Gabriel Kahane has released "To Be American," from his upcoming album, Magnificent Bird. Kahane both mines and interrogates nostalgia in the song, which he wrote during the roiling, national tumult of October 2020. "It's fitting,” he says, “that a song preoccupied with the past would feature musicians who are some of my oldest friends. This song, as much as any on the album, is a showcase of my musical community." The elegiac anthem features an all-star band of Andrew Bird, Caroline Shaw, Chris Thile, Punch Brothers bassist Paul Kowert, and percussionist Ted Poor. You can watch the video for the song, directed by Robert Edridge-Waks, here.

David Byrne was on NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to talk with Fallon about his famed suit from Stop Making Sense, writing music from a rental car, performing American Utopia on Broadway, and his new book of drawings, A History of the World (in Dingbats). He was joined by his cast mates to perform "Like Humans Do." Byrne joined Tariq from The Roots to face off against fellow guest Renée Zellweger and Fallon in a game of The Jinx. You can watch all of the above here.

David Byrne was on CBS Saturday Morning to talk with Anthony Mason about bringing American Utopia to Broadway and took Mason on a walk through his new art exhibition at Pace Gallery in NYC. He was also joined by his Broadway cast mates to perform "Burning Down the House," "Everybody's Coming to My House," and "Marching Through the Wilderness" in a Saturday Sessions set from the St. James Theatre, where the show is running through April 3. You can watch the conversation and three performances here.

Hurray for the Riff Raff performed "PIERCED ARROWS," from their recently released Nonesuch debut album, LIFE ON EARTH, for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert's Late Show Me Music series of online videos. You can watch it here.

Brad Mehldau has released a new track from his upcoming album, Jacob’s Ladder, “Tom Sawyer." The song, Mehldau’s interpretation of the Rush classic, features his Nonesuch Records label mate Chris Thile on lead vocals and mandolin as well as Joel Frahm on saxophones and Mark Guiliana on drums; Mehldau plays keyboards and provides additional vocals. You can watch the video here. This follows the recent release of the album's opening track, "maybe as his skies are wide," which builds off an interpolation of one portion of "Tom Sawyer." 

Molly Tuttle’s new song, “Dooley’s Farm,” featuring special guest Billy Strings alongside her new bluegrass collective Golden Highway, from their upcoming album, Crooked Tree, is out now. You can watch Tuttle and Golden Highway perform the song live here. “When I was a kid I loved ‘Dooley,’ a song about a moonshiner whose daughters helped him run the family still," Tuttle says. "In ‘Dooley’s Farm’ I decided to recast Dooley as a modern-day outlaw, writing from the perspective of his granddaughter. I wrote this song with Ketch Secor and brought Billy Strings in to lend his amazing voice and playing. I had fun updating this classic bluegrass character while taking some inspiration from my real grandfather who was a farmer (but not that kind of farmer).”

Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal have released their take on the traditional tune "I Shall Not Be Moved," the closing track to their upcoming album, GET ON BOARD: THE SONGS OF SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE, out April 22. You can watch a video of them performing the song here. Nearly sixty years after they first played together, the longtime friends and collaborators reunite with the album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives. With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo—joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass—the duo recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee, whom they both first heard as teenagers in California.

Cécile McLorin Salvant takes part in the Qobuz One Cover One Word interview series to talk about her discovery of jazz, her inspirations, and more. She shares her thoughts on recordings by Melissa Aldana, Fiona Apple, Ambrose Akinmusire, Thelonious Monk, Kendrick Lamar, Max Roach, Soundgarden, Nina Simone, and Sullivan Fortner. "Things are getting more and more personal for me as the years go by," she says of her own new album, Ghost Song, and I feel less and less afraid of writing and singing the music that I'm hearing inside. So, I think this album is a testament to that." You can see what else she had to say here.

Pianist and composer Tigran Hamasyan’s StandArt—his first album of American standards—will be released on April 29. StandArt includes songs from the 1920s through the 1950s, by Richard Rodgers, Charlie Parker, Jerome Kern, and others; it also includes a piece Hamasyan improvised with his bandmates—bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Justin Brown—and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Other special guests include saxophonists Joshua Redman and Mark Turner. StandArt is available to pre-order with an instant download of Hamasyan’s take on Elmo Hope’s “De-Dah,” the video for which can be seen here. Hamasyan embarks on a US tour in June and has upcoming dates in France, Israel, Switzerland, and Spain.

Cécile McLorin Salvant has released her take on the Sting song "Until," from her Nonesuch debut album Ghost Song, due March 4; you can watch the video here. "This is the weirdest, moodiest set of lyrics," she says. "I feel like lyrics can morph into what you want them to be depending on when you listen. Of course it’s about love and romance, but there are these weird turns it takes, the dance at the center of the song. And that idea of catching the world in an hourglass is so great to me. I’m obsessed with hourglasses; I draw a lot of them in my visual art. It’s one of my favorite memento mori moments—the beauty of it and also the finality of it."

Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: THE SONGS OF SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE, out April 22 on Nonesuch Records. With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo—joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass—the duo recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee. A video for the track “Hooray Hooray” may be seen here, as well as an interview with Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal about the record. 

Composer/singer/songwriter Gabriel Kahane releases Magnificent Bird on March 25. On the album, Kahane chronicles the final month of a year spent off the internet, reveling in the tension between quiet, domestic concerns, and the roiling chaos of a nation and planet in crisis. “Sit Shiva,” the album’s first single, out now, finds Kahane skirting the rules of his digital hiatus in order to mourn, online, the death of his maternal grandmother; in typical fashion, he mines not just pathos, but humor and grace amidst his family’s grief. You can watch the video here. Pre-orders of Magnificent Bird from Bandcamp and Nonesuch Store include an exclusive, limited-edition print autographed by Kahane, while they last.