from my ECM days was the idea that you cannot second-guess the public in terms of what it might like; the experience of seeing Keith Jarrett selling millions of copies of a record of solo improvised piano music demonstrated to me that there are far more people interested in adventurous music than we can imagine. When I heard the finished tapes of Górecki and Buena Vista, I thought, ‘Great records, maybe we'll sell 50,000.’ We could have never expected either of the albums to sell in the millions. I give much of the credit to a very sophisticated public that has the hunger for new and unusual music that touches them deeply. That said, Peter Clancy found a way to harness that public excitement in a way that I think is unprecedented in our business; rather than follow the playbook of pop or jazz or classical companies, which would have been the obvious thing to do, Peter found a way to do it that was never condescending, and always full of imagination.” 

Nonesuch has retained its autonomy through the various boom and bust cycles of the record industry; a number of the classical music and jazz companies in operation in 1984 are no longer in business. Today, the label navigates in unpredictable waters as the music business has evolved from one focused on physical products to one that generates most of its revenues from streaming. Nonesuch has benefited from the resurgence of interest in vinyl and continues to release physical versions of all of its releases. It also maintains a small, passionate, and highly capable staff in New York and London who oversee the release of as many as 25 new titles and reissues every year. Its careful management of overhead has allowed the company more freedom in its decisions than in companies with much larger staffs.

In an industry marked by frequent layoffs and sudden consolidations, the length of tenure of much of the staff is remarkable—several can boast careers at Nonesuch upwards of 20 years each, including—VP of Press Melissa Cusick, New Media VP Gregg Schaufeld, and the London-based international marketing team of SVP Matthew Rankin and Director Katie Havelock. Most senior among them is VP of Production Karina Beznicki, who has overseen new releases for more than 30 years. Just as the label has nurtured a community of listeners with its repertoire, Nonesuch has created something rare within its halls: a family of music lovers who bring their passion as well as their expertise to every Nonesuch release. It is no wonder, then, that so many artists refer to the label as their home. 

Nonesuch has also built relationships with many of the finest freelance producers, engineers, art directors, graphic artists, writers, publicists, and photographers over the years—all of whom have made tremendous contributions to quality of the releases and the success of the label.

Since its days with Elektra, Nonesuch has always been attached to one of the Warner Music Group labels. After the ten years it spent with Elektra, it spent eight with Warner Music International and three years with Atlantic before moving to Warner Bros. Records (now Warner Records) in 2004. In January of 2026, Nonesuch became part of Warner Music’s Rhino and its affiliated arts music labels.

Nonesuch in the 21st Century 

In 2014, Nonesuch celebrated its 50th Anniversary. To mark the occasion, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a landmark series of concerts that September, Nonesuch Records at BAM: Celebrating a Label Without Labels, to launch its yearly Next Wave festival. The event showcased the depth and breadth of the label’s catalogue, from an historic pairing of vintage pieces by Philip Glass and Steve Reich to a rare appearance by Robert Plant. Laurie Anderson premiered her dark and stirring Landfall, a collaboration with labelmates Kronos Quartet. Pianist Brad Mehldau performed duets with mandolinist Chris Thile. The list of performing artists was formidable, including Caetano Veloso, Natalie Merchant, Rhiannon Giddens, Toumani Diabate, Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields and even The Black Keys, who sold out the nearby Barclays Center arena—a tribute to how truly broad the label’s reach had become.

"Common record companies chase public taste. Uncommon ones create it," wrote the Daily News's Jim Farber at the time. "Nonesuch Records falls into the latter category, having anticipated an improbably consistent run of musical movements."  Three years later, another outstanding lineup of Nonesuch artists gathered at BAM, this time in a salute to Hurwitz himself, called A Nonesuch Celebration, which marked Hurwitz’s transition from label head to Chairman Emeritus.

However, the concert wasn’t just a heartfelt tribute to Hurwitz and his 33-year stewardship of the label; it served as the premiere of eleven piano pieces written for, and in honor of, Hurwitz by Nonesuch artists, including Glass, Adams, Reich, Anderson, Mehldau, Donnacha Dennehy, Louis Andriessen, and Randy Newman. Performing several of the pieces that evening were newer Nonesuch signings, the pianists Timo Andres and Jeremy Denk, as well as Mehldau and Thomas Bartlett. This unique tribute had been conceived by John Adams and David Bither in acknowledgement of Hurwitz’s own skills as a pianist, albeit one whose stage was his living room and his office (where he kept a compact Yamaha that got daily workouts). He was presented with the sheet music for each of them at the end of the concert. For the broader Nonesuch audience, the pieces were collected on I Still Play, an album featuring performances by Andres, Denk, Mehldau, and Newman. 

Many of the relationships Nonesuch established during Hurwitz’s tenure, including with artists John Adams, Steve Reich, and Kronos Quartet, are still going strong. In 2022, Nonesuch released a 40-disc box set of the collected works of John Adams, including notes and tributes from younger Nonesuch artists Julia Bullock, Timo Andres, and Nico Muhly, and an essay from Hurwitz himself. A 27-disc set Steve Reich Collected Works, was released in 2025. Kronos Quartet celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, and currently has 40 Nonesuch albums to its name; a new boxed set for the group is being discussed.

To bring “other, newer voices into the room,” as Bither has put it, Nonesuch initiated collaborative relationships with two of the most adventurous—and equally difficult to pigeonhole—contemporary American independent labels, the Brooklyn-based New Amsterdam Records and the Chicago-based International Anthem. Bither likened these arrangements to the groundbreaking World Circuit Records deal of the mid-1990s, affording Nonesuch access to an even wider range of artists and a separate but complementary curatorial vision. For the labels, working with Nonesuch offered crucial marketing and distribution help for artists poised to break out to a wider audience. But these were more than just business arrangements; these deals helped to support a broader musical community of which Nonesuch has been such a vital part and, to these young label owners, an inspiration.

New Amsterdam features work from a new generation of composers, often classically trained, who are putting a 21st century spin on the world of “new music.” In 2013, Caroline Shaw became the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for her composition Partita for Eight Voices, released by New Amsterdam on the Grammy Award-winning debut album from vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. In 2019, Shaw’s first full-length album of her compositions, Orange, performed by Attacca Quartet, was released jointly by Nonesuch/New Amsterdam, and won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, as would their next album together, Evergreen.  

Addressing the launch of this partnership in 2019, New Amsterdam Co-Artistic Director Judd Greenstein said, “No record label has been more of a model to us than Nonesuch, in their representation of the world of music as defined solely by quality and vision, not genre or style. It is an absolute honor to be working together on these albums, which we hope will help amplify some of the strongest voices in our community and help bring their music to new audiences. We’ve always believed in working together with like-minded organizations and this has the capacity to be our most impactful and transformative partnership yet.” 

The founders of International Anthem like to call the largely jazz-based work they represent “boundary-defying music,” with most of its artists conversant in jazz tradition but eager to explore its outer limits. The inaugural release from Nonesuch’s partnership with International Anthem was guitarist Jeff Parker’s acclaimed Suite for Max Brown. Parker himself was already well known to indie fans as the touring guitarist for the visionary instrumental band Tortoise and as a sideman and session player for jazz artists like Joshua Redman and Meshell Ndegeocello. The two labels also released Makaya McCraven’s In These Times, an ambitious eleven-song suite of “post-genre, jazz-rooted 21st century folk music.” In 2025, Tortoise released the album Touch its first new offering since 2016, another collaborative undertaking between International Anthem and Nonesuch. 

“Nonesuch has influenced so much progressive music for the last 50 years—which I can see and hear in the work of the artists in our label family,” International Anthem Co-Founder/A&R Director Scottie McNiece said. “And as a label Nonesuch is a longtime progenitor of an anti-genre, unclassifiable catalog. This is a path we’ve been trying to walk since we started making recordings in 2012. We’re very proud of our output but know that we have much to learn, and that's just what we’re aiming to do alongside our friends at Nonesuch.” 

Jazz began to assume a more significant role on the Nonesuch roster in 2004, when the label moved to its current home of Warner Records. The transition coincided with the closing of Warner's jazz division and four extraordinary musicians from Warner Records—guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Brad Mehldau, saxophonist Joshua Redman, and trumpeter Nicholas Payton—moving to Nonesuch. Over the course of the next sixteen years, Metheny recorded fifteen albums for the label, including two collaborations with Mehldau, garnering three Grammys along the way. Mehldau has been equally prolific, beginning with his acclaimed Live in Tokyo solo disc and including several solo and trio outings; collaborative recordings with soprano Renée Fleming and bassist Charlie Haden; two discs with Redman; a genre-busting duo disc with mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile; a set of novel Beatles interpretations recorded live in Paris; and a songbook record of music by Elliott Smith. Redman, during his lengthy Nonesuch tenure, took a similarly wide-ranging view of the jazz repertoire, offering his own takes on standards and West Coast jazz, as well recording original compositions; assembling both acoustic trios and electric bands; leading the San Francisco Jazz Collective; collaborating with the Bad Plus; and performing as a member of the quartet James Farm. Mehldau, Payton and Redman all joined New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint on his Nonesuch collection of jazz standards, The Bright Mississippi. 

In the years since, the jazz roster at Nonesuch has become even more expansive, populated by acclaimed young artists who take the music into thrilling and challenging new territory. Sam Gendel is emblematic of this new breed: a California-based saxophonist whose 2020 Nonesuch debut Satin Doll was, in his own words, “a futuristic homage to historic jazz.” His follow-up COOKUP deconstructs/reinterprets nineties-era R&B hits. Another Gendel collaborator, Sam Amidon, is ostensibly a folk musician, but he reworks traditional tunes with the improvisatory spirit of jazz and a coterie of jazz musicians backing him, particularly on his 2017 release, The Following Mountain. 

Composer and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, on his 2023 Nonesuch debut, the gorgeously meditative Owl Song, collaborates with former Nonesuch artist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley for a set that London’s Guardian has praised as “joyously vivid, even spine-tingling.” It was followed by 2025’s honey from a winter stone, which SPIN called “an astonishingly original set that itself is the culmination of various explorations the musician has made through the last 15 years.” Akinmusire also accompanied Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan on StandArt, Hamasyan’s collection of jazz standards. Canadian composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue takes a maximalist approach with his 18-piece big band, Secret Society, on his Grammy-nominated 2023 Nonesuch debut, Dynamic Maximum Tension. He’s joined on his composition “Mae West: Advice” by the extraordinary vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, who was already a MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner when she joined Nonesuch for her 2022 album, Ghost Song. Both her Nonesuch debut and her 2023 album Mélusine were awarded the prestigious Edison Jazz Award in the Netherlands for International Jazz Vocalist. Mélusine stretches well beyond the borders of jazz with a primarily French-language repertoire that embraces folk, world-music, and classical elements. Her 2025 album Oh Snap features very personal songs by the singer/composer mostly recorded outside of a traditional studio environment. The already highly regarded composer and jazz guitarist Mary Halvorson debuted on Nonesuch in 2022 with a pair of albums, Amaryllis and Belladonna. Pitchfork praised each while offering that “they are most powerful when taken together, like a landscape and its reflection in rippling water.” Like several other labelmates, Halvorson was the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant for music; All About Jazz declared her “the most impressive guitarist of her generation.” Halvorson released her third Nonesuch disc, Cloudward, in January 2024, accompanied by the sextet that performed on her prior Nonesuch releases, with a guest turn from Laurie Anderson on the track “Incarnadine,” and her fourth, About Ghosts, with the sextet augmented by two guests on saxophone, in 2025—at the end of the year it was named the best jazz album of the year in the widely respected Francis Davis Jazz Poll.

Creative, serious pop and rock musicians, most of whom also defy easy categorization, are now as comfortably at home on the label as these jazz musicians. The arena-sized, multiple Grammy Award-winning rock duo The Black Keys released nine studio albums on Nonesuch between 2006 and 2024. Wilco released four studio albums on Nonesuch, starting most famously with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, plus  A Ghost Is Born,  Sky Blue Sky, and  Wilco (the album). The band returned to Nonesuch to shepherd the release of its 7-LP, 20th Anniversary Edition of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which won the 2023 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album (for the Super Deluxe Edition) and Best Album Notes for the essay penned by Bob Mehr, and again in 2025 for the 9-LP+4-CD deluxe edition of A Ghost Is Born. The equally venerable Magnetic Fields have four Nonesuch releases, including the five-disc 50 Song Memoir from 2016, plus a handful of projects from the band's wide-ranging singer/songwriter/composer Stephin Merritt. Natalie Merchant made her Nonesuch debut with Leave Your Sleep in 2012, her first studio recording in seven years, followed by her 2014 self-titled album, and new recordings of her acclaimed Elektra Records solo debut, Tigerlily, with a companion documentary DVD, in 2015. She released her tenth studio album as a solo artist in 2023, Keep Your Courage.

Among other iconic musicians Nonesuch has been fortunate to work with over the decades are Brian Wilson with his long awaited masterpiece SMiLE; Ry Cooder, including his California trilogy and a Grammy-winning collaboration with Taj Mahal; Emmylou Harris, from her Grammy-winning label debut, Red Dirt Girl, to several solo, duo, and band albums that followed; k.d. lang, starting with a personal Canadian songbook album, Hymns of the 49th Parallel; Randy Newman, beginning with the beloved piano-and-voice solo Songbook series and including two iconic additions to his studio catalog, Harps and Angels and Dark Matter; and Robert Plant, whose decade-plus relationship with the label continued with 2025’s Saving Grace. . Harris’s signing in 2000 was a pivotal moment for Nonesuch and for the artist herself, who began to focus on her burgeoning skills as a songwriter. As newer artists join the roster, listeners can watch them mature in plain sight, as the label gives them the room to grow. Lake Street Dive went from singing covers on Boston sidewalks to headlining Madison Square Garden. On two Nonesuch releases, Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, has transformed their punk-folk singer-songwriter approach with the help of producer Brad Cook, making soulful, haunting tracks that eloquently blend acoustic and electronic instrumentation.

Rhiannon Giddens has enjoyed one of the widest-ranging recording and performing careers of any contemporary Nonesuch artist. She has made a singular, iconic career out of stretching her brand of folk music, with its miles-deep historical roots and contemporary sensibilities, into just about every field imaginable. A multiple Grammy Award–winning singer and instrumentalist, 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for the opera Omar, MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, and composer for ballet and film, Giddens has centered her work around the mission of lifting up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been overlooked or erased, and advocating for a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins through art. In 2025, she released What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, reuniting with her Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson. 

Fellow MacArthur Fellow Chris Thile is the founding member of Punch Brothers, which a Boston Globe reviewer has called “the tightest, most impressive live band I have ever seen.” The group has released six albums on Nonesuch, including the Grammy-winning All Ashore. Among Thile’s solo work is two volumes of Bach sonatas and partitas, an album of songs from his public radio show Live from Here, and a truly solo collection recorded in a converted upstate New York church during the pandemic. His other Nonesuch releases include a duo album with guitarist Michael Daves, two records with bassist Edgar Meyer (one of which won a Grammy), a Bach album with Yo-Yo Ma and Meyer, a duet album with Brad Mehldau, and the T Bone Burnett–produced soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. He spent his formative years as a member of the Grammy-winning, multi-platinum selling band Nickel Creek, which reunited in 2014 for its highest-charting album to date, A Dotted Line. 

Perhaps the fastest-rising Nonesuch artist in the 2020’s has been bluegrass phenomenon Molly Tuttle. Her Nonesuch debut Crooked Tree, recorded with her band Golden Highway, won Best Bluegrass Album at the 2023 Grammy Awards, and Tuttle herself was nominated as Best New Artist. Her 2023 follow-up album, City of Gold, also garnered a Best Bluegrass Album Grammy nod. In 2025, she expanded her musical palette on her solo album So Long Little Miss Sunshine, a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad.

“I love the way in which there isn’t this wall at Nonesuch between the classical and the other worlds,” pianist Jeremy Denk told NPR during the label’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2015. Embracing that border-free approach, composer and singer Caroline Shaw, now recording directly for Nonesuch. In addition to her work with Attacca Quartet, she has released two projects with So Percussion; collaborated with pianist Gilbert Kalish and soprano Dawn Upshaw, both veteran Nonesuch artists, on Narrow Sea, which received a 2022 Grammy for Best Classical Composition; composed the score for Ken Burns’ PBS film Leonardo da Vinci; and as Ringdown released an adventurous pop project Lady on the Bike with Danni Lee Parpan in 2025.

Shaw’s Narrow Sea illustrates the intergenerational and interdisciplinary connections among Nonesuch artists: Upshaw was the voice of the groundbreaking recording of Gorecki’s Third Symphony decades earlier and released ten recital albums on Nonesuch. She was also both teacher and inspiration to younger soprano Julia Bullock, who released her Grammy-winning Nonesuch debut, Walking in the Dark, in 2022. Bullock was very much a part of the Nonesuch family even before she signed to the label. John Adams has called her a “muse”—she has revived his oratorio El Niño (which featured Upshaw at its Paris debut in 2000) as a concert presentation retitled El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered, and can be heard on the first recording of his opera Girls of the Golden West. 

Nonesuch Records remains a thriving community, a refuge, a home. And for some artists, being there has been a dream come true. As the ever-evolving mandolin master Chris Thile told NPR with characteristic sincerity when Nonesuch turned 50: “I’ve wanted to be on Nonesuch since I was a little kid.” 

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Grammy Award Winners

Below is a complete list of Nonesuch Records artists and albums to have received Grammy Awards over the label's history:

John Adams

City Noir

- 2014 Best Orchestral Performance; David Roberston, conductor (St. Louis Symphony)

On the Transmigration of Souls

- 2004 Best Classical Album
- 2004 Best Orchestral Performance
- 2004 Best Classical Contemporary Composition

El Dorado

- 1997 Best Classical Contemporary Composition

Nixon in China

- 1988 Best Contemporary Composition

Thomas Adès

Dante

- 2023 Best Orchestral Performance; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor (Los Angeles Philharmonic)

Alarm Will Sound

Donnacha Dennehy: Land of Winter

- 2026 Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance

Laurie Anderson

- Lifetime Achievement Award

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet

Landfall

- 2018 Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance

Sérgio & Odair Assad

Jardim Abandonado

- 2008 Latin Grammy: Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Sérgio Assad, "Tahhiyya Li Ossoulina"

Sérgio & Odair Assad Play Piazzolla

- 2002 Latin Grammy: Best Tango Album

Attacca Quartet

Caroline Shaw: Evergreen

- 2022 Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance

Caroline Shaw: Orange

- 2020 Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance

Dan Auerbach

- 2012 Producer of the Year

Björk

Biophilia

- 2012 Best Recording Package

The Black Keys

El Camino

- 2012 Best Rock Album
- 2012 Best Rock Performance, "Lonely Boy"
- 2010 Best Rock Song, "Lonely Boy"

Brothers

- 2010 Best Recording Package
- 2010 Best Alternative Music Album
- 2010 Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals, "Tighten Up"

Buena Vista Social Club

Buena Vista Social Club

- 1997 Best Tropical Latin Performance

Julia Bullock

Walking in the Dark

- 2023 Classical Solo Vocal Album

Ken Burns

The Civil War [Soundtrack]

- 1991 Best Traditional Folk Album

Carolina Chocolate Drops

Genuine Negro Jig

- 2010 Best Traditional Folk Album

Ry Cooder

Mambo Sinuendo (w/ Manuel Galbán)

- 2003 Best Pop Instrumental Album

Buenos Hermanos (producer)

- 2003 Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album

Buena Vista Social Club

-1997 Best Tropical Latin Performance

Toumani Diabaté

Ali and Toumani (w/ Ali Farka Touré)

- 2010 Best Traditional World Music Album

In the Heart of the Moon (w/ Ali Farka Touré)

- 2005 Best Traditional World Music Album

Dr. John

Locked Down

- 2012 Best Blues Album

Ibrahim Ferrer

Buenos Hermanos

- 2003 Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album

Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer

- 2000 Latin Grammy: Best New Artist

Bill Frisell

Unspeakable

- 2004 Best Contemporary Jazz Album

Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi

They're Calling Me Home

- 2021 Best Folk Album

Emmylou Harris

Red Dirt Girl

- 2000 Best Contemporary Folk Album

Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell

Old Yellow Moon

- 2013 Best Americana Album

Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica

After Mozart

- 2001 Best Small Ensemble Performance

Kronos Quartet

Berg: Lyric Suite (w/ Dawn Upshaw)

- 2003 Best Chamber Music Performance

Terry Riley: Sun Rings

- 2020 Best Engineered Album, Classical. Engineered by Leslie Ann Jones; mixed by John Kilgore, Judy Sherman, and David Harrington; and mastered by Robert C. Ludwig.

Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

Neruda Songs

- 2007 Best Classical Vocal Performance

Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder

GET ON BOARD: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee

- 2022 Best Traditional Blues Album

Brad Mehldau

Finding Gabriel

- 2020 Best Jazz Instrumental Album

Pat Metheny

Unity Band

- 2012 Best Jazz Instrumental Album

What's It All About

- 2011 Best New Age Album

Pat Metheny won Grammy Awards for the following albums, originally recorded for another label: One Quiet Night, 2003 Best New Age Album; (Go) Get It, 2000 Best Jazz Instrumental Solo; Secret Story, 1992 Best Contemporary Jazz Performance (Instrumental); Change of Heart, 1990 Best Original Composition; Offramp, 1982 Best Jazz Fusion Performance.

Pat Metheny Group

The Way Up

- 2005 Best Contemporary Jazz Album

The Pat Metheny Group has also won Grammy Awards for the following albums, originally recorded for another label: Speaking of Now, 2002 Best Contemporary Jazz Album; The Roots of Coincidence, 1998 Best Rock Instrumental Performance; Imaginary Day, Best Contemporary Jazz Performance; We Live Here, 1995 Best Contemporary Jazz Performance; The Road to You, 1993 Best Contemporary Jazz Performance (Instrumental); Letter from Home, 1989 Best Jazz Fusion Performance; Still Life (Talking), 1987 Best Jazz Fusion Performance; First Circle, 1984 Best Jazz Fusion Performance; Travels, 1983 Best Jazz Fusion Performance.