“What I find most compelling about her is her musical adventurousness, her willingness to voyage across centuries and make the music of different times, cultures, and mindscapes uniquely her own,” Brian Levine says of Cécile McLorin Salvant, his guest on The Gould Standard, a podcast from the Glenn Gould Foundation about the arts, culture, and contemporary society. “Cécile’s questing spirit is fully on display in her newest album, Mélusine, and its predecessor, Ghost Song.” You can watch their conversation—the first of two parts, with the second forthcoming—here.

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway have released an animated video for “Down Home Dispensary,” from their Grammy-nominated new album, City of Gold, made by Mechanism Digital Inc. Tuttle says: "Too much politickin’ and not enough tokin’? Check out our animated 'Down Home Dispensary' video!" You can do just that here.

The Staves’ new album, All Now, produced by John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), is due March 22, marking their debut album as the duo of Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor, after their sister Emily’s departure. “There was a delayed reaction to trauma and these big changes out of your control,” Jess says of the period after the February 2021 release of their album Good Woman, as the band—like everyone—was forced to sit with their thoughts. Struggling after two years of deep solitude and pain, The Staves did what they know how to do best: they got back to writing with the idea of going back to basics and focusing almost solely on each other and their guitars as a starting point.

Yussef Dayes, who begins a US tour in Brooklyn on Thursday, has shared a live-performance video filmed in the Malibu mountains, backed by a hazy, golden-hour sunset. He and longtime collaborators Rocco Palladino, Venna, Elijah Fox, and Alexander Bourt perform thirty minutes of music from his critically lauded debut album Black Classical Music and more. You can watch it here, along with a performance of the album's title track on BBC Two’s Later… With Jools Holland from Friday.

Cécile McLorin Salvant performs 12th-century trobairitz (female troubadour) Almucs de Castelneau's "Dame Iseut," from her Grammy-nominated new album, Mélusine, accompanied by Sullivan Fortner on harpsichord and Keita Ogawa on percussion, in the Unicorn Tapestries Room at The Met Cloisters in a new video out now as part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s performance series, MetLiveArts. This is the third of three performances Salvant filmed in the Met’s Unicorn Tapestry galleries of songs from the album. You can watch it here.

Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra)'s new album, The Past Is Still Alive, is due February 23 on Nonesuch. Segarra created the album during a period of personal grief, when they found inspiration in radical poetry, railroad culture, outsider art, the work of writer Eileen Myles, and activist groups like ACT UP and Gran Fury. They use their lyrics as a way to immortalize and say goodbye to those they have loved and lost, and to honor both the heartbroken and the hopeful parts of themselves. Though made in North Carolina by the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based Segarra and produced by Brad Cook, the record brings listeners to places far beyond, evoking vivid experiences of small shops and buffalo stampedes in Santa Fe, childhood road trips and Florida storms, struggles of addiction in the Lower East Side, and days-long journeys to outrun the cops in Nebraska. Hurray for the Riff Raff will lead a headline tour of the US and Europe from February through May.

Cécile McLorin Salvant performs Michel Lambert’s 1660 air de cour “D'un feu secret,” from her new album, Mélusine, accompanied by Dušan Balarin on theorbo (a type of French lute) and Sullivan Fortner on harpsichord, in the Unicorn Tapestries Room at The Met Cloisters in a new video out now as part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s performance series, MetLiveArts. This is the second of three performances Salvant filmed in the Met’s Unicorn Tapestry galleries of songs from the album, following the title track last week and ahead of “Dame Iseut” next week. You can watch “D'un feu secret” here.

It was thirty-five years ago today that Kronos Quartet gave the world premiere performance of Steve Reich’s Different Trains at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. To mark the occasion, Reich’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, has published a new video, in which he discusses the process behind composing this piece for string quartet and tape. Reich used carefully chosen speech recordings to shape the musical material for the score, evoking his American childhood during World War II while also addressing the Holocaust. The 1989 first recording of Different Trains, performed by Kronos, won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition.

Cécile McLorin Salvant performs her song “Mélusine,” the title track to her new album, accompanied by Dušan Balarin, in the Unicorn Tapestries Room at The Met Cloisters in a new video out now as part of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s performance series, MetLiveArts. You can watch it here. This is the first of three performances she filmed there of songs from the album; the remaining two will follow in the weeks ahead.

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway made their Austin City Limits debut on PBS stations across the US over the weekend. “This is something I've dreamed of for so long,” Tuttle says. “I've been watching Austin City Limits since I was a little kid.” She and the band performed four songs from their acclaimed new album, City of Gold and two from their 2021 Grammy-winning debut album, Crooked Tree. You can watch it here. 

Natalie Merchant has released the video for "Sister Tilly," from her new album, Keep Your Courage. The track is dedicated to Joan Didion and pays homage to the generation of women who influenced Merchant in the 1960s and ’70s when she was growing up. You can watch the video, directed by Matthew Shattuck and featuring archival footage from the era, here. Merchant begins a European tour next week. She hosts a new workshop at Fondazione Prada’s Accademia dei bambini in Milan in January and resumes her US West Coast tour in May.

Rhiannon Giddens recently gave an intimate performance at Racket in New York City for WFUV’s FUV Live. She spoke with host Alisa Ali about her new album, You’re the One, and more, and was joined by her band to perform several songs from it. You can now watch the performance of the album tracks “Too Little, Too Late, Too Bad,” “You Louisiana Man,” and “Yet to Be” below and listen to the complete session at wfuv.org.