Kronos Quartet joins The National and Bombino plays his own set at Outside Lands festival in San Francisco ... Sam Amidon plays Haldern Pop Fest ... Laurie Anderson brings Dirtday! to Oslo ... Carolina Chocolate Drops, Fatoumata Diawara, Sara Watkins play Edmonton Folk Fest ... Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter tour South, as does Dr. John ... Kremerata Baltica tours Costa Rica ... Randy Newman performs in Kentucky ... Joshua Redman, Rokia Traoré perform at Festival Au Grès du Jazz in France ... Chris Thile celebrates Elliott Smith in NYC ... Allen Toussaint closes out Lincoln Center Out of Doors ... and more ...
The Outside Lands Music & Arts festival began earlier today at the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and continues through the weekend with music, food, wine, art, and more.
San Francisco’s own Kronos Quartet performs in the penultimate set of festival’s opening night, joining The National on the main Lands End stage tonight at 5 PM. (Aheym, a piece written by The National’s Bryce Dessner, is a regular fixture in the Kronos performance repertoire.) The Kronos performance with The National will stream live online on at ustream.tv/outsidelands Channel 1, starting at 6:20 PM PST. None other than Sir Paul McCartney hits the same stage directly afterward to close out the first night of shows.
Bombino, who made his Nonesuch debut with the recent release of the Dan Auerbach-produced album Nomad, concludes the US leg of his tour at Outside Lands with a set on the solar-powered Panhandle stage on Saturday at 4:30 PM. Tonight, directly following the festival’s park performances, he plays a sold-out show at The Independent in San Francisco supporting Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, as part of the Outside Lands Night Show series.
The Mercury News includes Bombino among Outside Land’s Must See Acts. “Looking for a new guitar hero?” asks the paper’s Jim Harrington. “Try Omara ‘Bombino’ Moctar, the acclaimed Tuareg guitarist and singer-songwriter from Agadez, Niger, who is quickly becoming a world music sensation … [T]his guy is amazing.”
Fans around the world can tune in to all the Outside Lands festival magic via TuneIn, online at tunein.com.
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Sam Amidon brings the songs of his recently released Nonesuch debut album, Bright Sunny South, to Rees-Haldern, Germany, tonight, for a set at the Haldern Pop Festival. His European summer tour rounds out with festival sets in the UK, Netherlands, and Belgium in the coming weeks.
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Laurie Anderson performs her piece Dirtday! at the Oslo Opera House in Norway on Sunday, as part of the Oslo Jazz Festival. Dirtday! is the third and final piece in Anderson’s triptych of solo story works, which also includes Happiness and The End of the Moon. Anderson spoke with Dagens Naeringsliv's D2 in advance of the performance for a piece you can read, in Norwegian, at dn.no.
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Carolina Chocolate Drops head north of the 49th parallel for a brief Canadian stint, starting with two sets at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival in Gallagher Park: on Stage 1 tonight and Stage 5 on Saturday. They head next to Regina, Saskatchewan, to perform in Victoria Park on Sunday, as part of the Regina Folk Festival.
Fatoumata Diawara plays three sets of her own at the Edmonton Folk Music Festival this weekend: on Stage 6 tonight and on Sunday, and on the Main Stage on Saturday. The Edmonton Journal, in a feature profile on Diawara previewing her festival appearance, calls her Nonesuch Records debut album, Fatou, “marvelous.” You can read the article at edmontonjournal.com.
Sara Watkins performs multiple sets at the Edmonton Festival as well. Just following her Radio Romance tour with Garrison Keillor and the cast of A Prairie Home Companion, she performs in Gallagher Park’s Stage 1 on Saturday and Stage 2 on Sunday afternoon.
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Shawn Colvin resumes her duo tour with Mary Chapin Carpenter down South, in the Atlanta Botanical Gardens tonight and Wolf Trap’s Filene Center in Vienna, Virginia, on Saturday.
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Dr. John offers two Southern festivals sets this weekend: at the Heritage Music BluesFest in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Sunday, and the Richmond Jazz Festival on the Maymont estate in Richmond, Virginia, on Sunday. In a review of his Hollywood Bowl performance last week, the Los Angeles Times describes the New Orleans native son as a “veteran keyboard conjurer” and noted the “raw energy” on stage.
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Gidon Kremer brings his Kremerata Baltica chamber orchestra to Latin America, kicking off their week-long residency at the Festival de Musica Credomatic in Costa Rica with a performance at the Hotel Hacienda Sueño Azul in San Jose tonight. On the program are works by Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Georgs Pelēcis, and Piazzolla. The festival continues in San Jose with additional pieces—including Philip Glass’s “American Four Seasons”—at the Teatre Nacional on Saturday.
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Randy Newman performs at the Lexington Opera House in Lexington, Kentucky, tonight. In advance of the show, Newman spoke about his inimitable songwriter career with the Lexington Herald Leader's Walter Tunis, who notes Newman's having "long been heralded as one of the country's most resourceful songsmiths." Read the article at kentucky.com.
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Joshua Redman and his quartet—pianist Aaron Goldberg, drummer Gregory Hutchinson, and bassist Reuben Rogers—perform at Place Jerri Hans in La Petite Pierre, France, tonight, as part of Festival Au Grès du Jazz, and at Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo on Sunday. The group offers selections from Redman’s latest Nonesuch release, Walking Shadows. Reviewing their recent set at the Newport Jazz Festival, the Boston Globe described the quartet’s ability to “build excitement and get the crowd screaming without pressing or compromising [their] art.”
Rokia Traoré performs at the Festival Au Grès du Jazz as well, offering songs from her latest album, Beautiful Africa, at Place Jerri Hans on Sunday evening.
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Chris Thile joins Rhett Miller, Mary Lou Lord, and others at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on Saturday, as part of the week-long “Celebration of the Life and Music of Elliott Smith.” A decade since his passing, over a hundred musicians perform Elliott’s music in four different cities, each event benefitting a specific charity in the area. New York’s proceeds go to New Alternatives for LGBT Homeless Youth.
Thile kicks off a 10-day US tour with fellow musicians of the Goat Rodeo Sessions album—Yo Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Stuart Duncan, and special guest Aoife O’Donovan—with a set at Tanglewood on Thursday.
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Allen Toussaint joins fellow Louisiana native son Bobby Rush, as well as Motown songwriters Eddie and Brian Holland and Mississippi gospel vocalists Coco Mamas for a free concert to close out the Lincoln Center Out of Doors festival at the Damrosch Park Bandshell in New York City on Sunday, with an afternoon of funk, soul, blues, and traditional gospel.
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