Natalie Merchant, who kicked off the seven-show California leg of her Keep Your Courage tour in San Diego last night, performs sold-out shows at Humphrey's in San Diego this Memorial Day weekend, on Saturday and Sunday. Keep Your Courage, released on Nonesuch Records in 2023, “has some of Merchant’s best songwriting,” says the AP. Mojo calls it “her most beautiful in decades.” Merchant was a recent guest on Guy Raz’s podcast, The Great Creators; you can hear their conversation here.

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Just down the road, pianist Jeremy Denk joins the San Diego Symphony, led by Rafael Payare, in a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, Op. 58 at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park in San Diego on Saturday. The program also includes Stravinsky’s The Firebird. “There’s always an element of awkwardness and difficulty that becomes part of the musical expression for Beethoven,” Denk tells the San Diego Union-Tribune ahead of the concert. “He likes to leap off into the top part of the keyboard and suddenly do some weird voicing or create passages that are treacherous and demanding.” You can read what else he had to say here, and can hear him perform Beethoven, Stravinsky, and many other composers on his 2019 album, c. 1300–c. 2000, which the Telegraph called “quite exhilarating” and BBC Radio 3 called “a thoughtfully curated, beautifully played, brilliantly annotated recital.”

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Pianist Richard Goode joins the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Chia-Hsuan Lin, for a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 18 and 23 at Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul, Minnesota, this morning and Saturday night, following a performance last night. Goode recorded Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 18 and 20 with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra for Nonesuch in 1996. The San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle gave the recording five stars, exclaiming: “This is an exquisite disc, pure and simple … marked by grace, beauty and formidable intelligence.” Their recording of Nos. 23 and 24, released in Nonesuch in 1999, was described by the New Yorker as “intense performances of profound pieces.”

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Mary Halvorson plays with the Tomeka Reid Quartet—cellist Tomeka Reid, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara—at The Green Mill in Chicago tonight and Saturday. Last week, Halvorson won the Jazz Journalists Association's 2024 JJA Jazz Award for Guitarist of the Year. Her new album, Cloudward, released earlier this year on Nonesuch Records, features eight new compositions she performs with her sextet—the improvisatory band that performed on her acclaimed 2022 Nonesuch debut albums Amaryllis and Belladonna—and “reveals a newfound sense of beauty and clarity,” per the Guardian. “[Halvorson] outdoes herself again,” says All About Jazz. “Cloudward is just too good.”

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Emmylou Harris performs on the Bassett Lawn stage at Pop’s Farm in Martinsville, Virginia, on Saturday, for the Rooster Walk Music and Arts Festival. Harris’s second Nonesuch album, Stumble Into Grace, was released on vinyl for the first time, in a limited cream-colored edition, last year, for its twentieth anniversary. Newsweek declared: “Her stellar voice takes on new depth when tied to songs this personal.”

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Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, concludes their European tour, in support of their new album, The Past Is Still Alive, with festival sets in Spain and Italy: at Caja Mágica in Madrid on Saturday, as part of Tomavistas, and Teatro Indirigibile in Figino Serenza on Sunday, for the Townes Van Zandt International Festival. Segarra is nominated for the 2024 Americana Honors & Awards for Album of the Year for The Past Is Still Alive, which Pitchfork includes in its list of “The Best Music of 2024 So Far,” while the album track “Ogallala” is included in New York magazine’s Vulture’s list of “The Best Songs of 2024 (So Far).”

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Kronos Quartet live-scores filmmaker Sam Green’s A Thousand Thoughts: A Live Documentary at Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam on Saturday. The multimedia experience—called “mind-blowing” by Newsweek and “magical" by the Los Angeles Times—blends live music and narration with archival footage and filmed interviews with some of the many artists with whom Kronos has collaborated, like Philip Glass, Tanya Tagaq, Steve Reich, Wu Man, and Terry Riley. As Green tells the multi-decade and continent-spanning story of the quartet, Kronos revisits its extensive body of work, performing music by George Crumb, Laurie Anderson, John Adams, Clint Mansell, John Zorn, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and many others

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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Aaron Kimmel—play free festival sets this weekend, at Piedmont Park in Atlanta on Saturday, for Atlanta Jazz Festival, and at Discovery Green in Houston on Sunday, as part of Jazzy Sundays in the Park. Last week, Salvant won the Jazz Journalists Association's 2024 JJA Jazz Award for Female Vocalist of the Year. To celebrate the recent one-year anniversary of her critically acclaimed album Mélusine, which DownBeat included among the year’s best and calls “a masterpiece of thoughtful, adventurous music,” Salvant shared live performances of four songs from the album made at Oberlin College and Conservatory; you can watch those here.

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Also in Houston, bass-baritone Davóne Tines joins the Houston Symphony, conducted by David Robertson, for performances of composer John Adams’ Nativity opera-oratorio El Niño at Jones Hall on Saturday and Sunday. The premiere recording of El Niño, featuring Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Dawn Upshaw, and Willard White, was released on Nonesuch in 2001.

Davóne Tines and his band THE TRUTH released “LET IT SHINE,” the first song from their new work ROBESOИ, earlier this month on Nonesuch. "As this 'Let It Shine' progresses," says WNYC's Soundcheck, 'Tines begins to show off his remarkable ability to soar into heights that a so-called ‘bass-baritone’ simply has no business being in." Details of the forthcoming ROBESOИ album, Tines’ solo recording debut, will be announced soon.

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Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway conclude their own Texas tour, in support of their critically acclaimed new album, City of Gold, with shows at Gruene Hall in New Braunfels tonight and The Haute Spot in Cedar Park on Saturday. City of Gold won the Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album and the International Folk Music Award for Album of the Year; it made last year’s best lists from PopMatters, Folk Alley, No Depression, AllMusic, WFUV, and Holler, which calls it Tuttle’s “most captivating record yet … A heady 48 minutes of joy, Tuttle is single handedly making bluegrass her own.”

Tuttle performed a solo set of two tracks from City of Gold plus a cover of Jefferson Airplane's “White Rabbit" for Paste at MerleFest last month; you can watch it here.