The second annual L.A. Bluegrass Situation gets under way at Largo tonight and continues through the weekend with sold-out shows each night. The event kicks off with a performance from the Watkins Family Hour, featuring Sara and Sean Watkins. Punch Brothers headline tomorrow night. Ed Helms, the festival's curator, and Steve Martin, both friends of Punch Brothers, perform the following nights. "We’re both fans of the band," Helms tells the Los Angeles Times.

AfroCubism has won the Cross-Cultural Collaboration category in the 2011 Songlines World Music Awards, which recognize outstanding talent in world music. Songlines Editor-in-Chief Simon Broughton describes the band as a "brilliant collaboration." The band will receive the award at London's Royal Albert Hall on June 27, the start of a European tour. The first announced North American date is July 8 at the Oregon Zoo; more dates will follow.

Emmylou Harris celebrated the release of her new album, Hard Bargain, with a special performance of the complete album at NY's Bowery Ballroom last night. She performs "Six White Cadillacs" on the Late Show with David Letterman tonight and will appear on the Today show tomorrow morning. NPR's Fresh Air calls the new album "the most eclectic and loose-fitting album Emmylou Harris has made in a long time," one that "deserves a wider audience." WNYC's Soundcheck names it a Pick of the Week.

Cal Performances at the University of California, Berkeley, has announced its 2011–12 season, which will feature performances from a number of performers familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal: Dawn Upshaw and Rokia Traoré, each in a collaboration with director Peter Sellars, the latter also with novelist Toni Morrison; Kronos Quartet in the Bay Area premiere of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11; Sérgio and Odair Assad; and Richard Goode.

Tune in to hear Steve Reich today on WNYC's Soundcheck. The composer will discuss his latest piece, WTC 9/11, which will be given its NY premiere in a performance by Kronos Quartet this Saturday at Carnegie Hall, in an all-Reich concert celebrating his 75th birth year. (Listen to a recent Q2 program on the Carnegie Hall concert here.) Also on today's Soundcheck is a live set from Timothy Andres, who was recently named one of the top 100 Composers Under 40 by NPR and Q2. Soundcheck names Emmylou Harris's Hard Bargain a Pick of the Week. 

Emmylou Harris's new album, Hard Bargain, is out now. She performs at Bowery Ballroom tonight and on the Late Show with David Letterman tomorrow. The Washington Post says Hard Bargain is "lovely and understated and will only further Harris’s reputation as a paragon of gentle dignity and forbearance." USA Today gives it four stars and calls it "exquisite." Paste says Harris continues to create "some of the best country-influenced music being recorded today." Country Standard Time says the album "marks another triumphant recording in a career filled with memorable work." In a new video, Harris talks about her songwriting and recording the new album; watch it here.

James Farm, the self-titled debut album from the collaborative band featuring Joshua Redman, Aaron Parks, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland, is out now. The album uses traditional acoustic jazz quartet instrumentation for its song-based approach to jazz and incorporates the members’ myriad influences: rock, soul, folk, classical, electronica. The New York Times calls it "a model of dazzling proficiency." The Times of London and the Financial Times give the album four stars.

Nonesuch releases 2x5 Remixed, a new, three-track digital EP, available at iTunes, featuring the winning entries in the 2010 contest to remix the third movement from Steve Reich's 2x5, as chosen by the composer. As Reich told the BBC World Service, there is a rich history of artists reinterpreting others' work, explaining: “Remixing is a modern take on variations." Bang on a Can performs 2x5 in an all-Reich concert at Carnegie Hall this Saturday.

Emmylou Harris, whose album Hard Bargain is due out tomorrow, is the subject of a feature profile in the New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure section, which says the new album "is suffused with kindly intimacy, acknowledging sorrows and reaching past them." The AP says her new songs are "up to her high standards." Harris also spoke with The Canadian Press and with the Los Angeles Times, which cites "her unwavering compassion throughout her career for the underdog, oppressed, the voiceless." The video for the song "Six White Cadillacs" has premiered on Garden & Gun, which says the album "packs a powerful, bluesy punch"; watch the video here.

With a week to go before the May 3 release of Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás, you can now listen to the album in its entirety till release day on npr.org as an NPR First Listen. The title piece "is full of sounds and textures that are at once haunting and exhilarating," says NPR, with a performance by Irish singer Iarla O’Lionáird that creates "one of the best and most satisfying listening experiences of the year so far." Dawn Upshaw's performance of Dennehy's "ravishing song cycle" That the Night Come "shows off her tremendous range."

Peter Lieberson, the composer of the highly acclaimed Neruda Songs, has died, following complications from lymphoma, at the age of 64. Lieberson wrote Neruda Songs, his setting of Pablo Neruda's sonnets, for his late wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, before her untimely passing in 2006. "I am so grateful for Neruda’s beautiful poetry," the composer said, "for although these poems were written to another, when I set them I was speaking directly to my own beloved, Lorraine.”

Emmylou Harris performed songs from her forthcoming album, Hard Bargain, at LA's El Rey Theatre last night, with Ryan Adams offering a surprise guest opening set. She performs at New York's Bowery Ballroom with another surprise special guest opener on Tuesday. Harris appeared on PBS's Tavis Smiley show earlier this week. "Harris is admired as much for her straightforward songwriting as for her expressive singing," says the show. "Forty years into her career, she's still doing both with ... Hard Bargain." Watch the show here.