Multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer Yussef Dayes closes out a year in which his debut solo album, Black Classical Music, received critical acclaim and landed on several year's best lists, with the release of A Colors Show, in which he performs "Chasing the Drum" from the new album. You can watch it here.

Composer and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire's Nonesuch Records debut album, Owl Song, is out now. The album, featuring a trio with two musicians Akinmusire has long admired, guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley, has landed on the New York Times’ list of Best Jazz Albums of 2023 and on Jazzwise’s Albums of the Year list. Uncut says: "This is subtly profound music, full of meditative, focused beauty." "A quiet rush of gorgeous sound where space, tone and beauty come together in one of the most impactful albums of 2023," says DownBeat's five-star review. "This is one of the most interesting recordings to come along in a very long time by one of the most interesting artists of our time.”

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway have released a live performance video of "Where Did All the Wild Things Go?,” a song from their Grammy-nominated new album, City of Gold, filmed at Sound Emporium Studio A in Nashville, where the album was made. "When I wrote [the song] with Ketch Secor, I couldn’t wait to play it live with my band," Tuttle says. "Since then it’s become one of my favorite songs to perform because it gives everyone the chance to let loose and have a little fun. We hope all you wild things will howl along to this live in studio version!" You can watch the video, directed by Michael Kessler, here.

“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.