Organizers of the Ojai Music Festival have released a few details for the 62nd annual event, with Dawn Upshaw slated to perform and Steve Reich named as composer-in-residence. The Festival, which runs June 5–8, 2008, marks the composer's first appearance there in 35 years and includes a number of events featuring his works. 

This Saturday, November 10, Kronos Quartet will perform all three of Górecki's string quartets in the course of one evening in Górecki's hometown of Katowice, Poland, with the composer in attendance. The event is part of the 16th Annual Upper Silesian Art Festival. All three of Górecki's string quartets—Already It Is Dusk (Quartet No. 1), Quasi una Fantasia (Quartet No. 2), and Piesni Spiewaja ("...songs are sung") (Quartet No. 3)—were written especially for Kronos. The three quartets have never been performed like this before.

Following Caetano Veloso's sold-out show at the University of North Carolina, the school's Daily Tar Heel offered a glowing review and a uniquely student-centric perspective on his latest, most rock-influenced work, Cê, and his current tour of the US. "It makes me happier," the paper quotes him as saying, "because I think that a university town has a lot of young people and young people are very curious. They're interested in things."

With the Pat Metheny Trio headed to Richmond, VA, to play at the Modlin Center this Friday, the city's Style Weekly offers a preview of what's to come: "Pat Metheny is the opposite of a chameleon. He doesn’t blend into the settings of his numerous projects as much as he reshapes the musical landscape around him." And with all the projects the tireless guitarist has immersed himself in over the years, "today the purest way to experience Metheny’s playing is in his trio."

In today's New York Daily News, Carolina Gonzalez previews Caetano Veloso's upcoming New York City performances at the Nokia Theater, and has a friendly suggestion for the folks who hand out the Grammys: "If the Latin Recording Academy gave out a Grammy for Best Living Songwriter, Caetano Veloso would walk away handily with the prize." (While that's not yet an option, Caetano has grabbed two nominations for his new record, Cê—Best Singer-Songwriter Album and Best Brazilian Song for "Não Me Arrependo" off the album.)

As we reported last week, the phenomenal collaboration between Tom Waits and Kronos Quartet at this year's Bridge School Benefit concerts proved to be the highlight of the weekend's events. Now you can catch a glimpse of the spectacular set on this video released by The Bridge School. In this clip, Waits and Kronos perform the song "God's Away on Business," which they last played together at a benefit concert in 2003.

Caetano Veloso performed at Boston's Orpheum Theatre last Friday, and the Boston Globe reports on what was a full-on rock show by "the gifted and eclectic Brazilian superstar." With the focus of the concert on Caetano's latest album, the rock-influenced Cê, "the setting was stripped-down and austere by the artist's standards, but the ideas were not."

In today's Boston Globe, correspondent Siddhartha Mitter previews tonight's Caetano Veloso show at the Orpheum Theare. In Caetano's current artistic output, Mitter finds that the 65-year-old singer "still shows the restlessness that first earned him fame in the late 1960s." Yet for all the sonic surprises on the new, rock-influenced album Cê, "the man's voice is as richly seductive and thoughtful as ever, and the lyrics ... offer intellectual and cultural queries presented in the Veloso manner, suffused with yearning and ambiguous eroticism."

Last week, Laurie Anderson visited Melbourne, Australia, to present her latest work, Homeland, at the annual Melbourne International Arts Festival. In a report from the festival, the Guardian praised the piece from its "breathtaking" opening moments—"a fitting introduction to her finest show in more than a decade."

While reports continue to pour in about the show-stealing set by Kronos Quartet and Tom Waits at last weekend's Bridge School Benefit, the group sent in a special backstage photo from the event. Here they are with Tyler, the Bridge School student whose artwork lined the walls of their dressing room to provide some inspiration before the show.

Kronos Quartet and Tom Waits performed last Saturday and Sunday for 40,000+ people at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, as part of the 21st annual Bridge School Benefit organized by Neil Young and his wife, Pegi. Reports all point to the Waits/Kronos set as "the day's most thrilling" (San Jose Mercury News) and "the undisputed highlight of the concert" (Rolling Stone).

"Their speed, their gorgeous tone, their ease reaching over the body of the guitar to its extreme high range, their uncanny musical memories ... and their ability to play thousands of notes without a single clinker, click or buzz are the stuff of guitar gods," says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of Sérgio and Odair Assad's recent performance in Milwaukee. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reviewing their performance in the Seattle Symphony's guitar series, says that "the Assads displayed all the taste and refinement for which they are known ... their music gleams with such innate virtuosity."