Jeff Parker talks Happy Today at Chicago film screening. Rhiannon Giddens tours Texas. Mary Halvorson is in New Haven and at Long Play Festival in Brooklyn. Kronos Quartet is in Santa Barbara. The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt performs and DJs in NYC. Molly Tuttle and Ketch Secor tour California.
Guitarist Jeff Parker is at The Land School in his former hometown of Chicago on Sunday for a screening of Happy Today, followed by a conversation. Directed by Charlie Weinmann, the concert film documents the August 20, 2025, performance by Parker and his ETA IVtet—drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—at the Lodge Room in Highland Park. Additional screenings this weekend take place at Mono Space in Portland, Oregon, and Public Records in Brooklyn, tonight, and Mono Tape Club in Salt Lake City on Sunday. The album Happy Today is due May 15 on International Anthem / Nonesuch Records. You can watch an excerpt from the film—part two of the track “Like Swimwear”—here. Parker was profiled in Pitchfork in an article titled "How Jeff Parker Changed the Sound of Jazz"; you can read it here.
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Rhiannon Giddens is in Texas, performing at Jones Hall in Houston tonight, Bass Concert Hall in Austin on Saturday, and Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas on Sunday. Giddens has just announced the creation of her Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, celebrating the African diaspora’s role in creating American identity and culture through music, literature, food, and community; find out more here.
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Guitarist Mary Halvorson and her band Canis Major perform sold-out early and late sets at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut, tonight, before she joins Trevor Dunn's trio at Roulette in Brooklyn on Sunday for Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival. (Long Play also includes performances by Contemporaneous, Tyondai Braxton, Dirty Projectors, and So Percussion and the music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, among others.) The Jazz Journalists Association has nominated Halvorson for five JJA Jazz Awards: Jazz Musician of the Year, Composer of the Year, Guitarist of the Year, Midsize Ensemble of the Year (Amaryllis), and Duo of the Year (with Sylvie Courvoisier). Her new album with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, is due June 12; listen to the album track “Soundcheck” here.
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Kronos Quartet performs the West Coast premiere of Three Bones, a semi-staged, multisensory exploration of the histories of Indigenous, Gullah-Geechee, and Chinese American communities in the United States, at Campbell Hall in Santa Barbara, California, on Saturday.
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The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt performs and DJs at The Parkside Lounge in New York City tonight for Porky's, a new queer music party.
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Molly Tuttle and Ketch Secor are in California, performing intimate shows at the sold-out Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley tonight and Golden State Theatre in Monterey on Saturday. "She does integrate her guitar playing incredibly effectively,” says WBUR's Amelia Mason of Tuttle’s So Long Little Miss Sunshine. “The songs are just really good ... it works really well."
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