Dr. John kicks off a two-week tour of the United States featuring music from his Nonesuch debut album, Locked Down, and favorite tunes from throughout the New Orleans legend's 50+ year career. Joining him for the tour will be his band The Lower 911 featuring Jon Cleary. In addition to his own headline shows, Dr. John will join Gov't Mule for several shows across the South and will be a special guest of Iron & Wine for a show at the Ravinia Festival. At the end of the month, the tour heads to Europe for several club shows and festival sets through July.

The new album pairing works by Krzysztof Penderecki with those they inspired by Jonny Greenwood has been named June's Recording of the Month by Stereophile. It's "a fulfilling, call and response between student and teacher where the younger composer tries to push forward the ideas that the older man began," says Stereophile. The album's sound quality is "superb throughout: detailed, spacious and breathtakingly transparent." Greenwood's work will be performed at the Spoleto Festival this weekend; the album's repertoire can be heard at Poland's Open'er Festival in July.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth, Nonesuch released Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions, on which Billy Bragg and Wilco put music to lyrics by Guthrie for which he had not written music or made recordings. Bragg has launched a tour in celebration of the centenary and has just added four specially curated acoustic shows in the UK and Ireland this September, with guests Joe Henry, KT Tunstall, and more. Here, in his own words, Bragg shares his thoughts on Guthrie, the Mermaid Avenue project, and the concerts.

The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, formerly UCLA Live, has announced its inaugural season, marking the curatorial debut of its Executive and Artistic Director Kristy Edmunds, and featured among the artists performing as part of its 2012–13 season of events at Royce Hall are several artists familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal: Emmylou Harris, Laurie Anderson, Allen Toussaint, the Brad Mehldau Trio, and Joshua Redman. The new season also includes events celebrating Kate McGarrigle and Ali Farka Touré.

On this long Memorial Day weekend in the US, Shawn Colvin and Sara Watkins join Garrison Keillor and the cast of A Prairie Home Companion for live shows ... Laurie Anderson brings Dirtday! to Portugal ... Billy Bragg brings Mermaid Avenue to Belgium and Germany ... Carolina Chocolate Drops tour with Dave Matthews Band ... James Farm has three nights in Oakland ... Kronos Quartet joins Philip Glass for Dracula in the UK ... Richard Goode performs in Spain ... k.d. lang is in New Orleans and Orlando ... Brad Mehldau Trio plays Cancun ... and more ...

The Sara Watkins–penned tune "You and Me," off her new album, Sun Midnight Sun, has been chosen as Today's Top Tune by KCRW in LA. The song, which Watkins recently performed on The Tonight Show, features harmony vocals by Jackson Browne, with whom she tours later this summer. Watkins, one of the most frequent guest artists on A Prairie Home Companion, will join host Garrison Keillor and fellow guest Shawn Colvin for a live broadcast of the show from Wolf Trap's Filene Center outside DC this weekend.

James Farm—Joshua Redman, Aaron Parks, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland—launch a tour of the Bay Area at the Napa Valley Opera House tonight, followed by sets at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz and a weekend of shows at Yoshi's Oakland. The group heads next to Japan for four nights at the Blue Note Tokyo. "We complement each other very well and have a type of intuitiveness with the way we play with each other," Harland tells the San Francisco Chronicle. "That's something that takes years to develop, so it's amazing that we kind of have that already, even though we don't tour that often."

Amadou & Mariam perform in A Room for London, a one-bedroom riverboat installation lodged atop the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, tonight, as part of the Sounds from a Room series. It will be projected live via large screen at Queen Elizabeth Hall and stream live online at aroomforlondon.co.uk. Earlier events at A Room for London include new sound works from Laurie Anderson and David Byrne. Other performers in the series include Andrew Bird, Imogen Heap, Baaba Mal, and tUnE-yArDs.

British singer/songwriter/guitarist Lianne La Havas, whose debut album, Is Your Love Big Enough?, will be released in the US on August 7 via Nonesuch Records, performs a headline show at Bootleg Bar in Los Angeles tonight. It's a return to Los Angeles for La Havas, who recorded Is Your Love Big Enough? there and in Brooklyn last summer; she also recorded her 2011 free EP Live in LA in the city. Pre-order information for the album and additional US tour dates will be announced shortly.

Jeremy Denk marks the release of his new album, Ligeti/Beethoven, with a performance at NYC's (Le) Poisson Rouge tonight. It's a Critics' Pick in Time Out New York and in New York, which calls him "splendid." The New Yorker calls the program "irresistible." WNYC has made it today's Gig Alert. The Washington Post says of Saturday's performance of the program in DC: "Denk has a way of explicating complicated music by playing it so that it seems self-evident and absolutely graspable—a considerable gift." In a new essay for Newsweek, Denk writes of having chosen a career in music over chemistry: "I knew I wouldn’t cure cancer or anything, but I might discover some beautiful way of playing something that no one else had found."

Jeremy Denk performs in DC on Saturday and celebrates the recent release of his Nonesuch debut album, Ligeti/Beethoven, in NYC on Monday ... The Black Keys close out their North American tour in Atlantic City ... Billy Bragg launches European tour in Germany ... Carolina Chocolate Drops are in Virginia ... Shawn Colvin plays the Cherokee Creek Music Festival ... Michael Daves, Noam Pikelny do the Brooklyn Folk Fest ... Kronos Quartet kicks off European tour in the Netherlands ... k.d. lang continues US tour in Kansas ... Jessica Lea Mayfield plays Nelsonville Music Festival ... Brad Mehldau Trio has a trio of SFJAZZ shows ... Randy Newman plays a set at the Hang Out Music Festival ... and more ...

Punch Brothers pick up their US tour again at Appalachian Uprising in Ohio on June 2, one of a number of festival dates ahead in the US and Europe, in addition to their own headline shows. In duo news, Noam Pikenly performs at the Brooklyn Folk Fest tonight with guitarist Michael Daves, who joins Chris Thile at the Ryman next month. During a recent stop in Nashville, Punch Brothers performed two songs off their new album, Who's Feeling Young Now? at Lightning 100: "Patchwork Girlfriend" and "Movement and Location." Watch both here.