The Carolina Chocolate Drops' Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig, is out now. The BBC calls it "an extraordinary and stylish album," its highlight a "pickin’, fiddlin’ and slappin’ version of Blu Cantrell’s 'Hit ‘em Up Style.'"

Steve Reich joined So Percussion on stage in a performance of his 1972 work Clapping Music—"still one of his most audacious and breathtaking creations," says the San Francisco Chronicle—for a "marvelous" all-Reich program at Stanford. Featured were some of Reich's "groundbreaking percussion works" that sounded "as magical and arresting as ever," says the Chronicle, and the US premiere of Reich's Mallet Quartet. At the hands of the performers, said the Mercury News, it sounded "irresistible."

Anne Midgette, the classical music critic for the Washington Post, has already named Alarm Will Sound's a/rhythmia among the year's best albums, and, for WNYC's Soundcheck, included John Adams's Dharma at Big Sur among the decade's best. Now, on her Post blog, she says of Adams, "if there was a composer to whom the decade belonged, I'd say it was him." Audiophile Audition gives his latest, Doctor Atomic Symphony, four stars.

John Adams led the Orchestra of St. Luke's in a performance of El Niño at Carnegie Hall Sunday. The New York Times finds Adams's Nativity Oratorio to be "best suited to the business of telling the Nativity story" of the works typically heard during Advent and credits the conductor with drawing "a solid, passionate performance from the orchestra." Playbill spoke with Adams and New York City Ballet's Peter Martins about Martins's new piece set to Naive and Sentimental Music, which recently premiered at Lincoln Center.

The revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's A Little Night Music opened last night at the Walter Kerr Theatre, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angela Lansbury; Nonesuch Records / PS Classics will record the cast album in January. New York calls the revival a "stunning, twilit, devastatingly good new production ... beautiful." Sondheim and Lansbury talk to the magazine about this and their previous work together. NPR's Weekend Edition looks at a different sort of relationship with ties to the play. USA Today praises both Lansbury and Sondheim's score for their "blend of wit and poignancy."

BlakRoc, the album that brought together The Black Keys, Damon Dash, and a star-studded lineup of hip-hop MCs, is now available digitally at nonesuch.com for fans in the US and Canada at the same audiophile-quality 320kbps MP3s available throughout the site. The A.V. Club gives the album an A, saying it "defeats all odds by sounding both organic and cohesive." The Houston Chronicle gives it four stars, calling it "a sinewy masterpiece."

Wilco's latest Nonesuch release, Wilco (the album), has been named Album of the Year by the Independent, which has an exclusive interview with Jeff Tweedy as well. In a year that has been "a fine year for albums," the paper's Andy Gill calls Wilco's newest "an extraordinary achievement." Also on his list of favorites is Oh My God, Charlie Darwin from The Low Anthem, "this year's most intriguing new Americana-indie offshoot." The Boston Herald concurs, placing both albums on its Top 10 of 2009.

Kronos Quartet's latest Nonesuch release, Floodplain, has been named one of the Ten Best Albums of 2009 by Songlines. "There are few musicians on earth that encompass a range of music like Kronos," says Songlines, praising its "mastery of classical string playing" and "engagement with traditional sounds and contemporary geo-politics." The group reunites with its former cellist, Joan Jeanrenaud, in concert at UC Berkeley this Sunday.

The Times (UK) weighed in on the decade's best music late last month, including Nonesuch albums in each of four categories. Now, the Sunday Times  offers its list of the best albums of 2009, and Nonesuch artists are one again represented across genres: Wilco for Wilco (the album) in rock/pop, Kronos Quartet's Floodplain in world, and Allen Toussaint's The Bright Mississippi in jazz. SPIN includes Wilco (the album) and Amadou & Mariam's Welcome to Mali on its own list of the year's best.

The LA Phil's West Coast, Left Coast festival concludes tonight, after more than two weeks of performances at Walt Disney Concert Hall, with a celebration of the Beat poets featuring Joshua Redman, among others. The Los Angeles Times praised Kronos's "enthusiastic" Friday performance and the LA Phil's Sunday performance of Adams's "ecstatic" Dharma at Big Sur, led by the composer, in which Leila Josefowicz "played brilliantly ... rising to heights of rapture."

After its Black Thursday release in the US, BlakRoc is now out in the UK. The Times, Independent, Financial Times, and Guardian all give it four stars; the Independent, quoting a lyric, says: "The Black Keys got so much soul." Back in the US, the New York Times describes its sound as "hard but loose, rooted in sinewy beats by Patrick Carney ... and spooky riffs by Dan Auerbach"; the Washington Post calls it "inspired." It gets an A from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Consequence of Sound says it's "simply incredible."

The latest in NPR's compendium of the year's best music is a list of the Top Ten "New Music" albums, as chosen by WNYC's Nadia Sirota. On it is Alarm Will Sound's Nonesuch debut, a/rhythmia, which offers a diverse repertoire unified by the works' play on conventional notions of rhythm and pulse. "The idea sounds complex," says Sirota, "but the group makes its crystal-clear point joyfully through engaging programming and performances."