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.

Nonesuch Records is happy to announce that the new album by The Magnetic Fields, Distortion, will be released on January 15, 2008. The band will perform a small
number of US tour dates in February and March. Specific details regarding venues and ticket pre-sales will be announced shortly.

MSN has announced its list of the upcoming holiday season's must-see movies, and both Sweeney Todd and There Will Be Blood are among the top ten. "Combine Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning musical of a revenge-seeking barber, Tim Burton's distinctive vision, the charisma of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Sacha Baron Cohen, and you're up for one hell of a bloody (literally) ride," says MSN of Sweeney. And Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood score is a powerful player in that film.

On Friday night, London's Barbican Centre celebrated John Adams's 60th birthday in style. For the occasion, Adams conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a program featuring his own Choruses from The Death of Klinghoffer. BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting the concert on today's Performance on 3 program and will continue to stream the performance online for the next seven days.

Stephin Merritt has joined Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno, and others in contributing tracks to Plague Songs, a UK compilation that pays homage, in song, to the Biblical plagues. He's written a little ditty about lice, or more precisely, "The Meaning of Lice," and Pitchfork says: "Only one man could successfully write and record a wistful, feel-good, disco-danceable, three-minute ode to parasites and pestilence—with a chorus that includes the word 'subcutaneous'—and that man is Stephin Merritt."

Tomorrow night, Itzhak Perlman joins members of the Perlman Music Program for gifted young musicians in concert at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Included on the program is Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, along with Mozart's G Minor Quintet for Viola and Strings and Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence. Nonesuch released the world premiere recording of the Reich piece, performed by Kronos Quartet, in 2001.

Boston Now joins the critical mass in praising this week's kick-off of the Sweeney Todd national tour at Boston's Colonial Theatre, saying "It works gloriously." Entertainment Editor John Black offers high praise indeed when he writes: "On a night when it seemed that the entire city was staying at home to watch the Red Sox in the World Series, a few lucky thousand were seated at the Colonial Theatre watching a thrilling tale of revenge, romance, murder, and meat pies." Citing the recent Tony-winning Broadway production, Black writes, "The play obviously has a pedigree. Thirty minutes into the show at the Colonial, you will know why."

The first national tour of John Doyle's Tony Award–winning Sweeney Todd reinvention kicked off at Boston's Colonial Theatre on Tuesday night, to rave reviews. The Boston Globe says the production "reveals Stephen Sondheim's dark brilliance in all its cold-blooded glory. It is marvelous and terrible to behold." Sweeney Todd will play in Boston through November 4, when it will travel to Toronto, then on to more than a dozen cities across the US