Rokia Traoré, Toumani Diabaté, and Amadou & Mariam have all been nominated for the inaugural Songlines Music Awards, recognizing outstanding talent in world music. Diabaté and Traoré are each nominated for Best Artist, Amadou & Mariam for Best Group. Winners will be chosen by the Songlines editorial team and announced in May. The WOMAD festival, the Awards' co-presenter, will host a live event with a selection of the nominees at WOMAD Charlton Park in July, where Traoré and label mate Oumou Sangare are scheduled to perform.

Dan Auerbach, fresh off his two-week tour with Hacienda and Those Darlins, helped kick off Austin's South by Southwest Music Conference last night with an opening-night set at The Parish. The first reports are in, and the show seems to be the hit of a typically jam-packed SxSW night. MTV includes the "raw and rumbling set" among the night's highlights, and JamBase says, "The top pick for the first night was undoubtedly Dan Auerbach ... [I]t took all of one song to realize this was something special." The Dallas Observer calls Dan's solo debut, Keep It Hid, "an intimate trek down gravel roads and back alleys to the crossroads of American music."

Isabel Bayrakdarian will perform songs from her Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, celebrating the work of composer Gomidas Vardabet, at Ohio's Baldwin-Wallace College, tomorrow night, to benefit the school's Art Song Festival. "The Lebanon-born Canadian soprano of Armenian heritage has proved herself on the international operatic and recital stage, where her lustrous voice and expressive urgency are winning increasing approbation," says the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. "I think these songs are in the psyche of all Armenians," Bayrakdarian says of the Gomidas works. "In many ways, when I sing them ... they come from a part of me that is very different from when I sing any other repertoire."

Emmylou Harris and Kate and Anna McGarrigle will be among the artists celebrating the legendary singer-songwriter Pete Seeger, in honor of his 90th birthday, at a special Madison Square Garden concert event, Sunday, May 3. All proceeds will go to the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, the organization Seeger co-founded in 1966 to fight pollution on New York's longest river. Also on stage will be the honoree himself, along with a diverse line-up of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Joan Baez, Ani DiFranco, Steve Earle, Ben Harper, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and many more.

"Composer, pianist and living legend Allen Toussaint has helped shape the sound of R&B, soul and funk while infusing a little bit of New Orleans into it," says KCRW in naming as yesterday's Top Tune the Thelonius Monk–penned title track of Toussaint's forthcoming Nonesuch solo debut, The Bright Mississippi. Toussaint will perform during both weeks of the 40th anniversary New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which runs April 24–30 and May 1–3. Given his prominent place in the festival and the city's musical history, it's no surprise that Toussaint has made his way onto the official JazzFest 2009 poster, by artist James Michalopoulos.

Dan Auerbach was the featured guest on yesterday's episode of KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic. Dan and band perform more than half the songs off his recent Nonesuch solo debut, Keep It Hid, live in the KCRW studios. At the end of the set, the show's host, Jason Bentley, sighs, "Man, you got some soul, brother." His favorite album tracks, he says, "really caught my attention as just soulful blues-rock of the highest order."

Richard Goode's series of concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra comes to a close Tuesday night. The Boston Globe, in a preview of this May's release of Goode's complete piano concertos with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, looks back at the pianist's 1993 collection of the Beethoven piano sonatas and says it "stands as one of the most important statements made about this music in recent decades." Goode, whom the St. Louis Post-Dispatch calls "a musician's musician," will perform Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto this weekend with David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.

Three Girls and Their Buddy, the popular series of concert featuring Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin, and Buddy Miller, has just announced a spring and summer leg of its tour and have launched a special pre-sale for tickets that will allow fans to both order early and automatically be entered to win a chance to meet and greet the stars of the artists. Pre-sale customers will also have a chance to purchase a limited-edition tour poster, autographed by the artists.

John Adams conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony with Leila Josefowicz; San Francisco Ballet dances to Adams in Mark Morris program ... Afro-Cuban All Stars tour the Midwest ... Laurie Anderson performs a new collection at the Guggenheim ... Dan Auerbach closes out US tour, makes the Very Short List ... David Byrne launches European spring tour ... Bill Frisell tours the South with Greg Leisz ... Philip Glass launches four-week series in NYC ... Richard Goode joins Boston Symphony Orchestra ... Kronos reaches Rotterdam's RedSound Festival ... Brad Mehldau Trio makes festival rounds in Australia, Singapore ... Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone play Delaware's DuPont ... Joshua Redman Trio play sets in Sweden, Switzerland ... Steve Reich featured at the Salzburg Biennale ... and more ...

Steve Reich is the featured composer at this weekend's cycle of the Salzburg Biennale, a new festival for contemporary music. Events begin tonight with a performance of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Fase, featuring four works by Reich, and continue through the weekend with performances of Reich's works by the Österreichisches Ensemble für Neue Musik, Synergy Ensemble, Ictus Ensemble, and the composer himself. Interspersed are performances by a traditional Balinese gamelan, to reflect its influence on the composer.

Gerald Finley, the star of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic, is the subject of a feature profile in the Globe and Mail, which examines Finley's work with "opera's great chronicler of modern history," particularly in a role that "sometimes feels like the nightly equivalent of a triathlon." Violinist Leila Josefowicz tells the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about performing Adams's The Dharma at Big Sur, which she will do again this weekend, with the composer conducting the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The piece "takes you to a different place," she says, "with total strength vs. vulnerability at the same time."

Laurie Anderson is a featured artist in the Guggenheim Museum's current exhibit The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989, which examines the influences of Asian culture on American artists. In addition to the inclusion of her work in the exhibit, the museum presents two live performances by Anderson, titled Transitory Life: Some Stories, in the Guggenheim's theater, tonight and tomorrow night.