Brad Mehldau continues a sold-out Trios residency at Village Vanguard in NYC through the weekend. Sam Amidon is at Fire in the Mountain Fest in the UK. The Magnetic Fields performs 69 Love Songs in Atlanta. Natalie Merchant concludes her California tour at Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, where Cécile McLorin Salvant performs as well before heading to Phoenix. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed in Costa Mesa, CA. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway hit three of the Four Corners states—Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. Yasmin Williams is in Charlottesville and Norfolk, VA.
Brad Mehldau and his Trio of bassist Felix Moseholm and drummer Joe Farnsworth continues a sold-out, six-night Mehldau Trios residency at Village Vanguard in New York City through the weekend, with early and late sets tonight, Saturday, and Sunday, following performances Tuesday through last night with bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Marcus Gilmore. Mehldau’s new solo albums, After Bach II and Après Fauré, were released earlier this month on Nonesuch. The Associated Press says: “Mehldau’s variations are bracing and daring, breathtaking and beautiful, spiritual and psychedelic. Blue notes emerge from the contrapuntal complexity as he tests the limits of Bach’s music, showing there are none.”
Mehldau recently stopped by for the Nonesuch Selects video series, in which artists visit the Nonesuch office, pick some of their favorite albums from the music library, and share a few words on their choices. He chose recordings by Richard Goode, Dawn Upshaw, Adam Guettel, Kronos Quartet, and Darcy James Argue's Secret Society. You can watch that here.
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Sam Amidon performs at The Farm in Aberystwyth, United Kingdom, tonight, for Fire in the Mountain Festival. Amidon’s latest release, his 2020 self-titled album, is “a fine showcase for [his] studio experimentation,” says Rolling Stone, adding that the album “incorporates elements of spacious, echoing ambient electronic music to complement Amidon’s warm vocals, reminiscent of Nick Drake and Arthur Russell.” No Depression, describing it as “full of delicate noise and artful sophistication,” says it “deserves a pause in a harried time.”
Amidon’s own Nonesuch Selects video premiered last month, with music by Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood, and the Rajasthan Express; Astor Piazzolla; Kronos Quartet; Sam Gendel; Word of Mouth Chorus; and Bill Frisell. You can watch it here.
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The Magnetic Fields continue their 69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary tour in Atlanta, performing two shows at Variety Playhouse on Saturday and Sunday. The concerts, which pick back up in Europe later this summer, feature the full album, all 69 songs, over two nights at each tour stop.
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Natalie Merchant concludes the seven-show California leg of her Keep Your Courage tour at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on Saturday. 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.”
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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Aaron Kimmel—are also at Walt Disney Concert Hall, sharing the stage with Silvana Estrada tonight. Salvant and her band then head to Arizona for a concert at Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix on Sunday. Earlier this month, Salvant won the Jazz Journalists Association's 2024 JJA Jazz Award for Female Vocalist of the Year.
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Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed by Pacific Chorale and the Pacific Symphony, led by Artistic Director Robert Istad, at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, California, on Saturday. The program also includes works by Gustav Holst, Leonard Bernstein, and more. Mass for the Endangered is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. The first recording, released on New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records in 2020, features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch.
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Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway continue their “Down the Rabbit Hole” tour, in support of their critically acclaimed new album, City of Gold, hitting three of the Four Corners states this weekend: at the Orpheum Theater in Flagstaff, Arizona, tonight; Fort Buenaventura in Ogden, Utah, on Saturday, as part of Ogden Music Festival; and Mishawaka Amphitheatre in Bellvue, Colorado, on Sunday. 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.”
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Yasmin Williams performs in her home state of Virginia this weekend, with a concert at The Southern Cafe and Music Hall in Charlottesville tonight, followed by a duo performance and discussion on melodic and harmonic inspiration with Aoife O'Donovan at Robin Hixon Theater in Norfolk on Saturday, as part of Virginia Arts Festival’s Light in the Eastern Sky, a day of music and workshops curated by O'Donovan. Last fall, Williams released her first song on Nonesuch, “Dawning.” The track—featuring O’Donovan on vocals, Kafari on rhythm bones, and Nic Gareiss’ percussive dancing—provides an early peek at her Nonesuch debut album, due later this year. You can hear the song and watch the video for it here.
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