Rhiannon Giddens’ inaugural music festival, Biscuits & Banjos, is in downtown Durham, NC, including a Yasmin Williams set and a live-streamed Carolina Chocolate Drops reunion. Ambrose Akinmusire leads a Village Vanguard residency in NYC. Kronos Quartet’s 10th annual hometown festival is at SFJAZZ. Mandy Patinkin is in Seattle. Cécile McLorin Salvant performs at the University of Maryland. Caroline Shaw & Gabriel Kahane are at 92NY. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway conclude their month-long tour with Brooks & Dunn in St. Louis and Louisville.
Rhiannon Giddens’ inaugural music festival, Biscuits & Banjos, kicks off today in downtown Durham, North Carolina, with performances through Sunday. The sold-out festival celebrates the deep roots and enduring legacy of Black music, art, and storytelling with a program of concerts, workshops, square dances, panel discussions, free banjo lessons, and a biscuit bake-off.
For Opening Night, Rhiannon Giddens and Friends play at the Armory at 8pm in the Friday Night Frolic Square & Line Dance, preceded by Christian McBride’s set with the NCUU Jazz Ensemble at the Carolina Theatre and followed by Taj Mahal and Leyla McCalla’s show there at 9pm.
Saturday starts with two panel sessions: Justin Robinson and Shorlette Ammons’s Cultivating Legacy: Sustainability, and the Farm-to-Table Movement at the American Underground at 10am, and Rhiannon Giddens, Rissi Palmer, and Alice Randall’s Black Voices in Country Music at the Water Tower at 12pm. That evening, guitarist Yasmin Williams performs at the Blackbird Stage at 5pm before the main event: Rhiannon Giddens’ Carolina Breakdown, featuring a Carolina Chocolate Drops reunion, at the Durham Performing Arts Center at 6pm with a live stream for folks around the world to tune in via Veeps. This monumental performance marks the first time in more than a decade that all original and key members of the GRAMMY-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops will perform together on stage.
Saturday night’s show will also debut Giddens' new band, The Old-Time Revue, featuring Justin Robinson, which tours North America this spring and summer, and includes music from Giddens’ and Robinson’s new album of some of their favorite North Carolina banjo and fiddle tunes, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, released just last week. You can watch performance videos of eight of tunes from the album here.
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Composer and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and his quartet—pianist Sam Harris, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Justin Brown—conclude their Village Vanguard residency, which started Tuesday in New York City, with early and late sets tonight, Saturday, and Sunday. His latest album honey from a winter stone which Glide calls “compelling, abstract, discordant, gorgeous” was released earlier this year with vocalist Kokayi, Sam Harris on piano, Chiquitamagic on synths, Justin Brown on drums, and Mivos Quartet. Akinmusire was just nominated for the JJA Jazz Award for Trumpeter of the Year, which he won last year.
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Kronos Quartet’s tenth-annual hometown Kronos Festival begins today and continues through Sunday, all at SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco. This year’s festival, dubbed Good Medicine, is named after the final movement of Terry Riley’s Salome Dances for Peace to bring healing to the world through music.
The quartet is joined by Soo Yeon Lyuh and Vân-Ánh Võ at Miner Auditorium tonight to perform that very movement. The program also includes the world premieres of new works by Lyuh and Hildur Guðnadóttir, plus pieces by Peni Candra Rini, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and Gabriella Smith.
On Saturday afternoon, there are two free Kronos Festival Labs showcasing the work of composers Laura Ortman and Gabriella Smith, at 3pm and 5pm, respectively. Later that evening, Kronos returns to Miner Auditorium, joined by special guests Ariel Aberg-Riger and Benedicte Maurseth to perform the West Coast premieres of works by inti figgis-vizueta and Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjøgersen, as well as works by Sun Ra, Viet Cuong, Nina Simone, and Hamza El Din.
The festival culminates with a Kronos concert at Miner Auditorium on Sunday night, with special guests Laura Ortman, Tsering Wangmo Satho, and the San Francisco Girls Chorus conducted by Valérie Sainte-Agathe. The program features the world premieres of works by Satho and Ortman, as well as pieces by Nicole Lizée, Mary Kouyoumdjian, and Zachary James Watkins.
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Mandy Patinkin continues his Being Alive tour—a collection of his favorite Broadway and classic American tunes from the likes of Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter, Harry Chapin, and more—with pianist Adam-Ben David, at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle on Saturday.
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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist Paul Sikivie, and drummer Kyle Poole—perform at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park tonight. Salvant was recently nominated for the Deutscher Jazzpreis for Live Act of the Year International and the JJA Jazz Awards for Female Vocalist of the Year—which she won last year—and, with pianist Sullivan Fortner, Duo of the Year.
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Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane perform their new collaborative work Hexagons, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story “The Library of Babel,” at 92NY’s Buttenwieser Hall at The Arnhold Center in New York City tonight and on Saturday.
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Molly Tuttle and her band Golden Highway—mandolinist Dominick Leslie, banjoist Kyle Tuttle, fiddle player Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and bassist Shelby Means—conclude their month-long tour with Brooks & Dunn performing at Enterprise Center in St. Louis tonight and the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, Kentucky, on Saturday. Earlier this year, Tuttle was joined by Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show on the Grand Ole Opry stage in Nashville to perform "San Joaquin," a song they co-wrote for her Grammy-winning 2023 album City of Gold; you can watch it here.
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