Ry Cooder continues his tour of the Southern Hemisphere with Nick Lowe, Joachim Cooder, and special guest Juliette Commagere in Australia, in a Saturday set at the Brisbane Convention Centre. The group's recent performance in Auckland, New Zealand, "rose past the highest expectations," says the New Zealand Herald's Graham Reid. He cites the "masterful musicianship, warmth from the stage, and music of sometimes great emotional depth ... which was uncompromisingly delivered." Reid's conclusion: "Exceptional."

And speaking of uncompromising, there's a fascinating feature profile of Cooder in Australia's The Age that takes a candid look at his life and career, including the "uncompromising comeback" of his recent California Trilogy on Nonesuch: Chávez Ravine, My Name Is Buddy, and I, Flathead.

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Dan Auerbach's tour with Justin Townes Earle and Jessica Lea Mayfield comes to a close this weekend with two final performances, both in Tennessee. First up is a Friday night set at Minglewood Hall in Memphis, followed by a tour-closing concert at the Cannery Ballroom in Nashville.
 
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Björk celebrates her 44th birthday on Saturday with a special Top 10 countdown on MTVE, according to bjork.com. Says the site: "All the style and weirdness rolled into this Top 10 with Björk who is known fabulously for her artistic flair, her outspokenness and her very special self genre of music."

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David Byrne is at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City on Saturday to participate in The Red Book Dialogues. It's a series, tied to the museum's exhibition The Red Book of C.G. Jung, that pairs personalities from different walks of life with a psychoanalyst to respond to a piece from Jung's Red Book as a starting point for a wider conversation.

For Saturday's sold-out event—jumping off point: "Analysis is like a lobotomy. Who wants to have all their edges shaved off?"—Byrne will be speaking with Dr. Sherry Salman, a Jungian analyst and author of the forthcoming book Dreams of Totality: Where We Are When There's Nothing at the Center.

John Adams will participate in a Red Book event in January. For more information on the series, visit rmanyc.org.
 
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Carolina Chocolate Drops, who recently announced a number of tour dates for January and February to coincide with the release of their Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig, conclude their current tour tonight with a concert at the Caswell County Civic Center in Yanceyville, South Carolina.
 
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Shawn Colvin performs two sets at the Tupelo Music Hall in Londonderry, New Hampshire, Saturday night.

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The Brooklyn Academy of Music hosts three staged performances of the Philip Glass opera Kepler, about pioneering scientist Johannes Kepler, this week as part of BAM's Next Wave Festival. Performances began on Wednesday and continue tonight and tomorrow night. The Bruckner Orchestra Linz performs, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting. You can watch a video interview with the composer at bam.org.

New York audiences can also see Glass discuss the project in a public Artist Talk at BAM's Hillman Attic Studio. He'll join Science Channel presenter and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible and Beyond Einstein, for a conversation about superstrings and the sound of the cosmos.
 
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Emmylou Harris performs at the University of Colorado's Macky Auditorium in Boulder tonight with her Red Dirt Boys and special guest Buddy Miller. The Denver Post spoke with Harris in advance of the performance and describes her as "a songwriter's songwriter and a collaborator's dream." The Billings Gazette says Harris shone at her career-spanning show there earlier this week.

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Gilbert Kalish performs two concerts with the Chamber Music Society at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York this weekend, tonight and Sunday. On the program are works by Mozart, Barber, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, and Ravel. Earlier this year, on the 200th anniversary of Joseph Haydn's death, Nonesuch reissued five albums, originally released between 1975 and 1980, of Kalish performing the composer's piano works, as digital albums, exclusively in the Nonesuch Store.

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As reported earlier in the Nonesuch Journal, Kronos Quartet helps kick off the Adams-curated West Coast, Left Coast festival at Walt Disney Concert Hall a special Opening Event titled Eureka!, featuring performances by Kronos Quartet, Terry Riley, Matmos, and Mike Einziger. Kronos performs It Got Dark, by Thomas Newman, and joins Matmos in for the duo's For Terry Riley.

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The Low Anthem taped its performance for tonight on BBC2's Later ... with Jools Holland earlier in the week, as it heads to Holland for two performances at each cite of the Crossing Border festival. The band is at The Hague Theatre Quarter with Grizzly Bear and Yo La Tengo tonight and at the Arenbergschouwburg in Antwerp on Sunday.

Fellow Crossing Border festival participant and label mate Natalie Merchant performs at The Hague Theatre Quarter tonight as well.
 
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Brad Mehldau concludes his European tour with a solo set at the Serbian National Theatre in Novi Sad on Saturday. He returns to the States to perform at Birdland in New York with Charlie Haden, Lee Konitz, and Paul Motian in early December.
 
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Joshua Redman joins the Aaron Goldberg Trio, with Reuben Rogers and Greg Hutchinson, at the Teatro Verdi in Padova, Italy, tonight. This son of Berkeley, California, returns to the US to perform in the John Adams-curated West Coast: Left Coast festival with Joe Lovano and Christian McBride in a celebration of the Beat poets on December 8.
 
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Sara Watkins' weeklong tour with The Infamous Stringdusters comes to a close with two shows in North Carolina this weekend. Tonight, they're at the Visulite Theater in Charlotte, and tomorrow, it's The Grey Eagle in Asheville. Up next is a fittingly Thanksgiving-week set with the Watkins Family Hour at the Largo in LA on Monday.