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.

Brad Mehldau's recent concert at Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg with the Frankfurt Radio Big Band conducted and with arrangements by its composer-in-residence Darcy James Argue, can now be seen on ARTE. "Brad Mehldau ranks among the most significant jazz pianists of our time," says ARTE. "One of the most influential pianists of recent decades, Mehldau has garnered a following extending far beyond the jazz world." Argue, whom ARTE says "possesses the ability to propel big-band music into uncharted territory," has has been nominated for the JJA Jazz Award for Arranger of the Year; his arrangements can be heard on Cécile McLorin Salvant's forthcoming orchestral album, With Every Breath I Take.

Cécile McLorin Salvant’s album With Every Breath I Take, her first with orchestra, featuring The Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest conducted by Jules Buckley, is due June 26. Salvant and the ensemble perform timeless songs—by Cy Coleman, Noël Coward, Duke Ellington, Stephen Sondheim, Billy Strayhorn, and Salvant—newly arranged by composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue. “It is a rare opportunity to be able to make an album at this scale, which has been a dream of mine for many years,” she says. “Darcy James Argue wrote stunning arrangements and the Metropole Orkest, conducted by the extraordinary Jules Buckley, gave these stories a cinematic dimension ... I am so incredibly proud to share it."

Flea was on NPR's Fresh Air to talk with host Terry Gross about his debut solo album, Honora, his childhood, early musical influences, and more. "If one is willing to feel the pain and suffering of being a human being, you're gonna grow," he says. "I'm grateful for growth, and I'm grateful for humility, and I'm grateful for being a student." You can hear their conversation here.

Rhiannon Giddens has announced the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation, a new nonprofit organization celebrating the African diaspora’s role in creating American identity and culture through music, literature, food, and community. Building on the mission-oriented work that has defined Giddens’ career, the Biscuits & Banjos Foundation will serve as a long-term home for cultural work that is too often unpaid or underfunded—investing in Black-led traditions and the artists, culture bearers, educators, and communities who sustain them.

Congratulations to Mary Halvorson, Ambrose Akinmusire, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Darcy James Argue on their JJA Jazz Association's 2026 JJA Jazz Awards nominations: Halvorson for 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); Akinmusire for Record of the Year (honey from a winter stone) and Trumpeter of the Year; Salvant for Female Vocalist of the Year and Duo of the Year (with Sullivan Fortner); and Argue for Arranger of the Year.

Brad Mehldau Trio continue a sold-out residency at NYC's Village Vanguard. John Adams conducts LA Phil. Jeremy Denk is in LA as well. Rhiannon Giddens is in Louisiana and North Carolina. Gabriel Kahane is in Chicago and Pasadena. Kronos Quartet performs in NYC and Massachusetts. Makaya McCraven tours New England. Jeff Parker talks Happy Today at LA film screenings. Molly Tuttle is in North Carolina and Florida.

The Wild Heart, the Nonesuch debut from composer Dylan Mattingly, is due June 26. The album, performed by Contemporaneous with conductor David Bloom and vocal soloist Iarla Ó Lionáird, comprises the five-movement work The Transmutation Notebooks, as well as Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things). (The vinyl edition features the latter piece and two movements from The Transmutation Notebooks: “Ulysses Dances” and “Last Dance.”) The two pieces sprang from Mattingly’s six-hour epic composition History of Life. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum (these are the tears of things) was written during the first year of the pandemic, while wildfires blazed in Mattingly’s native California. Composer John Adams says: “Dylan Mattingly is a true original whose music fills the listener with a sense of overflowing abundance ... He’s a genuine American Maverick in the true sense of the term.”  You can watch a video for "Ulysses Dances" here. 

Guitarist / bandleader Jeff Parker and ETA IVtet have released Part Two of "Like Swimwear," from their new album, Happy Today, due May 15. It follows last month's release of Part One. Recorded and mixed at Lodge Room in LA on August 20, 2025, Happy Today is the sound of Parker and the rest of the IVtet—drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson—engaged in their signature, minimalist, form-bending improvisational syntax across two sprawling, LP side-length pieces. You can watch the video for the new track, taken from an album-length concert film by Charlie Weinmann, capturing that Lodge Room performance, here. Premiere screenings of the concert film will take place in select cities in late April and early May, before the album's release. The film will be released worldwide on May 29. 

The 2026 BBC Proms schedule has been announced, including performances by Ambrose Akinmusire and Thomas Adès and music by Adès, John Adams, Gabriel Kahane, Steve Reich, and Caroline Shaw. The 86-concert series takes place in the UK over eight weeks this summer. Every Prom will be broadcast on Radio 3 and BBC Sounds and twenty-four will be broadcast on BBC television and iPlayer.

The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers, the seventh album from the Grammy-winning band—and its first comprising all instrumental tunes as well as its first with fiddle player Brittany Haas, who joined the quintet in 2023—is due July 24 on Nonesuch. The album features eight new original compositions by Punch Brothers as well as three traditional songs they arranged. The album’s title is more than a play on words: without lyrics to guide the listener, these are stories, impressions, and emotions communicated entirely with strings through melody, harmony, rhythm, and a literary sense of musical structure. For a band known for pushing acoustic music into unexpected places, going fully instrumental may be the most adventurous move they have made yet. The Unsung Adventures of Punch Brothers is produced by the band and engineered by Joseph Lorge. You can watch the band perform the opening track, “New Bike,” in a new video here, and see the band on tour this spring, summer, and fall.

Douglas McCombs and John Herndon of Tortoise stopped by Amoeba San Francisco for a shopping trip and a chat for Amoeba’s What’s in My Bag? series. They pick up a book by Budgie and music by Tom Verlaine, Louis Jordan, David Thomas, Silent Servant, Broadcast, Hound Dog Taylor and the HouseRockers, Bill Orcutt, Emptyset, Wah!, Oneohtrix Point Never, The Durutti Column, and Peaches. You can take a look inside and hear what they have to say about their picks here.