The 2014 Glastonbury Festival got under way at Worthy Farm in Pilton, UK, earlier this week and continues through the weekend, featuring performances from a number of artists familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal: Robert Plant, The Black Keys, and Toumani and Sidiki Diabaté.

The UK’s own Robert Plant and his Sensational Space Shifters band take the festival’s main Pyramid Stage on Saturday at 5:30 PM. This set, which the BBC will be streaming live for UK fans at bbc.co.uk, is part of Plant’s European summer tour, which continues in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the Czech Republic in the weeks ahead. He and his band will tour the UK in November (general on-sale begins today) and the US this fall in support of the forthcoming album lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar, due September 9 on Nonesuch/Warner Bros. Records. Pre-orders are available now at robertplant.com and include a limited-edition print and an instant download of an album track.

Sunday night, The Black Keys perform the penultimate set of the whole festival on the Pyramid Stage at 7:45 PM. The Keys, who kicked off a world tour in support of their highly acclaimed new album, Turn Blue, last week, headline two more European festivals this weekend: the sold-out Open Air St. Gallen on the Sitterbühne stage in St. Gallen, Switzerland, tonight, and the Down the Rabbit Hold Festival, on De Groene Heuvels park’s Hotot stage in Beuningen, the Netherlands, on Saturday. The European summer festival dates continue through the end of July, and an extensive tour of North America begins this fall with special guests Cage The Elephant, Jake Bugg, and St. Vincent.

Earlier Sunday afternoon, Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté and his eldest son, Sidiki, perform duets on the main stage at 1:30 PM. The set features songs from their new father-and-son duo album, Toumani & Sidiki. The record was recently named one of the Best Albums of 2014 So Far by Los Angeles Times music critic Randall Roberts. “It’s a beguiling sound, and when two geniuses bridge generations, you can hear echoes of a continuum stretching back centuries,” says Roberts. Toumani and Sidiki Diabaté tour the United States this fall.

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Bombino rounds out his European tour with a set at Festival MED in the Municipal Market of Loulé, Portugal, tonight, before kicking off a string of dates in North American at the Electric Forest Festival at the Double JJ Ranch in Rothbury, Michigan, on Sunday afternoon. The Tuareg guitarist, whose Dan Auerbach-produced album, Nomad, was released last year, heads north for two more festival sets in Canada in the days ahead.

“Boosted by a Black Key, West African guitarist crosses Hendrix with Tuareg traditionalism,” writes Rolling Stone about Bombino in its Young Guns artist series. “Omara ‘Bombino’ Moctar stands out even in a field as fertile as ‘desert blues,’ the catchall term for deliciously rough guitar music from the Sahara.” The guitarist tells the magazine about his musical inspiration—“For me the freedom that Jimi expressed through his guitar sent me to another world, where I was also free”—as well as his feelings on the political conflict in West Africa. Read the full article at rollingstone.com.

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Shawn Colvin, who has led a course at singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s acoustic guitar and songwriting camp, Frets and Refrains, in upstate New York all week, joins her fellow “counselors” for a Farewell Breakfast in the Tent Pavilion this morning. She kicks off a string of solo tour dates in the Northeast in the weeks ahead before heading out West in August.

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Jeremy Denk offers a solo performance at the Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, Massachusetts, on Sunday late afternoon, as part of the Rockport Music Festival. The program comprises the Bach Goldberg Variations in full (heard on his latest Nonesuch album), followed by the Ives “Concord” Piano Sonata No. 2. Denk discusses the program and much more in an interview with the Boston Globe at bostonglobe.com. 

The past two weekends, Denk was fully engaged as the Music Director for the 68th Ojai Music Festival, which featured the premiere of The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts)—“a 70-minute delight” (Financial Times)— for which he wrote the libretto, and the subsequent Ojai North offshoot in Berkeley. Among the festival’s various performances was Denk’s “virtuosic and riveting account of the first two books of Ligeti's piano etudes, music that is as fearsome as it is humane,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. (Denk recorded those pieces for his Nonesuch debut album, Ligeti/Beethoven.)

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Iron and Wine continues its summer tour with an all-ages show on The Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio, tonight and a performance at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina, near his new hometown of Durham, on Saturday. Sam Beam, the man behind the moniker, heads next to the Paramount Theater in his previous hometown of Austin to perform his annual benefit concert for the Midwives Alliance of North America on July 26. Beam and the band then kick off the next leg of their tour out West, featuring music from Iron and Wine’s 2013 Nonesuch debut album, Ghost on Ghost, in August.

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As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana—the electric duo group Mehliana—kick off a three-week tour with a set performing on a double bill with the Stanley Clarke Trio in Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday, as part of the Toronto Jazz Festival.

“Even with such an extensive catalog, Mehldau still has the ability to defy expectations,” writes Huffington Post Canada about Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, the duo’s debut album, released on Nonesuch earlier this year. “Guiliani’s high energy playing and Mehldau’s ability to play bass and melodies simultaneously are worth checking out.”

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Pat Metheny Unity Group—featuring Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—performs at Théâtre Femina in Bordeaux, France, tonight, before kicking off the last leg of its European tour in Spain: at the Teatro Circo Prince in Madrid on Saturday and the Sohail Castle in Fuengirola on Sunday. The Unity Group, which recently released its Nonesuch debut album, Kin (←→), performs in Cordoba before returning to the States in mid-July.