Natalie Merchant brings the music of her 2010 Nonesuch debut album, Leave Your Sleep, to Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium in New York City for a special Family Concert on Saturday afternoon, as a part of Carnegie Hall’s Family Concert program. The concert, which features the nursery rhymes and lullabies by 19th- and 20th-century poets she set to music for the album, also includes projected illustrations by Barbara McClintock, who collaborated with Merchant on a 48-page book based on the album (and available in the Nonesuch Store). Merchant and McClintock sign copies of the book in the Citi Cafe at Carnegie Hall directly following the performance.

Merchant’s new self-titled album of entirely original songs will be released by Nonesuch Records on May 6. Videos for two songs from the album have now been unveiled: “Giving Up Everything,” which premiered on NPR Music, and musicOMH calls “one of Natalie Merchant’s most lyrically-powerful songs in a long time,” and “Ladybird,” which premiered on Rolling Stone yesterday. “A lilting lullaby for happier times,” says the magazine, “the song is vintage Merchant.” You can download the track now when you pre-order the album in the Nonesuch Store and on iTunes. Merchant will embark on a US summer tour in July.

Also this weekend at Carnegie Hall, Alarm Will Sound performs a program entitled “(post) folk” in Zankel Hall on Sunday. The ensemble performs Donnacha Dennehy’s Grá agus Bás, led by Artistic Director Alan Pierson and featuring vocalist Iarla Ó Lionáird, both of whom are on the 2011 Nonesuch recording of the piece by Crash Ensemble. Also on Sunday’s program, part of collected stories, composer David Lang’s week-long series of multi-genre concerts at the Hall, are the world premieres of avant-garde guitarist Kaki King’s Other Education and Australian composer Kate Moore’s The Art of Levitation, as well as the US premiere of Richard Ayres’ No. 42 In the Alps.

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Bombino closes out a three-night run of Louisiana with two festival sets this weekend: a free set at the Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette on Saturday, closing out the penultimate night of the week-long festival on the Scéne Stabil Drill stage, and a set in the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival’s Blues Tent on Sunday afternoon. He rounds out the southern leg of his tour with shows in Georgia and Alabama in the week ahead.

In advance of his set at the Festival International de Louisiane, where he last performed in 2012, Bombino spoke to the Times-Picayune, who describes the Tuareg guitarist as sounding “a little like Jimi Hendrix when he makes his guitar sing. His wails are from the east, from the west, are part-psychedelia, part-Saharan desert rhythms, and virtually define the concept of ‘world music.’” 

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Carolina Chocolate Drops continue their US tour with two shows in Virginia this weekend: at the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville tonight and the Harvester Performance Center in Rocky Mount on Saturday. They go on to perform an all-ages set at the East Tennessee State University’s Mountain States Health Alliance Athletics Center in Johnson City on Sunday, joining the Old Crow Medicine Show for the University’s 2014 Spring Major Concert.

The New York Times’ Brian Seibert described the Chocolate Drops’ recent performance at Brooklyn Academy of Music as a “rollicking, revelatory concert,” lauding co-founding member Rhiannon Giddens as “ridiculously charismatic.” Giddens performed four tunes on last week's episode of Nurse Jackie, which is now available via Showtime On Demand and Showtime Anytime.

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Pianist Jeremy Denk and his longtime collaborator cellist Steven Isserlis, whom The New Yorker calls a “distinguished duo,” perform together at the 92nd Street Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall in New York City on Saturday. Returning to the Y after their duo performance there in 2010, the two Oberlin College and Conservatory alumni perform works for cello and piano by Hahn, Chopin, Martinů, Liszt, and Franck, all of whom share an unlikely common thread: “The music of all five of these composers,” the program notes read, “would be unimaginable without their formative experiences in the heart of Paris, the City of Love and Light.”

Denk heads next to Brazil for a three-night run with the São Paulo Symphony at Sala São Paulo, preceded by a solo program there of Ives’s “Concord” Sonata and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. His recent recording of the Variations for Nonesuch Records was included on the New York Times’ list of Favorite Classical Recordings of 2013.

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Dr. John closes out a tour of Australia with fellow New Orleans native son Aaron Neville at the Riverside Theatre in Perth on Saturday. The concert features selections from Dr. John’s 2012 Dan Auerbach-produced Nonesuch album, Locked Down, and songs from throughout his career.

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Richard Goode concludes his two-night run with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Orchestra Hall in Chicago on Saturday. Led by English conductor Sir Mark Elder, the program features Mozart’s Piano Concert No. 23—a piece which Goode recorded for Nonesuch almost two decades ago—bookended by Ives’s Symphony No. 2 and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Op. 28.

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The Brad Mehldau Trio performs a sold-out set at the Manchester Craftsman Guild in Pittsburgh tonight followed by two shows in Canada: at Massey Hall in Toronto on Saturday and the Palais Montcalm in Québec City on Sunday. Early next month, the Trio returns to New York City for a six-night residency at the Village Vanguard, where Mehldau and his Trio recorded a series of acclaimed live albums from 1996 to 2001 and again in 2006.

“Brad Mehldau is a singular artist,” writes the Columbia Daily Tribune about the group’s recent performance in Missouri, “yet he understands the power of three.” Mehldau also explored the power of two on his latest release, Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, the debut album from his electric duo with Mark Guiliana released on Nonesuch earlier this year.

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—woodwind player Chris Potter, drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Ben Williams, and multi-instrumentalist Giulio Carmassi—heads across the Atlantic to launch the European leg of its world tour in the Baltics this weekend: at Pramogų Arena in Vilnius, Lithuania, tonight; the Riga Congress Centre in Riga, Latvia, on Saturday; and the Nokia Concert Hall in Tallinn, Estonia, on Sunday. The Unity Group, which released its debut album, Kin (←→), earlier this year on Nonesuch, next kicks off the Scandinavian leg of the tour with dates in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway in the weeks ahead.

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Nickel Creek rounds out the Southern leg of its US tour in three different states this weekend: a sold-out set at the Tabernacle in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight; the nTelos Wireless Pavilion in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday; and a sold-out set at the Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville on Sunday. The band then brings the music of its just-released album, A Dotted Line, to the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Tuesday, and the tour continues in the Northeast in the week ahead.

In a recent feature on the band, the Wall Street Journal’s Jim Fusilli describes A Dotted Line as “a new stream of bright, charming and technically challenging acoustic music.”