Kronos Quartet premieres new Riley work at Notre Dame ... Graz and Giessen ballets continue to dance to Adams works ... Afro-Cuban All Stars offer NYC a "thrillingly autentico survey of the colorful panorama of Cuban music" (Village Voice) ... Laurie Anderson honors documentary film music ... David Byrne brings My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' "sound collage of spiky funk rhythms" (Daily Telegraph) and other Eno joints to the UK ... Shawn Colvin solos at RootsFest Denver ... Christina Courtin backs Marianne Faithfull on violin ... Toumani Diabaté and Béla Fleck's Africa Project tour the East Coast ... Philip Glass & Friends Pierce Turner, Zack Glass, Suzanne Vega play City Winery ... Richard Goode plays Bach, Chopin outside DC ... Glenn Kotche joins the Bang on a Can All-Stars and Terry Riley for Marathon concert ... k.d. lang presents at the Junos ... Brad Mehldau plays Jazz fests in Europe ... Mandy Patinkin and Patti LuPone play Newark's NJPAC ... Punch Brothers go Georgian ... Joshua Redman swaps bassists in Europe ... Jeff Tweedy performs solo for Clearwater benefit ... Sara Watkins opens for John Prine ... and more ...

k.d. lang joins fellow Canadians Feist, Diana Krall, and (by marriage) Elvis Costello in presenting at Canada's Juno Awards this Sunday. k.d. has also been nominated as both the Artist of the Year and Producer of the Year for her 2008 Nonesuch release, Watershed. Also this weekend, k.d.'s North American tour takes her to California and Nevada. Her recent Portland, Oregon, performance led The Oregonian to exclaim: "There are a lot of good singers out there. kd lang is a great one." London's National Portrait Gallery might agree, having named k.d. among the Gay Icons in its exhibit of that name, opening this summer, which also includes David Hockney, Harvey Milk, Walt Whitman, Tchaikovsky, and Nelson Mandela.

Sara Watkins, whose self-titled solo debut album is due out from Nonesuch on April 5, is the subject of a feature article in the Charlotte Observer. She's set to play two shows in North Carolina opening for John Prine this weekend: at Charlotte's Ovens Auditorium tomorrow night and Thomas Wolfe Auditorium in Asheville the following night. The Observer says that on the new album, Sara "continues to explore different genres from torchy, playful western swing (Jimmie Rodgers' 'Any Old Time') to pop-rock (Davíd Garza's 'Too Much') to the aching chamber folk (Jon Brion's 'Same Mistake')." Three additional songs from the album are now streaming on Nonesuch Radio.

Joshua Redman and one of two trios featured on his recent Nonesuch release, Compass, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Greg Hutchinson, played a three-night residency at Ronnie Scott's club in London through last weekend. The Guardian gives the sets four stars, describing Redman as "a compelling builder of extended stories, and his pacing is masterly." The Trio gave the audience, which "howled their appreciation," "a demonstration of peerless sax mastery and group empathy." The Financial Times gives four stars as well, asserting: "Redman’s trio deliver an intense and fiery chamber jazz ... The fractured breaks, snatches of improv and twists and turns seemed as spontaneous as the applause they immediately won."

Afro-Cuban All Stars spread their energetic sound through the Midwest ... ENO production of Adams's Doctor Atomic comes to a close; Graz, Giessen, and San Fran ballets dance on to Adams ... Dan Auerbach plays two more "raw and rumbling" sets at SxSW ... Isabel Bayrakdarian performs Gomidas songs at Art Song Festival benefit ... David Byrne brings Eno/Byrne songs to Sweden ... Toumani Diabaté plays Yoshi's with Béla Fleck ... Bill Frisell, Greg Leisz tour North Carolina ... Philip Glass revisits Tibetan refugee project with Foday Musa Suso ... Richard Goode performs Beethoven's "Emperor" with Saint Louis ... k.d. lang plays Pacific Northwest ... Brad Mehldau goes Dutch in solo set ... Joshua Redman Trio takes over Ronnie Scott's London ... Spokane Symphony takes Reich, Marshall music to The Knitting Factory ... Sara Watkins joins brother Sean at Largo ... and more ...

Rokia Traoré, Toumani Diabaté, and Amadou & Mariam have all been nominated for the inaugural Songlines Music Awards, recognizing outstanding talent in world music. Diabaté and Traoré are each nominated for Best Artist, Amadou & Mariam for Best Group. Winners will be chosen by the Songlines editorial team and announced in May. The WOMAD festival, the Awards' co-presenter, will host a live event with a selection of the nominees at WOMAD Charlton Park in July, where Traoré and label mate Oumou Sangare are scheduled to perform.

Dan Auerbach, fresh off his two-week tour with Hacienda and Those Darlins, helped kick off Austin's South by Southwest Music Conference last night with an opening-night set at The Parish. The first reports are in, and the show seems to be the hit of a typically jam-packed SxSW night. MTV includes the "raw and rumbling set" among the night's highlights, and JamBase says, "The top pick for the first night was undoubtedly Dan Auerbach ... [I]t took all of one song to realize this was something special." The Dallas Observer calls Dan's solo debut, Keep It Hid, "an intimate trek down gravel roads and back alleys to the crossroads of American music."

Isabel Bayrakdarian will perform songs from her Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, celebrating the work of composer Gomidas Vardabet, at Ohio's Baldwin-Wallace College, tomorrow night, to benefit the school's Art Song Festival. "The Lebanon-born Canadian soprano of Armenian heritage has proved herself on the international operatic and recital stage, where her lustrous voice and expressive urgency are winning increasing approbation," says the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. "I think these songs are in the psyche of all Armenians," Bayrakdarian says of the Gomidas works. "In many ways, when I sing them ... they come from a part of me that is very different from when I sing any other repertoire."

Emmylou Harris and Kate and Anna McGarrigle will be among the artists celebrating the legendary singer-songwriter Pete Seeger, in honor of his 90th birthday, at a special Madison Square Garden concert event, Sunday, May 3. All proceeds will go to the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, the organization Seeger co-founded in 1966 to fight pollution on New York's longest river. Also on stage will be the honoree himself, along with a diverse line-up of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, Steve Earle, Ben Harper, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and many more.

"Composer, pianist and living legend Allen Toussaint has helped shape the sound of R&B, soul and funk while infusing a little bit of New Orleans into it," says KCRW in naming as yesterday's Top Tune the Thelonius Monk–penned title track of Toussaint's forthcoming Nonesuch solo debut, The Bright Mississippi. Toussaint will perform during both weeks of the 40th anniversary New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which runs April 24–30 and May 1–3. Given his prominent place in the festival and the city's musical history, it's no surprise that Toussaint has made his way onto the official JazzFest 2009 poster, by artist James Michalopoulos.

Dan Auerbach was the featured guest on yesterday's episode of KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic. Dan and band perform more than half the songs off his recent Nonesuch solo debut, Keep It Hid, live in the KCRW studios. At the end of the set, the show's host, Jason Bentley, sighs, "Man, you got some soul, brother." His favorite album tracks, he says, "really caught my attention as just soulful blues-rock of the highest order."

Richard Goode's series of concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra comes to a close Tuesday night. The Boston Globe, in a preview of this May's release of Goode's complete piano concertos with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, looks back at the pianist's 1993 collection of the Beethoven piano sonatas and says it "stands as one of the most important statements made about this music in recent decades." Goode, whom the St. Louis Post-Dispatch calls "a musician's musician," will perform Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto this weekend with David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.