"I don't think enough people have heard the music of Sam Phillips," says Bob Boilen, host of NPR's All Songs Considered, "and now seems like a good time to change that." Boilen invited Sam to perform songs from the new record at the NPR offices as part of the new All Songs Considered "Tiny Desk Concert" series ...

Randy Newman's forthcoming release, Harps and Angels, is featured in the latest edition of NPR's All Songs Considered: the Summer Music Preview. The show's host, Bob Boilen, says Randy's new record reminds him of the Newman records he first new and loved, like Good Ol' Boys and Sail Away. Harps and Angels, he says, "just made me smile," bringing to mind, as it does, a "languid Southern summer." He praises Newman for his use of the blues form "to tell a tale in such a great way."

Orchestra Boabab continues its US tour, bringing music from its latest release, Made in Dakar, to New York City for two free shows, today and tomorrow. This evening at 7 PM ET, the seminal Senegalese band will perform at Rockefeller Park on the Hudson River in downtown Manhattan as part of the summer's River to River Festival of free outdoor performances. Tomorrow, the group will head to Brooklyn's MetroTech center for a noon event as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rhythm & Blues Festival.

Ry Cooder's new album, I, Flathead, releases today and follows Chavez Ravine (2005) and My Name Is Buddy (2007) as the third and final album in Cooder's California trilogy. Two versions of the new record are available: the standard CD as well as a deluxe package with both the CD and the accompanying 95-page novella that Ry wrote in conjunction with the album songs, told from the perspective of the fictitious musician Kash Buk and featuring an oddball cast of characters and car obsessives from California's drag-racing salt flats in the 1960s.

Harps and Angels, Randy Newman's first album of new music in nearly a decade, is due out on Nonesuch August 5, and already, CBS Sunday Morning's Bill Flanagan is calling it one of the summer's best.

Congratulations to Emmylou Harris, who, the same week she entered the Top 40 on the UK pop charts, with her latest release, All I Intended to Be, debuted at No. 22 on the US pop charts, a career high. The new album simultaneously reached No. 4 on this week's country charts.

Tune in to npr.org tonight at 7:30 PM ET to hear Orchestra Boabab, live in concert. After nearly 40 years of making music, Orchestra Baobab, says NPR, "remains one of the world's foremost purveyors of Afro-Cuban pop.

Tune in to tonight's episode of ESPN's Baseball Tonight at 7 PM ET to catch the Punch Brothers' take on the classic baseball tune "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." ESPN celebrates the 100th anniversary of the iconic song by with a "battle of the bands."

Orchestra Baobab are currently touring the States with songs from their latest release, Made in Dakar, stopping at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee this past weekend to perform a set that PopMatters calls "the gem of the festival." Tonight they're in Western Massachusetts to play Northampton's Pearl Street Nightclub and head further east at the end of the week for a set at the Somerville Theater, outside Boston, on Saturday. The Boston Globe's Andrew Gilbert says the band is "sounding more soulful than ever" on the new album.

The 2008 JVC Jazz Festival New York got under way earlier this week and continues through June 28 at venues throughout the City, including Carnegie Hall, where the Brad Mehldau Trio will play this Sunday in Zankel Hall in a program titled "A Taste of Genius," and the Greenwich Village club Le Poisson Rouge, where Bill Frisell's new trio will make its New York debut this Thursday.

Works by John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Frederic Rzewski, Bill Frisell, John Zorn, John Cage meet the music of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra's second annual 8 Days in June music festival, which kicks off tonight. It's a multidisciplinary affair aiming to examine the relationship between music and the explosive changes of the 20th and 21st centuries and harness the "The Power of Change."