As was just announced, Amadou & Mariam’s new album, Welcome to Mali, will be released in the US this March. It was released last month in the UK to great critical acclaim, taking the top spot on Metacritic's as the year's best-reviewed album. The Observer named it the CD of the Week, describing it as "consistently banging; busily upbeat and lushly-produced." Both Observer Music Monthly and Uncut give the album a perfect five stars; Pitchfork gives it an 8.4 and concludes: "'Inevitable' is a pretty good word for the stardom of Amadou & Mariam. People this amazingly talented and open to new sounds and ideas rarely remain obscure, especially after so many years honing their craft and building their catalog."

John Adams's A Flowering Tree and Kronos Quartet's The Cusp of Magic have been named among NPR's Top 10 classical CDs of 2008, the latter a seamless blend of Eastern and Western influences, the former demonstrating the power of Adams's "imaginative musical language." Audiophile Audition gives A Flowering Tree five stars and exclaims: "John Adams has produced a masterwork." With this "shimmering soundscape," Adams has written "some of the most purely gorgeous music of recent years," all captured on this "beautifully recorded" album. "Most strongly recommended!"

The 1997 Buena Vista Social Club recording was, according to All About Jazz, "brimming with magic and full of songs from the vast trove of musical treasures with which Cuba is plentiful." The group's unforgettable performance at Carnegie Hall the following year "remains the pinnacle of the Buena Vista project," and now, with the newly released recording, it is available "for everyone who was there to remember, and everyone else to enjoy ... The music throughout Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall is a deep pleasure: melodic and full of warmth."

Even with all the critical acclaim and analysis John Adams and his work have received over the years, writes LA Weekly in recommending the composer's new memoir, "if you know Adams’ music—really know it—it may not surprise you to discover that everything written up to now is puny, indeed, besides the guy, and what he has to say about himself." In the book, Adams shows "what it takes to compose great music, serious music that can reach out and touch people importantly" while transcending other memoirs with "this intense, immensely charming and revealing work."

Punch Brothers' US tour took them to the Walton Arts Center in Arkansas on Saturday, leading the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to state: "No matter what music they touched, the Punch Brothers were quite amazing." The review calls The Blind Leaving the Blind, from the band's Nonesuch debut, Punch, "the most impressive piece of the night." An examination of that piece in The Gospel & Culture Project concludes: "[Chris] Thile has made music that shakes fans out of genre-bound identities, challenges attention spans, and undermines pre-conceptions of where great music is to be found. TBLTB can teach listeners new ways to experience music."

Buena Vista Social Club at Carnegie Hall, the recent release capturing that famous 1998 concert, receives five stars from the New Zealand Herald, which calls it "just as powerful as the 1997 studio album that made the Cuban players world-wide stars." The passing, since that show, of a number of the key band members "makes the beautifully packaged double album even more special," states the review, and "it's the closest you're going to get" to 1940s Havana. "Transport yourself."

Isabel Bayrakdarian's Nonesuch debut, Gomidas Songs, featuring the music of Armenia's national composer, Gomidas Vardabet, has been named a CD Pick of the Week by WNYC's Soundcheck. Gramophone magazine describes the album's repertoire as "exquisitely haunting miniatures [that] sound as if they belong somewhere between Bartók and Canteloube ... Above all, the limpid, melismatic vocal lines allow us to savour the bright lyric soprano of Bayrakdarian at her most relaxed."

"Glenn Kotche is not your average rock-and-roll percussionist," says the Chicago Sun-Times in its review of Glenn's joint concert on Tuesday with new-music ensemble eighth blackbird at Chicago's Harris Theater. The paper calls the performers "kindred musical souls," mild in temperament, perhaps, but "as fierce as any garage band or chamber players hurtling through a late Beethoven string quartet." Chicagoist's editors faced a conundrum in deciding how to spend their Tuesday night but "realized just how foolish we would be to pass up" what was "a stellar performance" with "a jaw dropping solo rendition of 'Monkey Chant' by Kotche" and, ultimately, "a truly remarkable evening."

Fresh off yesterday's five-star review in The Guardian, Bill Frisell's tour-closing concert at the Barbican earns another five stars, from the Financial Times. For the show, the Frisell Trio performed Bill's "spot-on score" that gave "a zesty sheen" to the films of Buster Keaton, Jim Woodring, and Bill Morrison, with the Trio's musical efforts "equal partner in the audiovisual experience." The paper sums up Bill's works as "a soundscape pregnant with humour, menace and the struggle to survive."

Bill Frisell concluded his Trio tour—playing music to the films of Buster Keaton, Bill Morrison, and Jim Woodring—at the Barbican in London on Saturday as part of the London Jazz Festival. The Guardian gives a perfect five stars to the performance, in which the Trio gave "all the light and shade needed to underpin three very different film-makers' visions ... Best of all were the Buster Keaton movies The High Sign and One Week, integrating music and vision so brilliantly it was impossible to think of the event as pure film or just jazz."

Punch Brothers are on the road again, touring the States, following Chris Thile's duo tour with bassist Edgar Meyer. Last night, the quintet performed at the University of Buffalo Center for the Arts. The Buffalo News says that as "Bach eventually begat Beethoven," so too has Punch Brothers taken "Bill Monroe’s speeded-up version of old-time country music and accelerating it into another century." The review calls Chris "ferociously gifted," Noam Pikelny's banjo playing "revelatory and a perfect counter for Thile’s high flying skills," and their bandmates' playing "masterful."

The Met premiere production of John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic concluded last Thursday; this weekend, the Atlanta Symphony will give a staged production of the piece. Tonight, the composer is at Harvard to lead a performance of The Wound-Dresser, followed by a discussion. The Boston Globe talks with the composer about this "particularly rich time" in his life, as "one of America's busiest and most original composers" and features a review of Adams's memoir, Hallelujah Junction, that concludes: "[T]his is a book that any aspiring artist, in any medium, should read as a kind of how-to guide to achieving artistic success without losing integrity, something that seems to many young artists today nearly impossible. In fact, it is a book for anyone who wants to create something—including a self."