Audra McDonald joins Barbara Cook, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker, and The Black Keys join Devo for election-year benefits ... John Adams's Doctor Atomic continues at the Met; the Pittsburgh Symphony recognizes Adams as its Composer of the Year ... Laurie Anderson brings Homeland to Canada ... Sérgio and Odair Assad join the Turtle Island Quartet for a college tour ... Isabel Bayrakdarian’s Celebrating Gomidas Vartabed heads to her home country of Canada ... David Byrne disproves "this groove is out of fashion" at two tour stops in Missouri ... Shawn Colvin plays two shows in Mississippi ... Philip Glass shows “Glass overflows with the beauty of Cohen's poems" at Melbourne Festival ... Richard Goode performs in Kansas City ... k.d. lang tours the Midwest ... The Magnetic Fields’ fall tour heads south ... Randy Newman plays the Golden State and offers BBC his "desert island discs" ... Nicholas Payton continues residency at Jazz at Lincoln Center ... Joshua Redman plays 25th annual Festival Miami ... Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer return to the road ... and more ...

Randy Newman brings his tour to his home state of California this weekend. After last night's concert in Tennessee, the Knoxville News calls Randy "one of the great songwriters of the rock era—and a guy who never takes the easy way with a lyric." Leading to this weekend's concerts, the Monterey Herald says Randy's "musical arrangements are brilliant and each song's personality is matched by the tone of the composition; he's the master at placing notes and rhythm in line with the character and its predicament"; and the Santa Barbara Independent says Harps and Angels "finds the native Californian at his satirical best."

The Magnetic Fields began their fall tour this past Friday at the State Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Beforehand, Stephin Merritt stopped by The Current studio to talk and perform a few solo acoustic songs. The next night brought a show in Madison, Wisconsin, where, reports The Isthmus, Merritt's "astonishing and sweeping body of work" was "yielded up wit, emotional nuance, memorable hooks and crisp, careful rhymes." Then came a Dallas show the Star-Telegram termed a "victory lap for one of the most idiosyncratic and interesting bands in indie pop" and the Dallas Morning News lauded as "meticulous chamber-pop."

The Black Keys' US tour made its way back home to Akron, Ohio, last Saturday night to play E. J. Thomas Hall. The Cleveland Plain Dealer says the band turned the venue into "one big juke joint" for the nearly 3,000 fans. Pat and Dan, whose "music brilliantly reinvents the wheel," were treated "like conquering heroes" in this "unforgettable evening." They created "primal rock 'n' roll" that "all but demanded a visceral reaction." The band plays Akron again this Friday, at the Civic Theatre, with another group of hometown favorites, Devo, to raise funds for the Obama Presidential campaign's efforts in the all-important swing state.

Isabel Bayrakdarian's Remembrance Tour, celebrating the music of Gomidas Vartabed, whose work is featured on her Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, continues this Friday at Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall. Her most recent performance, last week at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, was "a rarity singing a rarity," writes the Vancouver Sun—Bayrakdarian for "her lustrous voice and emotional commitment to the material she finds meaningful." The Nonesuch recording is "wonderful," says the Sun, and the live performance of it "captivated us with the beauty of the songs."

Randy Newman took his tour of songs from his latest album, Harps and Angels, and throughout his career, across the Midwest this past weekend. The Waukegan, Illinois, paper The Lake Forester says Randy "was in top form Friday" at the show there, with the performance showing "how well constructed Newman's songs are." The Kansas City Star concludes after Randy's Saturday show in that city: "No one does what he does the way he does it: sing and comment with humor, sadness, anger and regret about everything from world history, politics, religion and socio-economics to love, death, sex and parenthood."

Brad Mehldau and Chris Thile perform Bach at a Barack Obama benefit in NYC ... Adams and Rzewski works are on the program for an Obama benefit in Baltimore, while the Pittsburgh Symphony pairs Adams with Dvořák and the San Francisco Ballet brings Mark Morris's Joyride, with Adams music, to New York ... Laurie Anderson returns to Homeland after a trip to the Arctic ... Andriessen meets Kubrick when the Dresdner Sinfoniker pairs De Stijl with 2001 ... The Black Keys return to Akron ... David Byrne heads West with Eno songs, a white-clad band, and dancers ... Bill Frisell sets up shop at Yoshi's in Oakland with Russell Malone ... Philip Glass plays to the poetry of Leonard Cohen at the Sydney Opera House ... k.d. lang is back on tour in California ... The Magnetic Fields kick off their fall tour in Minneapolis ... Randy Newman plays the Midwest too ... Choreographer de Keersmaeker's Steve Reich Evening plays two nights in Aix-en-Provence ... and more ...

Randy Newman continues his world tour in the Midwest this week. The Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot previews tomorrow night's show in nearby Waukegan by assuring his readers that, with the new album, Randy's "standards remain high, his work stellar ... Instead of growing content and nostalgic, Newman remains at his acerbic best on Harps and Angels, his deceptively jaunty, blues-based, luminously orchestrated pop songs brimming with dark humor and pointed commentary that continues in the tradition of '70s classics such as 'Sail Away,' 'Louisiana,' and 'Political Science.'"

David Byrne, who just announced European dates for his current tour, Songs of David Byrne and Brian Eno, has been performing in California all week. San Diego City Beat calls the show "classic Byrne ... a great reminder of Byrne’s genius and his continuing relevance as a performance artist." The Orange County Register calls the Los Angeles show "remarkable" with "Byrne as good as he's ever been since his heyday." The Oakland Tribune calls the Byrne/Eno pairing "one of the greatest partnerships to ever occur in the recording studio," writing that "time has served to validate the significance of" their recently reissued collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which has "played a huge role in shaping modern electronic music."

Bill Frisell begins an eight-set residency at Yoshi's Oakland tomorrow night with guitarist Russell Malone. The two performed together last night in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in what the Grand Rapids Press 3-1/2 star review describes as a "singular evening of comparing and contrasting electric-guitar styles." Frisell played a duo set of a different sort late last month with drummer Matt Wilson at the Monterey Jazz Festival, in what the All About Jazz reviewer names among his "personal highlights from the festival." Label mate Joshua Redman had opened the festival with "a rousing trio set, hearkening back to the Sonny Rollins' trio recordings from the late fifties."

Isabel Bayrakdarian began her North American tour music from her recently released Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, this past weekend in California and heads to Vancouver tonight. The Star-Ledger gives the album four stars and says this "charming artist with a warm, gleaming voice ... sounds utterly authentic in these piquant, touching songs." The San Francisco Chronicle says Saturday's tour opener there, by "the brilliant Armenian Canadian singer," was "transfixing ... a wondrous showcase for singer and composer alike." Her voice's "vivid, dark-hued tone and sumptuous phrasing imbued every piece of music with warmth and urgency. Her singing reached great heights of oratorical splendor when necessary, but the simplicity of some of the more straightforward songs was equally touching."

Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile's tour with music from their recently released self-titled debut duo disc on Nonesuch, takes a week's hiatus before resuming in Raleigh next Wednesday. In the mean time, Chris will be performing with label mate Brad Mehldau at New York's Poisson Rouge on Friday in a benefit for Obama. Last night in Seattle, Meyer and Thile gave a performance that, says the Seattle Times, "showcased the rigorous yet accessible, and engrossing, experimentation that defines their intermittent partnership ... [T]he boldness of this duo's performance will not be easily forgotten." After their Sunday show in Portland, The Oregonian calls them "masters of their respective instruments unconstrained by considerations of genre."  Chris also found time to talk to the Los Angeles Times about another passion of his: The Cubs.