Orchestra Baobab's Made in Dakar tour of the States culminated last night with a concert at the intimate Dakota Cafe in Minneapolis that lead Minneapolis City Pages reviewer Peter S. Scholtes to exclaim: "Orchestra Baobab is the kind of band that makes critics (at least this one) resort to hyperbole and sociology: They sound like God ..."

Orchestra Boabab continues its US tour, bringing music from its latest release, Made in Dakar, to New York City for two free shows, today and tomorrow. This evening at 7 PM ET, the seminal Senegalese band will perform at Rockefeller Park on the Hudson River in downtown Manhattan as part of the summer's River to River Festival of free outdoor performances. Tomorrow, the group will head to Brooklyn's MetroTech center for a noon event as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rhythm & Blues Festival.

Harps and Angels, Randy Newman's first album of new music in nearly a decade, is due out on Nonesuch August 5, and already, CBS Sunday Morning's Bill Flanagan is calling it one of the summer's best.

Tune in to npr.org tonight at 7:30 PM ET to hear Orchestra Boabab, live in concert. After nearly 40 years of making music, Orchestra Baobab, says NPR, "remains one of the world's foremost purveyors of Afro-Cuban pop.

Orchestra Baobab are currently touring the States with songs from their latest release, Made in Dakar, stopping at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee this past weekend to perform a set that PopMatters calls "the gem of the festival." Tonight they're in Western Massachusetts to play Northampton's Pearl Street Nightclub and head further east at the end of the week for a set at the Somerville Theater, outside Boston, on Saturday. The Boston Globe's Andrew Gilbert says the band is "sounding more soulful than ever" on the new album.

The 2008 JVC Jazz Festival New York got under way earlier this week and continues through June 28 at venues throughout the City, including Carnegie Hall, where the Brad Mehldau Trio will play this Sunday in Zankel Hall in a program titled "A Taste of Genius," and the Greenwich Village club Le Poisson Rouge, where Bill Frisell's new trio will make its New York debut this Thursday.

Works by John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Frederic Rzewski, Bill Frisell, John Zorn, John Cage meet the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's second annual 8 Days in June music festival, which kicks off tonight. It's a multidisciplinary affair aiming to examine the relationship between music and the explosive changes of the 20th and 21st centuries and harness the "The Power of Change."

T Bone Burnett and the Raising Sand tour with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss have made their way to New York City for two shows at Madison Square Garden. While in New York, T Bone stops by WNYC's Soundcheck to discuss Tooth of Crime, his recent Nonesuch release, and his efforts to improve sound quality in the digital age.

k.d. lang's extensive tour of Canada with songs from her latest Nonesuch release, Watershed, continues this week, after several stops across the expanse of her native land, which recently announced that she would be among the newest inductees to Canada's Walk of Fame. "Still thrills, this voice," says the StarPhoenix's Joanne Paulson, after last week's show in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

The Black Keys have closed out the UK leg of their Attack & Release tour and will soon be heading south for stops in Australia and New Zealand in mid-June. Reviewing the new album, JamBase describes it as music that "crawls into your marrow and disturbs your rest. It's not the blues but it's gone drinking with them. For sure, it's rock 'n' roll but with a haunted echo behind even the good time pronouncements ... [T]he imagination and talent gathered on Attack & Release make it a shoe-in for Best of 2008 lists everywhere. Often that sounds like hype but in this case it's just a statement of fact. Once in a while quality just shines out in a way that can't be denied."

Punch Brothers had a packed schedule over the long weekend: they performed at the first annual Delfest in Cumberland, Maryland, on Sunday; The Mauch Opera House in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday; and The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, on Friday. The Washington Post says The Blind Leaving the Blind, the centerpiece of the group's Nonesuch debut, Punch, was the "most adventurous number" of a live set "that packed a powerful ... well, punch." The AV Club calls it "a tour-de-force."