Stephin Merritt will be DJing at the George & Dragon pub in London on December 10. He's been a regular at NYC’s Beauty Bar night "The Phantastic Invisible Tentacle" and a co-host of the Nowhere Bar’s "Runt" party. This marks his return to the London venue, where he'll be spinning his eclectic mix of late '60s and early '70s bubblegum and psychedelic pop songs. Distortion, the forthcoming The Magnetic Fields album, was featured on BBC 6 Music's Roundtable and scored high on the show's rating scale.

Lee's Summit, Missouri, Pat Metheny's hometown, is also the home and inspiration for the new Metheny Music Foundation, which awards scholarships for local high school students to attend the University of Missouri—Kansas City Jazz Improv Camp. On Friday, March 7, the Foundation will hold a fundraising concert at the nearby Unity Village Activities Center featuring student musicians from Lee's Summit schools along with the Pat Metheny Trio and Pat's brother, trumpeter Mike Metheny.

Sam Davol was recently featured in the New York Times—not an unheard of event for the cellist of The Magnetic Fields. This time, though, it wasn't in the Arts section. Sam, his wife, Leslie, and their two children have decamped from tony downtown Manhattan to return to the couple's hometown of Boston, and their beautiful new home is on view in the Times's Home & Garden section. The Davols traded in their New York digs for a more affordable place up north so, among other things, Sam could focus on his music. And with the recording studio they built in the new space, Sam was able to record a number of his tracks on The Magnetic Fields upcoming Nonesuch release, Distortion, right from home.

The Guardian has revealed the last batch of albums on its list of the 1,000 all-time must-hears. Earlier this week, we brought you Nonesuch artists A through M on the list. Here are N through Z, along with the Guardian's take on albums from Orchestra Baobab, Astor Piazzolla, Radio Tarifa, Oumou Sangare, SFJAZZ Collective, Taraf de Haïdouks, Rokia Traoré, and Wilco.

During her visit to the BBC Radio 2 studios in London last Friday, k.d. lang stopped to spend some time with "Pudsey," the mascot for the charity Children in Need. The organization works to improve the lives of disadvantaged children in the UK. 

The CMJ chart numbers have been released, and Youssou N'Dour's Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take) moves up ten slots—the week's biggest mover—to hit No. 1 on the New World chart. Youssou performs tonight and tomorrow night at NYC's Nokia Theatre as part of the Great African Ball. 

Congratulations to Ry Cooder, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Instrumentalist by the Americana Music Association (AMA), in a ceremony held earlier this month at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.

In a ceremony held at Manhattan's Hudson Theater last Tuesday, Laurie Anderson was awarded the esteemed Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Named in memory of the early-film era stars, each year, the prize honors “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” Here is a transcript of Laurie Anderson's acceptance speech from the event.

Now on display at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is Playback, an exhibition exploring the intersection between video art and music videos. The show features video by artists like Andy Warhol, William Wegman, Damien Hirst, Sonic Youth, and Laurie Anderson. "In a time when most video art has become multi-screen installation," says InterAccess, "Playback makes a strong case that single channel video, in the form of the music video, is alive and well, with an audience and a distribution network to rival single channel video’s heyday."

The DownBeat 72nd Annual Readers Poll results are in, including the Best Jazz Album of the Year: Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau's Metheny Mehldau. Metheny was also named Best Guitarist and Mehldau Best Acoustic Pianist. "There was a real exchange and richness of ideas," Metheny tells DownBeat about the making of the album. "We talked about the most complex, simple, detailed, or general idea at will. We moved around within three dimensions, sound-wise or texture-wise, harmonically or rhythmically."

The Criterion Collection has announced that it will release a special four-disc set of the Bernardo Bertolucci masterpiece The Last Emperor on February 26, 2008. The film depicts the tumultuous life of Pu Yi, who came to power in 1908, at the age of three, and became China's last emperor. It garnered nine Academy Awards, winning each of the categories in which it was nominated, including Best Original Score, by Ryuichi Sakomoto, Cong Su, and David Byrne. Among the special-edition DVD's bonus features are audio commentary by Sakamoto and new video interviews with Sakamoto and Byrne.

Best known for his contribution to the soundtrack for the 2003 Italian Job remake starring Mark Wahlberg, Brazilian-born DJ Amon Tobin talks to The Moscow Times about a surprising array of influences, from Ennio Morricone to Grandmaster Flash, and about his latest record, Foley Room, on which he looked to Kronos Quartet to record new tracks he could sample. Moscow readers can listen for the Kronos samples at Tobin's show tonight at Ikra.