Chris Thile brings Bach to MD, NJ, and NYC. Tortoise, Mary Halvorson, Kronos Quartet, Makaya McCraven, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, and Molly Tuttle are all in California, while Tortoise's new album can be heard at 150+ independent record stores a week early. Rhiannon Giddens hosts the The Met Live in HD’s season opening. Richard Goode joins St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Hurray for the Riff Raff joins Lucius in Chicago. Jeffrey Kahane conducts San Antonio Phil. Shara Nova performs The Blue Hour in Paris, where Gustavo Santaolalla begins his Ronroco tour. Cécile McLorin Salvant is in Florida. Caroline Shaw, Sō Percussion, and Ringdown perform in PA and upstate NY.
Chris Thile continues his solo US tour featuring music from his upcoming album, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, Vol. 2, at The Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda, Maryland, tonight; McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey, on Saturday; and 92NY’s Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City on Sunday. The new album, due November 7, includes Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004; Sonata No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005; and Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006. The Gavotte en rondeau, from Partita No. 3 in E Major, was released this week along with a video of Thile performing the piece in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park. You can hear the album track and watch the video, directed by Matthew Edginton, here.
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On the West Coast, Tortoise performs the first of a series of special fall performances with a set at The Broad in Los Angeles on Saturday. That same day, the band’s new album, Touch, out next Friday, can be heard one week early at listening events at more than 150 independent record stores around the world; you can find a participating store here. "These songs are full to bursting with sounds and ideas, suggesting a kind of wide-eyed maximalism, as though nothing is off limits except silence,” Uncut says of the album. “It’s not just about getting back together after nearly a decade apart, but a band reaffirming the ideals that animated them in the first place.”
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Rhiannon Giddens hosts the opening of The Met Live in HD’s season featuring Bellini's La Sonnambula in theaters Saturday afternoon, sharing exclusive behind-the-scenes content and interviews during intermission. Giddens's new album with Justin Robinson, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, was released earlier this year; you can listen to the album here and watch performance videos of all eighteen tunes and a mini documentary of the making the album here.
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Pianist Richard Goode joins the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra at Ordway Concert Hall in Saint Paul, Minnesota, for a morning and evening performance today, and another performance on Saturday. The program includes works by Mozart, Britten, and Janáček.
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Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson joins drummer Tomas Fujiwara, performing a duo set at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles tonight for Angel City Jazz Festival. Halvorson’s new album, About Ghosts, released earlier this year, "conjures such vibrant, picturesque riffs, capricious melodic excursions, and suspenseful rhythmic undertows," DownBeat says in its four-star review, "a marvelous document for Halvorson’s compositional acumen and conceptual ingenuity.”
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Hurray for the Riff Raff (Alynda Segarra) opens for Lucius in Segarra’s new hometown of Chicago, bringing music from their album The Past is Still Alive and more to The Salt Shed on Saturday.
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Jeffrey Kahane conducts cellist Tommy Mesa and the San Antonio Philharmonic, of which he is music director, at Scottish Rite Hall in San Antonio, Texas, tonight and Saturday for Brahms 1: Beyond Borders. The program includes works by Tania León, Andrea Casarrubios, and Brahms’s First Symphony. Kahane returns in December with his son, Gabriel Kahane, for A Family Affair, which will feature music from their new album Heirloom, released last week, and clarinetist Anthony McGill performing Gabriel Kahane’s new clarinet concerto If love will not swing wide the gates.
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Kronos Quartet is at Sonoma State University’s Weill Hall in Rohnert Park, California, on Saturday for Nonesuch & Nonetheless, celebrating the ensemble’s 40th anniversary as Nonesuch artists with music from Nonesuch releases “El Sinaloense” from Nuevo, and Terry Riley's Cadenza on the Night Plain, as well as works by Charlton Singleton, Peni Candra Rini, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and more.
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Drummer, producer, and sonic collagist Makaya McCraven, whose new two-disc, four-EP compilation Off the Record is out today, continues his US Off the Record tour performing at Price Center East Ballroom in La Jolla, California, on Saturday. McCraven’s four new EPs are due on all music platforms on October 31.
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Pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Christian McBride continue their US duo tour with two shows in California—at Presidio Theatre in San Francisco tonight and The Conrad’s Baker-Baum Concert Hall in La Jolla on Saturday—and a night at the Mesa Arts Center’s Piper Repertory Theater in Mesa, Arizona, on Sunday. Mehldau’s Ride into the Sun—a songbook record of music by the late singer, songwriter, and guitarist Elliott Smith—was released earlier this year; you can get it on vinyl and CD and hear it here. Mehldau and McBride can be heard on three albums with saxophonist Joshua Redman and drummer Brian Blade: LongGone (2022), RoundAgain (2020), and MoodSwing (1994).
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Composer and vocalist Shara Nova joins Orchestre national Avignon-Provence, conducted by Débora Waldman, in a performance of The Blue Hour—a song cycle composed by Nova, Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider—at Cité de la Musique in Paris tonight. Set to excerpts from Carolyn Forché’s epic poem On Earth, the music follows one woman’s journey through the liminal space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images. You can get the album and hear it here.
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Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Glenn Zaleski, bassist David Wong, and drummer Kyle Poole—are at Pinecrest Gardens in Pinecrest, Florida, on Saturday. Her new album, Oh Snap, was released last month. “From breezy swing to scampering synths, folksy harmonies to stark wails of the soul, Salvant’s crystalline vocals shine across her ingenious experiments,” says The Guardian in its four-star review. “A jazz artist of rare gifts and fearless variety.”
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Singer/composer/producer Gustavo Santaolalla kicks off his 2025 tour of his beloved album Ronroco at Le Bataclan in Paris on Sunday. A remastered edition of the Grammy and Academy Award winner’s critically acclaimed album was released on vinyl for the first time in a newly remastered edition on Nonesuch Records last year.
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Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion bring their Who Turns Out the Light program featuring Ringdown, to Majestic Theater in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, tonight, and Skidmore College’s Zankel Music Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, on Saturday. The program includes music from their GRAMMY-winning new album together, Rectangles and Circumstance, and the previous Shaw and Sō collaboration, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part.
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Molly Tuttle takes her The Highway Knows tour in support of her new album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, to the West Coast, performing two shows in Oregon—at Roseland Theater in Portland tonight and Holly Theater in Medford on Saturday—and one at Cascade Theatre in Redding, California, on Sunday. "Molly Tuttle is one of the best young guitarists in the business,” says NPR’s Stephen Thompson, including So Long Little Miss Sunshine on the All Songs Considered Best New Albums episode. “This thing is magical. It is so good.” Tuttle and her band perform “Rosalee” from the new album live at the Green Mountain Bluegrass and Roots Festival in Vermont in a new video; you can watch it here.
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