The Low Anthem and Jessica Lea Mayfield will just miss each other's sets at two big-name music festivals this weekend: Next Big Nashville's Soundland festival and the MidPoint Music Festival in Mayfield's home state of Ohio. She helped kick off the three-day Cincinnati festival yesterday with the final set of the night at the Know Theatre. The Low Anthem continues the music-making by closing out tonight's MidPoint performances at the School for Creative and Performing Arts' Mayerson Theater. While they do, Mayfield performs at the Pygmalion Music Festival in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois tonight.

While Jessica Lea Mayfield was performing at MidPoint last night, The Low Anthem was performing at the Soundland festival in Nashville, where Mayfield performs on Saturday. She takes the Neuhoff Factory Party Stage at 3 PM. American Songwriter included both Mayfield and The Low Anthem in its list of the 15 Artists You Need to See at Soundland. See the list at americansongwriter.com. For their part, The Low Anthem performs on The Kent Stage back in Mayfield's home town of Kent on Saturday. David Wax Museum and Sleepy Sun open.

Both The Low Anthem and Jessica Lea Mayfield will appear at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park next weekend, as will label mates Punch Brothers and perennial Hardly Strictly favorite Emmylou Harris.

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Laurie Anderson is in Bolzano, Italy, for the Transart Festival this weekend. She performs her solo retrospective piece Transitory Life at the Bahnhofsremise tonight and participates in a free public conversation at the Bolzano Museum of Contemporary Art tomorrow morning.

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The Black Keys are in Atlanta for the Music Midtown festival, performing the penultimate set on the Electric Ballroom Stage in Piedmont Park on Saturday, preceding Coldplay's festival closer.

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Carolina Chocolate Drops perform at the Whitaker Center in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, tonight. The group recently stopped appeared on Around Noon from Cleveland NPR member station WCPN 90.3 FM to perform and talk about their music with host Dee Perry. You can listen to the show at ideastream.org.

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Richard Goode opens the Wilton Candlelight Concerts' 64th season on Sunday with a recital featuring Mozart's Fantasy in C minor and Schumann's Kreisleriana. The concert will be held at the Wilton Congregational Church in Wilton, Connecticut, and will benefit the Wilton Library Association.

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Emmylou Harris has two concerts out West this weekend: at the Fox Tucson Theater in Tucscon, Arizona, tonight, and the Santa Barbara Bowl in Santa Barbara, California, on Saturday. For the latter show, Harris appears as the very special guest of Don Henley.

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Wanda Jackson earns top billing at the SoCal Hellbilly Fest held at the Del Mar Fairground in Del Mar, California, on Saturday. Proceeds from the day-long event benefit the St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.

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James Farm—featuring saxophonist Joshua Redman, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland—continues its US tour with three concerts on the Northeast this weekend. First up are two shows in Massachusetts, at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston tonight as part of the Beantown Jazz Festival and Bowker Auditorium at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on Saturday. On Sunday, the quartet heads down to University of Maryland to perform at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center's Kay Theatre in College Park.

Redman and Penman appeared on Radio Boston from NPR member station WBUR earlier this week to discuss tonight's concert. "In the world of jazz, it’s not every day that a new band comes along," says host Anthony Brooks, "especially a band that includes a player like Joshua Redman." Listen to the segment at wbur.org.

The Washington City Paper, previewing Sunday's concert, describes the band's music as "a determined effort to maintain contact between the jazz tradition and the contemporary musical universe—and it's a brilliant success." The DCist calls Redman "one of the most consistent jazz saxophonists out there, always giving
satisfying concerts that are forward-thinking, yet accessible."

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Kronos Quartet conclude their four-night run at the BAM Harvey Theatre in Brooklyn, New York, with two final performances of Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11 tonight and Saturday. The shows mark the New York premiere of the program and are part of BAM's Next Wave Festival. Kronos is joined by special guests the Brooklyn Youth Chorus for the performances.

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k.d. lang and the Siss Boom Bang continue their US tour, with support from singer-songwriter Teddy Thompson, with two stops in northern New England: at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont, tonight and the Collins Center for the Arts in Orono, Maine, on Saturday.

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Audra McDonald continues her run as Porgy in The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was 10 years ago Saturday that McDonald was featured in The Actors Fund's one-night-only 20th Anniversary benefit performance of Dreamgirls, along with Lillias White, Heather Headley, and many others. The event was recorded and later released in full as this 2-CD set on Nonesuch, the first to contain all songs from the original Tony Award–winning production.

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Pat Metheny continues his month-long US tour with bassist Larry Grenadier with three stops in California this weekend. Metheny and Grenadier perform at the Uptown Theater in Napa tonight, followed by double sets at both the Marine Memorial Theatre in San Francisco on Saturday and the Broad Stage in Santa Monica on Sunday.

The Herald, outside of Seattle, says Metheny was "sublime" at this week's two-night stint at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle.

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Punch Brothers' performance on NPR's Mountain Stage will be given an encore broadcast on NPR member stations across the US this weekend. To find out where Mountain Stage is airing near you, head to mountainstage.org.

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Philip Selway was the guest on WNYC's Soundcheck this afternoon. Selway performed songs from his new digital EP, Running Blind, and his 2010 solo debut album, Familial, and spoke with host John Schaefer about both. You can listen to the segment below. While in NYC, Selway will work in a few gigs with his band, Radiohead, as musical guests on the season opener of Saturday Night Live this Saturday, featured on The Colbert Report on Monday, and performing two shows at Roseland Ballroom next week.