Bombino closes out his 30-day European tour with a return to France for two more shows this weekend: a headline set at Le Tour du Pays d’Aix Festival at Le Jas’Rod in Les Pennes-Mirabeau tonight, and a performance at the Centre Culturel René-Char in Digne-les-Baines on Saturday.

The Tuareg guitarist and singer and his band then make their way across the Atlantic to kick off a 14-city North American tour, starting at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, on Wednesday. The tour includes stops in Nashville, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Montreal, Cambridge, Providence, and DC, culminating in New York City with a concert in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on December 6.

The tour features music from Bombino’s Nonesuch debut album, Nomad, released to critical acclaim earlier this year.

---

Sam Amidon rounds out the German leg of his European tour in three cities this weekend: at Berghain Kantine in Berlin tonight, Beatpol in Dresden on Saturday, and Fachwerk in Münster on Sunday afternoon. The tour, featuring music from his recently released Nonesuch debut album, Bright Sunny South, continues in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark.

---

Laurie Anderson participates in a sold-out conversation with author Neil Gaiman at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City tonight. The two offer their insight on the subject of the museum’s fall talk series, “Ignorance.” Tickets includes an optional tour of the gallery, where Anderson’s art installation From the Air was exhibited back in 2007.

---

Devendra Banhart continues the Brazilian leg of his Latin American tour at Órbita Bar in Fortaleza on Saturday. He and his band—Noah Georgeson, Matthew Compton, Josiah Steinbrick, Todd Dahlhoff, and Rodrigo Amarante—travel back down the coast to Porto Alegre next week before bringing the music of Banhart’s recently released Nonesuch debut album, Mala, to Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, and Chile.

---

Shawn Colvin concludes her three-night fall residency at the City Winery in New York City tonight, with special guest Toshi Reagon, and Saturday, with support from Allison Moorer. Colvin heads west for performances in Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver in December.

---

Jeremy Denk, following a performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City last night, closes out his week-long tour with the San Francisco Symphony with a sold-out performance at the Krannert Center’s Foellinger Great Hall in Urbana-Campaign, Illinois, tonight. Once again, Denk joins the SFS and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas in performing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25; also on the program are Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Steven Mackey’s Eating Greens, and Copland’s Symphonic Ode.

“Mozart is experimenting rather profoundly with certain kinds of instabilities and ambivalences,” Denk says of the concerto in the San Francisco Classical Voice. “It has an obsessive retreading of the boundary between light and dark. I find that fascinating and beautiful, and very moving.” He goes on to say: “For me, a very important part of playing a Mozart concerto is the wonder of each moment.” You can read the full interview at sfcv.com.

“Denk’s talent isn’t simply musical,” notes the San Francisco Examiner, praising his “eloquence and intellectual gifts” as well as his “expert insight and expression.”

---

Richard Goode gives the inaugural Wendy Tisch Memorial Concert at the First Congregational Church of Greenwich in Connecticut on Sunday afternoon. Presented by the Schubert Club of Fairfield County, the program aptly features Schubert’s A-major Sonata No. 20 and his 12 Deutsche Ländler Danses, as well as Debussy’s Préludes (Book 1).

In advance of the concert, the Connecticut Post spoke to Goode, calling him a “virtuoso pianist of the highest order.” The pianist shared his motivations for pursuing music, which he described as “an essential thirst that nothing else can satisfy.”

---

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, who closed out their North American fall tour in Canada earlier this week, perform a special benefit concert at The Cannery Ballroom in Nashville on Saturday to benefit the Epilepsy Foundation Middle & West Tennessee. Preceding the concert is a silent auction with proceeds also going to the Foundation, which has served people with epilepsy an array of free programs and services for 30 years.

---

Kronos Quartet brings its 40th anniversary season celebration to the Neptune Theatre in Seattle, the city where the group was "born" exactly 40 years ago this month. On the first half of Saturday's eclectic program is Flow, from Laurie Anderson’s 2010 Nonesuch album, Homeland, along with works written for Kronos by John Oswald, Ken Benshoof, Bryce Dessner, and Jherek Bischoff, as well as a piece by Krzysztof Penderecki. The second half of the concert, which The Stranger calls “once-in-a-lifetime fairy-tale stuff,” consists of composer Josuha Kohl’s multi-media character study Predator Songstress: Warrior, performed by his multi-disciplinary Degenerate Art Ensemble.

---

Audra McDonald takes her fall tour to Missouri, where she performs at two benefit concerts whose proceeds both go towards funding educational programs: at The Sheldon in St. Louis tonight, for their Sheldon Educational Programs, and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City, on Saturday, for Kansas City Young Audiences (KCYA). McDonald performs songs from her new album, Go Back Home, as well as other songs from the American songbook.

In anticipation of the KCYA benefit concert, during which McDonald is backed by the Kansas City Symphony, the singer spoke to the Kansas City Star about the importance of exposure to the arts: “I think it makes us better humans when we’re exposed to different cultures, feelings, emotions, ideas and stories through music and art. And so to reach out and sort of shape and grow a young generation through music is a very important thing.”

---

Mehliana, the electric duo featuring Brad Mehldau and drummer Mark Guiliana, kicks off the first weekend of a two-week European tour in two French cities this weekend: at Le Fil in Saint-Etienne tonight and Cargo de Nuit in Arles on Saturday. The configuration presents Mehldau performing on Fender Rhodes and an arsenal of vintage synthesizers while Mark accompanies on drums and effects. The duo performs two more dates in France before heading to the UK for a set at the London Jazz Festival at Barbican Hall next week.

---

Natalie Merchant joins the Tulsa Symphony, led by conductor James Bagwell, for two performances at the University of Tulsa’s Lorton Performing Arts Center in Oklahoma, tonight and Saturday.

---

Joshua Redman and his quartet continue their fall tour in two Californian cities this weekend: two sets at Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz tonight, featuring Joe Sanders on bass, and a performance at University of California’s Zellerbach Hall in Redman’s hometown of Berkeley on Saturday, with bassist Reuben Rogers. Along with pianist Aaron Goldberg and drummer Gregory Hutchinson in the Quartet, Redman offers selections from his recently released Nonesuch album, Walking Shadows, and much more.

---

As noted earlier today in the Nonesuch Journal, Steve Reich joins Alarm Will Sound for an all-Reich program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium in New York City on Saturday, featuring the New York premiere of Reich’s new piece inspired by Radiohead, Radio Rewrite. Also on the program is Clapping Music, which Reich performs with the orchestra, Piano Counterpoint, City Life, Four Genesis Settings from The Cave, and New York Counterpoint. The concert will stream live starting at 7 PM by Q2 Music on wqxr.org.

---

Rokia Traoré kicks off a two-week North American tour at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Theater in New York City tonight, as part of the White Light Festival. The tor then heads to the Northwest for a performance at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver on Sunday, preceded by; a screening of the film Living Memory: Six Sketches of Mali Today, free to ticketholders.

In advance of the White Light Festival, the New York Times calls her new album, Beautiful Africa, "excellent," noting that it "balances rough and smooth, soft and loud, ngoni and chiming electric guitar, lilt and funk," and describes Traoré as "a self-possessed, intense performer."