With Hurricane Irene expected to make landfall along the East Coast of the United States this weekend, from North Carolina to New England, anyone planning to attend concerts in the affected areas should check in with the venue to confirm whether the shows will go on as scheduled. Stay safe!

Punch Brothers and Jessica Lea Mayfield are scheduled to share a double bill at the Belleayre Music Festival in upstate New York on Saturday night, the festival’s penultimate concert for the season. The series takes place at the Belleayre Conservatory in the beautiful Catskill Mountains in Highmount, New York, and launched its summer season with another group of Nonesuch artists, when k.d. lang and the Siss Boom Bang stopped by on their North American tour.

Also scheduled for this weekend, Punch Brothers are due to take on Fairfield, Connecticut's StageOne tonight and head to the Filene Center at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, on Sunday, as special guests of pianist Bruce Hornsby. Mayfield's concerts at The Saint in Asbury Park, New Jersey, tonight and at the Rams Head on Stage in Annapolis, Maryland, on Sunday have been postponed due to the hurricane.

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Regrettably, the Carolina Chocolate Drops' performance at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh scheduled for tomorrow has been canceled due to the impending threat from Hurricane Irene. For information on ticket refunds, visit ncartmuseum.org.

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Emmylou Harris joins Canada's Harvest Picnic with Daniel Lanois and Friends on Saturday in Dundas, Ontario, at the Christie Lake Conservation Area. In addition to performances by Harris and Lanois, the event also features sets by Ray Lamontagne, Gord Downie and the Country of Miracles, and others. Lanois produced Harris’s 1995 album Wrecking Ball, her last studio recording prior to making her Nonesuch debut with Red Dirt Girl.

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The Low Anthem heads to St. Louis, Missouri, for this year's LouFest, the city's largest indie music event, giving a performance in Forest Park's Central Field on Sunday afternoon just before !!! And headliners TV on the Radio go on. The festival also features sets by The Roots, Cat Power, The Hold Steady, and many more. The Carolina Chocolate Drops performed at last year's inaugural LouFest.

In the lead-up to the event, the Riverfront Times writer Dani Kinnison spoke with band member Jeff Prystowsky about their two Nonesuch albums, Oh My God, Charlie Darwin and Smart Flesh, and what's ahead. Read the interview at riverfronttimes.com.

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Pat Metheny's Summer Music Workshop, in association with the National Guitar Workshop, comes to a close today. The five-day event, held at The Spa at Norwich Inn in Norwich, Connecticut, offered participants the rare opportunity to study in an intimate setting with Metheny and his trio, Christian McBride and Antonio Sanchez. Metheny is set to tour the US with bassist Larry Grenadier next month.

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Joshua Redman travels to Austria this weekend for a show on Sunday at the 32nd international Saalfelden Jazz Festival. He joins The Bad Plus as a special guest for a performance on the festival's main stage.

Earlier this month, Redman performed with his new quartet James Farm at the Caramoor Music Festival. "James Farm is a group of extremely talented musicians whose recent self-titled album is a tour de force," writes the Huffington Post's Ralph Miriello in a review of the event. "With such extraordinary musicianship it is little wonder that these guys create compelling music. While some groups seem to star one particular player, James Farm has taken a collective approach that works wonderfully. Each musician is both virtuoso and composer in his own right and they have subdued their own egos for the betterment of the musical message to great success." Read the review at huffingtonpost.com.

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Steve Reich's Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Double Sextet will provide the score to Kings 2 Ends, a new work by choreographer Jorma Elo, which receives its world premiere in a performance at the Edinburgh Playhouse by the Scottish Ballet and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra tonight. Elo's work pairs Double Sextet with Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 1. Performances continue through the weekend as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.

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As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, Sara Watkins closes out her months-long tour as a guest band member with the Decemberists outside the band's hometown of Portland, Oregon, at McMenamins Edgefield Amphitheatre's Concerts on the Lawn tonight. Watkins then heads straight into her next set of performances: with Garrison Keillor and the cast of public radio's A Prairie Home Companion for their cross-country Summer Love Tour. Their first date together is at the Alaska State Fair in Palmer, Alaska, on Sunday.