The 40th annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival got under way in Telluride, Colorado, yesterday and continues through the weekend with multiple performances from Punch Brothers and Sara Watkins. The festival features outdoor performances on the Main Stage, including a set last night from Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, as well as the more intimate Workshops at Elks Park and the indoor NightGrass series for when the sun finally goes down, all timed to coincide with the summer solstice and set amidst panoramic views of the picturesque San Juan Mountains and Telluride Box Canyon.

Punch Brothers return to Telluride in full force this year, having performed a “happy hour” set at Elks Park yesterday, following Chris Thile’s own festival-opening set on the Main Stage in the morning. (Thile's new album, Bach: Partitas and Sonatas, Vol. 1, is due in August and is available to pre-order here.) The full band hits the Main Stage tonight before closing out the whole festival with a NightGrass show at the Sheridan Opera House Sunday night.

Sara Watkins, who is currently touring the US as special guest of Jackson Browne, plays her own Telluride set Saturday afternoon, following her concert with Browne at Jazz Aspen Snowmass tonight.

The Telluride Bluegrass Festival also features the nationally recognized Telluride Troubadour songwriter competition. Among this year's finalists is former Nonesuch staffer Michaela Anne, whom we're all wishing the best of luck!

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Amadou & Mariam and Bombino perform a free concert outdoors at the Prospect Park Bandshell in Brooklyn tonight as part of the Celebrate Brooklyn! summer concert series. The New York Times recommends the show and the New York Daily News music writer Jim Farber takes a look at this "pair of authoritative artists" in a feature available at nydailynews.com.

Amadou & Mariam continue their North American tour with a show at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston Saturday night. The Malian duo was recently included in Billboard’s list of the top ten performances at Bonnaroo last weekend, suggesting that their “extremely sumptuous mix of world beats, slicing guitar work and vocal chants … may very well have provoked the single most enthusiastic crowd reaction at the end of their set.”

Bombino heads across the country to close out the current leg of his own US tour with a set at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in Boonville, California, on Sunday. He and the band then head to Europe for several summer festival sets before returning to the States in mid-July. Bombino was another Bonnaroo favorite, with the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff including his among the “best sets” and Rolling Stone exclaiming: “Niger-born guitar-god-on-the-rise Bombino and his air-tight backing band jammed out on fast-paced, repetitive gang vocals, rocking purposefully clenched game faces like a fully-commissioned hit squad. Pairing perfectly with the summery surroundings, despite their long velvety robes and white scarves, the band effortlessly whipped sun-and-sweat-drenched festivalgoers into dance-inducing hypnosis.”

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Sam Amidon finishes touring his native New England on Saturday with a set at MASS MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts, as part the Solid Sound Festival. The tour brought him through his hometown of Brattleboro, Vermont, where he performed songs from his recently released Nonesuch Records debut album, Bright Sunny South, which “takes the listener on an introspective odyssey through a spare but emotionally rich landscape,” writes the Brattleboro Reformer. This will be Amidon’s last scheduled US performance before he embarks on a run of festivals spanning the globe from South Korea and Japan to his adopted home in the UK.

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Carolina Chocolate Drops perform two concerts in the Midwest this weekend, first at the Minnesota Zoo Amphitheater in Apple Valley, Minnesota, and then at the Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek, Wisconsin.

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Fatoumata Diawara closes out a week’s tour of California with a performance at Don Quixote’s International Music Hall in Felton on Saturday and a set at the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival in Boonville on Sunday.

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Dr. John plays a set on the Toronto Jazz Festival’s Mainstage in Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday afternoon as the first of a week of performances across Canada.

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Adam Guettel continues his month-long tour of Australia with two events at the Adelaide Festival Center on Saturday as part of the Adelaide Cabaret Festival. He leads a master class in the morning, followed by an afternoon concert.

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Following last night's Telluride performance, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell perform two concerts in California over the weekend with the musical duo She & Him: at the Greek Theater in Berkeley on Saturday and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Sunday.

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Lianne La Havas plays a set at the Día de la Música festival in Madrid on Saturday afternoon. The show is another in a series of scheduled European festival dates before she returns to her native London next month.

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Iron and Wine plays an intimate show at the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles on Sunday. The following day, singer-songwriter Sam Beam and the band perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC. Tickets are on sale now for Iron and Wine’s newly announced fall tour dates.

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In honor of the recent 100th anniversary of the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble joins the San Francisco Symphony for a concert program featuring that groundbreaking piece along with Les Noces, the composer’s 1923 cantata about a peasant wedding, and traditional Russian folk songs. The Pokrovsky Ensemble famously paired Les Noces with such folk songs in a 1994 Nonesuch recording, which the Guardian included in its guide to the definitive recordings of classical works. There are two performances of the program at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, tonight and Saturday.

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Steve Reich joins the London Sinfonietta for a performance of his work as part of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, curated by Deerhunter, in Camber Sands, United Kingdom on Sunday. On the all-Reich program are New York Counterpoint, Electric Counterpoint, 2x5, and Clapping Music, for which the composer himself takes the stage.