Kronos Quartet and Tom Waits performed last Saturday and Sunday for 40,000+ people at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, as part of the 21st annual Bridge School Benefit organized by Neil Young and his wife, Pegi. Reports all point to the Waits/Kronos set as "the day's most thrilling" (San Jose Mercury News) and "the undisputed highlight of the concert" (Rolling Stone).

On Tuesday, November 6, the Austin Film Society will present a screening of Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée. The 2006 documentary, directed by Pierre-Yves Borgeaud, follows N'Dour and his band through Europe to a powerful performance at Gorée, the island off the coast of Senegal's capital that, for centuries, served as the final departure point for newly enslaved Africans. The screening is part of the Film Society's monthlong series Torn from the Motherland: Films from the African Diaspora, designed "to appreciate Pan-Africanist creativity under the cold realities of slavery, imperialism, colonization and neo-colonialism." 

Richard Goode begins his artist residency as Associate Artist at London's Southbank Centre for the 2007-08 season in a November 7 concert with Dawn Upshaw. On the program is Schoenberg's Book of the Hanging Gardens; Berg's Piano Sonata, Op. 1; and songs by Debussy and Wolf. Goode describes working with Dawn as "one of the purest pleasures of my musical life." The two collaborated, notably, on a Nonesuch recording of Goethe Lieder in 1994.

Two lucky Pat Metheny fans will soon find themselves the owners of a brand-new Polk Audio iSonic home-entertainment system. To celebrate the upcoming release of his new record, Day Trip, with Christian McBride on bass and drummer Antonio Sanchez, patmetheny.com announced a contest with the two Polk consoles as the grand prize and signed copies of the record for 50 runner-up winners. Everyone who pre-orders Day Trip from the site is automatically entered to win. 

As reported yesterday, Wilco's latest performance at Austin City Limits will air on PBS stations across the country this Saturday. You can now catch a sneak peek of the band's ACL performance of "Impossible Germany" from Sky Blue Sky here.

"Their speed, their gorgeous tone, their ease reaching over the body of the guitar to its extreme high range, their uncanny musical memories ... and their ability to play thousands of notes without a single clinker, click or buzz are the stuff of guitar gods," says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of Sérgio and Odair Assad's recent performance in Milwaukee. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reviewing their performance in the Seattle Symphony's guitar series, says that "the Assads displayed all the taste and refinement for which they are known ... their music gleams with such innate virtuosity."

With the song "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country," Randy Newman puts the current state of the union into context, as only he can do. He published the lyrics from the song in a New York Times op-ed piece earlier this year in response to the George Bush's own State of the Union address. Watch Randy perform "A Few Words" here.

A new list of the world's 100 greatest living geniuses features an eclectic group, with Philip Glass, in the top ten, joining the ranks of Nelson Mandela, Stephen Hawking, and, yes, Simpsons creator Matt Groening. According to The Guardian, an international consulting firm compiled the list after polling 4,000 Brits, and ranked the winners based on how much their work "turned conventional thinking on its head, the popular acclaim they received, their intellectual power, their achievements, and their cultural importance."

The Associated Press has posted a preview of the upcoming holiday films, and Sweeney Todd and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (with a score by Jonny Greenwood) have made the list. About Sweeney, AP asks "the season's big musical question: Can Johnny Depp sing?" And director Tim Burton replies with a resounding "yes": "He's a very musical person, but when he said he would do it, nobody had any idea if he could sing. I knew him well enough to know that he wouldn't have said yes to doing it if he couldn't."

In Sunday's New York Times, writer John Strausbaugh remembers Moondog, the avant-garde street poet/performer/composer who influenced the likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This "Viking of Sixth Avenue" was a longtime fixture on the corner of Manhattan's Sixth Avenue and 54th Street through the early '70s. Though he passed away in 1999 at the age of 83, Moondog, a new book by Robert Scotto makes clear the artist's lasting influence. A festival featuring Moondog's work (along with Beethoven and Bach, among others) will take place this weekend at NYC's Advent Lutheran Church.

"When people ask what kind of music Austin City Limits stands for, there's one band that sums it up better than any other ... Wilco!" So says ACL producer Terry Lickona in opening the band's latest performance on the series, which airs this Saturday, November 3, on PBS stations across the country. Check your local PBS station for air dates and times near you to watch Wilco perform songs from its latest album, Sky Blue Sky, along with some classics.

Youssou N'Dour's latest album, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), hits stores tomorrow, and it's already earning rave reviews. Earlier this month, on NPR's All Songs Considered, Rolling Stone contributing editor Robert Christgau called Youssou and Super Étoile "the best band in the world." It seems the press in London would agree: The Financial Times, BBC Music magazine, and the Guardian's Observer Music Monthly all give the new album their highest rating, five stars, with the Observer calling it "extraordinary" and "a new pinnacle in Youssou's career." In conjunction with the record's release, Nonesuch.com unveils a new mini-site featuring video interviews with Youssou and musicologist Lucy Duran, plus songs from the new album. Read excerpts from the interview transcript here.