Rachael & Vilray bring music from their latest album, I Love a Love Song!, released earlier this year on Nonesuch, to the US West Coast and Midwest this fall and winter, beginning in California with two nights at Blue Note Napa, December 15 and 16, and a concert at The Troubadour in West Hollywood on December 18. The shows continue in February 2024 with four dates in Colorado and stops in Grand Rapids, Chicago, and Minneapolis. 

Multi-instrumentalist Yussef Dayes' debut solo studio album, Black Classical Music, is out now. Dayes’ drum licks and Rocco Palladino’s bass are the anchors to this nineteen-track debut solo studio album, with Charlie Stacey (keys/synths), Venna (saxophone), Alexander Bourt (percussion), and a host of features including: Chronixx, Masego, Jamilah Barry, Tom Misch, Elijah Fox, Shabaka Hutchings, Miles James, Sheila Maurice Grey, Nathaniel Cross, Theon Cross, and the Chineke! Orchestra—the first professional orchestra in Europe to be made up of majority Black and ethnically diverse musicians.

Composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue and his Secret Society ensemble make their Nonesuch Records debut with Dynamic Maximum Tension, out now. The album pays homage to some of Argue’s key influences with original songs dedicated to R. Buckminster Fuller, Alan Turing, and Mae West. Cécile McLorin Salvant joins for “Mae West: Advice.” "Superb … Dynamic Maximum Tension is a delight," exclaims All About Jazz in a four-star review. The New York City Jazz Record adds: "Remarkable in its ambition, scope, and sheer length, this is Argue’s crowning achievement to date."

Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, who was on Norah Jones’ podcast Norah Jones Is Playing Along last week, can now be seen in a video from the session in which the duo performs Lucinda Williams’ song “Drunken Angel,” from Williams' 1998 album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. You can watch it here.

Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky is now available in a limited-edition two-LP, sky-blue vinyl release; you can take a quick look inside here. The Gold-selling album made year’s best lists from Rolling Stone, Uncut, Mojo, BBC Radio 6 Music, and more. “Near perfect,” said Spin. Featuring the band that was assembled after the release of 2004’s A ghost is born, Sky Blue Sky was the first studio album from a lineup that has remained the same to today: guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter Jeff Tweedy, bassist John Stirratt, percussionist Glenn Kotche, keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen, multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone, and avant-jazz guitarist Nels Cline.

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway perform at Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington, opening for Dave Matthews, who guests on their new album, City of Gold. Sam Amidon opens for Nickel Creek in Amsterdam. Timo Andres has three concerts in New Mexico. Joachim Cooder is in Sligo, Ireland. Richard Goode plays Mozart and Chopin in Montana. Emmylou Harris performs in Kentucky and at Earl Scruggs Music Festival in North Carolina. Makaya McCraven plays a free Chicago Jazz Festival set in Millennium Park.

“This feeling that your life seemed complete before, but now it’s full of color, it’s more vivid than you could ever imagine, because someone new came into it,” Stephen Rodgers, host of Resounding Verse, says on the subject of the title track to Rhiannon Giddens’ new album, You’re the One, a song that was inspired by a moment Giddens had with her son not long after he was born. “I find this song so moving because I can relate to the experience it describes, and I think many people listening to the song will have a similar connection to it. But it’s not just what the song is about that moves me so much. It’s also how the words are constructed, and how the music and words meld together.” You can hear the episode here.

“I’m so in love with the music,” Norah Jones says of Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, the guest on the latest episode of her podcast, Norah Jones Is Playing Along. “I’ve been listening to Hurray for the Riff Raff for a long time. And their voice is just breathtaking to me.” Jones and Segarra talk about Segarra’s life and music and duet on several songs together, including three from Hurray for the Riff Raff’s 2022 album, LIFE ON EARTH, and more, closing with their take on Lucinda Williams’ “Drunken Angel.” You can hear it all here.

“The music on Dynamic Maximum Tension consists mostly of portraits of people—Buckminster Fuller and Alan Turing and Mae West and Duke Ellington,” composer and bandleader Darcy James Argue says of his upcoming album with his Secret Society ensemble in a new behind-the-scenes video. "I tried to think about, well, what are the places in my life where I turn to look for optimism and inspiration and the idea that the future is something to be anticipated rather than dreaded. So that’s the impetus for so much of the music on this record—to look to a period in the past where the future seemed brighter than it does today, and to try to find a way to represent that optimism about the future in music some way.” You can watch the video, directed by Reuben Hernandez at PowerStation at BerkleeNYC, here.

Kronos Quartet gives a free concert in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park as part of Kronos: Five Decades. Laurie Anderson celebrates John Zorn's 70th with Zorn and Sean Ono Lennon in Brooklyn. Timo Andres plays Moab Music Festival. The Black Keys tour the Midwest. Joachim Cooder is at Tønder Festival in Denmark. Jeremy Denk performs at Music on the Straight festival in Washington. Cécile McLorin Salvant is in Massachusetts. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway join Charley Crocket in Texas then head to Kansas.

Rhiannon Giddens has shared a new video about the making of her new album, You're the One, filmed by Torrance Hill in Miami's Criteria Recording Studios at the recording of the album. "This album has been created in love and camaraderie, crossing boundaries musically," she says in the video. "We've got a lot of different types of music going on, a lot of different musicians from different worlds coming together. Part of my mission this whole time is to talk about how these barriers are not barriers ... When people are all in it for the same reason—i.e. we're gonna make an amazing piece of art, we're gonna make this great piece of music, and we're gonna do it in a way that enriches us and the listener, so we have gained by making it, and the listener has gained by listening to it—the barriers don't matter." You can watch it here.

"'The Light' celebrates the birth of my daughter Bahia," Yussef Dayes says of the new song from his upcoming album, Black Classical Music. "'The Light' is a Dayes lullaby song. The sweet harpsichord is a sound that Bahia was captivated by, although it was also a song she fell asleep too. An ode to Stevie Wonder's 'Isn’t She Lovely,' I wanted to add Bahia's voice from footage and voice notes I've recorded over the last few years since her birth. Bahia introduces the song and shares her positive affirmations with her mum, something she can't go to sleep without doing now."