Brad Mehldau holds residency at the new SFJAZZ Center, performing with Kevin Hays, Mark Guiliana, and his Trio ... The Black Keys launch four-city tour with special guests The Flaming Lips in Kansas City ... New Orleans Jazz Fest gets under way with Dr. John, Joshua Redman, Allen Toussaint ... Fatoumata Diawara performs at New Orleans' House of Blues ... Bombino continues European tour in Oslo ... Carolina Chocolate Drops play sold-out shows in Wisconsin ... Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter are out west ... Richard Goode performs Beethoven in Georgia ... Iron and Wine is on Jimmy Fallon ... Lianne La Havas is at Tobago Jazz Festival ... Gidon Kremer performs in Paris and back home in Riga ... Kronos Quartet plays in Portsmouth ... Rokia Traoré is on Jools Holland ...
Brad Mehldau helps celebrate the inaugural season of the new SFJAZZ Center in San Francisco with four nights of performances in the Center’s Miner Auditorium. He kicked things off with a rare solo performance last night.
Mehldau, who just concluded a US duo tour with label mate Chris Thile, reunites with two other recent duo partners for the first of this weekend’s three performances in Miner Auditorium: fellow pianist and longtime friend Kevin Hays, tonight (they released a collaborative album, Modern Music, on Nonesuch in 2011 and toured Europe in February), and drummer Mark Guiliana on Saturday, (their duo Mehliana toured Europe last month). Mehldau’s residency culminates with a sold-out performance with his famed Trio, featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard, on Sunday.
Reviewing the culminating performance of Brad Mehldau’s tour with Chris Thile at Chicago’s Symphony Center last week, the Chicago Tribune said “there was no mistaking the joyousness of this music, nor the integrity of its delivery.”
Following his San Francisco concerts, the Brad Meldau Trio continues to perform on the West Coast in the week ahead, with shows in Vancouver, Seattle, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles.
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The Black Keys launch a four-city tour with special guests The Flaming Lips at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri, on Sunday. Their tour continues in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Nashville.
The Keys go on to perform at a number of spring festivals throughout North America, including a set that will help close out the 2013 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival next Sunday.
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And speaking of Jazz Fest, as noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, the festival opens this weekend with afternoon sets from Dr. John and Joshua Redman today and a Saturday afternoon show from Allen Toussaint.
Also in New Orleans this weekend is Fatoumata Diawara, who performs at the House of Blues tonight. She stays in Louisiana through Saturday to close out her current US tour at the Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette. Diawara returns to the US for the next leg of her tour in June.
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Bombino, whose Nonesuch debut album, Nomad, was released earlier this month, continues his month-long European tour at Cosmopolite in Oslo tonight and Teatro Principal in Badalona, Spain, on Saturday. The Independent, previewing Bombino's concert at the Village Underground in London last night, describes him as "a brilliant young Tuareg guitarist and singer-songwriter" and Nomad as "a bone-shaker of a new album."
He closes out this leg of the tour with two dates in Belgium next weekend and makes his way to the US late next month for a tour that includes headline dates, festival sets, and opening spots with Amadou & Mariam, Gogol Bordello and Robert Plant.
The Huffington Post, in an article enticingly entitled “Bombino Revives Romance, Kicks Like Espresso, Lifts Your Mood, Makes Your Party. It’s Great Music,” describes Bombino’s guitar playing as “round like Knopfler, spacy like Hendrix, concise like Ali Farka Toure.” Read the article at huffingtonpost.com.
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Carolina Chocolate Drops reach a halfway mark in their US spring tour with two sold-out shows at the Stoughton Opera House in Wisconsin tonight and on Saturday. They kick off a West Coast leg in early May and continue their extensive, nationwide tour through the end of June.
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Shawn Colvin continues her North American duo tour with longtime friend Mary Chapin Carpenter with two performances out west this weekend: at the Blackfoot Performing Arts Center in Blackfoot, Idaho, tonight, and The Mother Lode Theater in Butte, Montana, on Saturday. The two perform material spanning their vast catalogs, including selections from Colvin’s latest Nonesuch release All Fall Down, as well as some of their favorite songs by other singer-songwriters.
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Richard Goode performs at Clayton State University’s Spivey Hall in Morrow, Georgia, on Sunday afternoon. The program consists of Beethoven’s last works: the Piano Sonata in E Major, Op. 109; the Piano Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 110; Bagatelles Op. 119 no. 6-11; and finally, the Piano Sonata in C minor, Op. 111. Goode famously recorded a landmark set of the Complete Beethoven Sonatas for Nonesuch in 1993; his latest Nonesuch release is the three-CD set of the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos.
Following this recital, Goode returns home to New York City for a performance of the all-Beethoven program in Carnegie Hall’s Stern Auditorium on Wednesday.
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Iron and Wine celebrates last week's release of its Nonesuch debut album, Ghost on Ghost, with a performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tonight. Set your DVR or tune in to NBC tonight at 12:35 AM to see Sam Beam and his band perform a song from the new album. They kick off a US tour at the Napa Valley Bottle Rock festival next month.
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Lianne La Havas plays at the Pigeon Point Heritage Park in Trinidad and Tobago tonight, as part of the Tobago Jazz Festival. She continues performing at various festivals in Europe and North America throughout the spring and summer, including Central Park SummerStage in New York City, XPoNential Music Festival in Philadelphia, and Lollapalooza in Chicago.
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Gidon Kremer joins the Chamber Orchestra of Paris for a performance at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris tonight. On the program are works by Mozart, Schubert, and Haydn. Kremer returns to his hometown of Riga, Latvia, for a performance at Guild Hall with his own Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra on Sunday.
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Kronos Quartet performs at The Historic Theater in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday. The program features Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, which Kronos performed on the first recording of the piece, released on Nonesuch in 2011, and works by Bryce Dessner, Nicole Lizée, and Ram Narayan, as well as Laurie Anderson’s Flow, from her latest Nonesuch album Homeland.
Earlier this week, Kronos Quartet announced the recipient of the fifth Kronos: Under 30 Project commission, Mary Kouyoumdjian.A New York City resident, Kouyoumdjian was chosen from a call for composers that yielded nearly 400 applicants in 43 countries on five continents, the largest response in the program’s history. Launched in 2003, the Under 30 Project is designed to help nurture the careers of young artists, while enabling Kronos to forge stronger connections with the next creative generation.
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Rokia Traoré and her band perform two tracks off her new album, Beautiful Africa, on Later ... with Jools Holland tonight. Tune in to BBC Two tonight at 11:05 PM to see them perform "Mélancolie" and "Tuit Tuit." On Tuesday's live show, they performed another album track, "Kouma." Beautiful Africa was released in Europe and Canada to critical acclaim earlier this month and is due out in the United States in September.
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