Audra McDonald was a special guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on NBC last night. The five-time Tony Award winner stopped by the studio to help Fallon out on a Suggestion Box request to give voice to some sage Yahoo! Answers in her own inimitable way. Watch the segment here. McDonald returns to Broadway this spring to take on the role of legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. Tickets are on sale now.

Nonesuch celebrates Kronos Quartet, long known as interpreters of music from around the world, in its 40th anniversary year with two releases: Kronos Explorer Series, a box set of five classic albums from five different parts of the world, and A Thousand Thoughts, a new album that looks at Kronos’s geographically wide-ranging sources, featuring music from 14 different countries. Both will be available on April 8, 2014 (international release April 21), and are available to pre-order in the Nonesuch Store; pre-orders of A Thousand Thoughts include an instant download of Sim Shalom, which you can hear here. Kronos continues its anniversary celebration with UCLA concerts on March 14 and 15, and a Carnegie Hall concert on March 28.

Nonesuch releases composer Jacob Cooper’s label debut, Silver Threads, on April 29, 2014. The album comprises a six-song cycle performed by soprano Mellissa Hughes. Cooper wrote the title track for Hughes in 2011, setting a haiku attributed to Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō for voice and electronic track. To expand it into a full cycle (for voice and track), he enlisted five other poets to write text inspired by the haiku. Nonesuch Store preorders include an instant download of the title track. Hughes performs selections from Silver Threads in NYC as part of her March 20 Lincoln Center American Songbook concert. 

Inside Llewyn Davis, the new film written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund, and Justin Timberlake, is out now on Blu-ray and DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Both formats include "Inside Inside Llewyn Davis," a 40-minute making-of documentary offering insights from the filmmakers, cast, crew, and musicians, and are available now in the Nonesuch Store.

Now available in The Black Keys' online store is the official West Akron Baseball League jersey designed by The Black Keys creative director Michael Carney. All profits from this t-shirt will be donated to the W.A.B.L., in which both Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney played as kids. "It was a really positive hobby that kept us from sitting around watching TV," Patrick Carney tells MTV. "We are proud to be sponsoring W.A.B.L to hopefully offset some of the league's expenses and get more kids outside having fun."

Randy Newman will lead a one-night-only performance of his famed 1995 musical Faust in concert at New York City Center on July 1, 2014, as part of the Encores! Off-Center series. The performance, directed by Thomas Kail (In the Heights), will feature Newman starring as the Devil, with additional casting still to be announced. Tickets go on sale to the general public on Monday, March 17.

Punch Brothers kick off a three-week US tour at Oberlin College this Sunday, part of the group's three-part residency on the campus this academic year. The tour, with support from singer/songwriter Aoife O'Donovan, continues through the end of the month with shows in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and upstate New York, as well as festival sets at Suwannee Springfest in Florida and Savannah Music Festival in Georgia. Punch Brothers will also perform at the High Sierra and Sasquatch! festivals in the Pacific Northwest in July.

The 2013 Americana Music Honors & Awards ceremony, at which Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell took home the Duo of the Year and Album of the Year awards for their album Old Yellow Moon last September, will be broadcast in full on AXS TV this Sunday, March 9, at 8 PM ET. Dr. John was also presented the Lifetime Achievement Award for Performance by The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, and Ry Cooder presented an award. Watch a preview here.

Randy Newman was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on NBC last night. He spoke with Fallon about the show's return to NYC, offering the perfect segue to Newman's performance of his classic tune, "I Love L.A." He was joined by The Tonight Show's house band The Roots for the performance, which you can watch here, along with a web-exclusive performance of another Newman classic, "My Life Is Good." Newman tours Colorado this month and returns to NYC for a concert performance of his Faust July 1.

Robert Ashley, the American composer, has died at the age of 83. Ashley, whose piece Improvement: An Opera for Television was released on Nonesuch Records in 1992, died at his home in New York from complications of cirrhosis of the liver on March 3, 2014. "Before there was Spalding Gray or Laurie Anderson or the 1980s," wrote the critic Josef Woodard, "there was Robert Ashley, the composer who dissected speech, envisioned television opera, and concocted a new kind of musical-theatrical experience." Ashley finished his last opera, Crash, in December 2013; it will premiere at the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial, April 10–13, 2014.

John Adams has teamed up with Toronto Symphony Orchestra Music Director Peter Oundjian for the tenth-annual New Creations Festival, running Saturday, March 1, through Friday, March 7. Following his TSO debut in the 2011 New Creations Festival, Adams returns with his music as a focus in the 2014 Festival, with Oundjian leading the TSO in his Doctor Atomic Symphony and the composer leading the orchestra in the Canadian premieres of his Slonimsky’s Earbox and Absolute Jest.

Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, the debut album from the electric duo of Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana, is out now on Nonesuch Records (March 18 on vinyl). The album is "astonishing," exclaims Jazzwise magazine, "one of the best albums of 2014." Mehliana earns four stars from the Guardian and from MusicOMH, which calls it "wholly absorbing ... an intuitive, compelling dialogue between the two musicians." Tune in to BBC Radio 2's Jamie Cullum tonight to hear an interview with Mehldau. Watch a performance of the album track "Sleeping Giant" here.