Carolina Chocolate Drops continue the Southern leg of their US tour at Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center’s Jemison Concert Hall at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, Alabama, tonight, sponsored in part by the Alabama State Council on the Arts. The Chocolate Drops offer a master class for music students in the concert hall earlier this afternoon. The band—Rhiannon Giddens, cellist Malcolm Parson, and multi-instrumentalists Hubby Jenkins and Rowan Corbett—then head one state over to perform at the Ferst Center for the Arts in Atlanta on Saturday.

Giddens, who recently received the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award for outstanding contributions to the Fine Arts of North Carolina, tells The Advocate in Louisiana of her newest band mates Parson and Corbett: “They not only have chops, they’re interested in the history and the music.”

Hubby Jenkins, a member of the band since 2011, spoke with the Huntsville Times about his own appreciation of that history. "Traditional music is so important to us; there's such a wealth of music there,” he says. “I want to be part of the team that's keeping it alive … After every show, we get comments like, ‘We love your show, it's so entertaining, but we also learned something.’"

Carolina Chocolate Drops continue their tour of the South in the week ahead with stops in the Carolinas, Florida, and Tennessee, before heading to the Northeast in late March. They are set to perform at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City on April 10, a precursor to BAM’s larger celebration of Nonesuch Records’ 50th anniversary this fall.

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Shawn Colvin joins longtime friend and fellow singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter, along with Joan Baez and others, for concerts with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York City tonight and Saturday. Led by conductor Vince Mendoza, the program features new orchestral arrangements of songs from throughout Carpenter’s career. Coincidentally, Colvin and Carpenter’s performance on NPR’s Mountain Stage from last May is scheduled for rebroadcast this weekend. To find out when and where Mountain Stage is airing near you, head to mountainstage.org.

Colvin goes on to offer a solo set at the South Orange Performing Arts Center in South Orange, New Jersey, on Sunday. "Performing is probably the most familiar thing [for me]," she tells the nearby Montclair Times. "I'm pretty much old-school. I need a place to plug my guitar, a microphone and I'm set to go."

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Jeremy Denk joins the Orquesta Nacionales de España to perform Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major at Auditorio Nacional de Música’s Sala Sinfónica in Madrid tonight, as part of composer John Adams’s Carta Blanca residency. Included on the program are Barber’s Adagio for Strings and two works by Adams: Slonimsky’s Earbox and Doctor Atomic Symphony. By chance, these two pieces—both recorded on Nonesuch Records—are also being performed elsewhere this weekend: Slonimsky’s Earbox by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra at Herkulessaal in Munich tonight, and Doctor Atomic Symphony by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto on Saturday, as part of the New Creations Festival (see today's Nonesuch Journal for more).

Denk, who recently released a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations on Nonesuch to critical acclaim, “appears never to think of himself, but only of the music,” writes the Spokesman Review, “each bar of which he greets as though for the first time with amazement and delight. The Review writes of his performance of the Ravel Concerto with the Spokane Symphony last weekend: “Denk prepares every bar he intends to play down to the minutest detail. Such mastery allows him to play with complete freedom and spontaneity.”

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Fatoumata Diawara rounds out the California leg of her North American tour at The Broad Stage in Santa Monica tonight, where she performs songs from her 2012 Nonesuch debut album, Fatou.

"Music becomes very powerful," Diawara recently told the Santa Barbara Independent regarding the political situation in her home country of Mali. "We need to keep music as the soul of the country. Even if you are Tuareg, or Bozo, or Idaksahak, you are a child of Mali, and you have the same rhythm. We all have the same rhythm."

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Leading up to Fat Tuesday, Dr. John performs a free set at the Aaron Bessant Park Amphitheater in Panama City Beach, Florida, tonight, as part of the two-day Panama City Beach Mardi Gras and Music Festival.

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Iron and Wine rounds out a six-city tour of Florida this weekend: at the University of Florida’s Curtis M. Phillips Center for Performing Arts in Gainesville tonight; a sold out show at the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall in Ponte Vedra Beach on Saturday; and The Moon in Tallahassee on Sunday.

In an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, singer-songwriter Sam Beam discusses his songwriting process—"I don’t really write a song with the finished product in mind. I wrote chords and the melody, and you can put any kind of arrangement behind it."—and how the music from an album takes shape on the road. Read more at tampabay.com.

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Kronos Quartet performs Terry Riley’s Sun Rings at the Leighton Concert Hall in the University of Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center in Indiana on Saturday. Riley wrote Sun Rings, a multimedia piece originally commissioned for Kronos by the NASA Art Program, among others, for string quartet, chorus, and pre-recorded “spacescapes,” including sounds captured by the Voyager spacecraft. Kronos continues its 40th anniversary concert season back in its home state of California, with dates in San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles in the weeks ahead.

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Audra McDonald performs at the L.J. Williams Theater in Visalia, California, tonight, a benefit event for Hands in the Community, a local non-profit organization that provides crisis and short-term referral services to the community. A native of California’s Central Valley, McDonald gives her first performance in the area since her 2011 performance opening Fresno’s Grand Opera season.

“I’d come home and hear either my mom playing Bach on the piano or she’d be playing Beethoven on the stereo,” says McDonald in an interview with theVisalia Times about the music she grew up listening to in her Fresno home. “On Sundays in church, we’d sing classical music at my mom’s church. Then afterwards go to my grandmother’s church on my dad’s side. There we sang gospel. My dad started out as a music school teacher at a high school where he had a jazz band.”

McDonald returns to Broadway to play Billie Holiday in the musical Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill this spring. The play recounts Holiday’s life story through the songs that made her famous.

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Brad Mehldau and his Trio perform at Maison des Arts Thonon-Evian in Thonon-les-Bains, France, tonight, before kicking off the Italian leg of their European tour at Teatro dell'Aquila in Fermo on Saturday and Teatro Ristori Verona in Verona on Sunday. The tour, which began in Switzerland on Wednesday, makes one more stop in Italy before continuing on to the Czech Republic, Belgium, Spain, and other French cities.

Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, the debut album from Mehldau’s electric duo with drummer Mark Guiliana, was released earlier this week on Nonesuch. It has earned four stars from the Guardian and from MusicOMH, which calls the album "wholly absorbing, as Mehldau’s playfulness and Guiliana’s taut, interwoven grooves create an inescapable tension … an intuitive, compelling dialogue between the two musicians, and between the musicians and their machines."

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—featuring Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams and Giulio Carmassi—performs at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco tonight before playing two sets in Oregon: at the Shedd Institute’s Jaqua Concert Hall in Eugene on Saturday and the Newmark Theater in Portland on Sunday. They head north of the 49th parallel for one show in Vancouver before returning to the States to round out the Western leg of their tour in Washington and Colorado.

The Unity Group’s 44-city tour throughout North America is in support of their just-released Nonesuch album, Kin (←→). “There’s a sprightliness and a captivating agility present throughout this album,” notes MusicOMH about the album. “This suggests a new ensemble taking complete joy in the art of making creative music and taking new risks.”

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Following shows in Eugene and Portland, Oregon, Chris Thile and fellow mandolinist Mike Marshall continue their duo tour with two sets at the Wintergrass Music Festival at the Hyatt Regency in Bellevue, Washington, on Saturday: an opening set at the Evergreen Stage at 6:30 PM and the closing set at the Grand Ballroom at 10:55 PM. They play one more festival set together at the Savannah Music Festival on March 22.

Thile joins his fellow Punch Brothers to tour for the rest of March and plays a duo show of a different sort with label mate pianist Brad Mehldau at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on April 8. Later this spring, Thile and his Nickel Creek band mates, kick off a reunion tour mid-April in Nashville. This will mark the band’s first US tour since 2007 and will feature music from their upcoming Nonesuch release, A Dotted Line, due out April 1 and now available for pre-order in the Nonesuch Store.