The Black Keys, Neil Young with Crazy Horse, and Foo Fighters headline The Global Poverty Project's Global Festival 2012, a multifaceted event culminating with a free ticketed concert on the Great Lawn of New York's Central Park on Saturday. Also performing are Band of Horses and K’Naan.

The Global Festival, which celebrates achievements made towards eradicating extreme poverty, has been timed to create awareness around the UN General Assembly in New York, when world leaders will convene to debate the Millennium Development Goals and make commitments to end extreme poverty.

Tickets were distributed through the website Global Citizen, at globalfestival.com, which will be streaming the day's events live starting at 4:30 PM ET on Saturday and again at 12:30 AM and 8:30 AM on Sunday.

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Laurie Anderson joins Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, for a conversation at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City titled Happy Talk. This is Anderson's seventh on-stage conversation at the Rubin.

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Shawn Colvin performs at the Prairie Center for the Arts in Schaumburg, Illinois, outside Chicago tonight. (For the occasion, the Chicago Tribune has assembled "a few things you didn't know" about Colvin at chicagotribune.com.) On Saturday, she heads to Brookfield, Wisconsin, to play a sold-out show with Leo Kottke at the Wilson Center for the Arts' Harris Theatre.

And tune in to Treme on HBO this Sunday night at 10 PM to hear the song "The Neon Lights of the Saints," which Colvin wrote with John Leventhal, and can be heard on her latest album, All Fall Down.

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Fatoumata Diawara makes her New York headline debut with a performance at the Michael Schimmel Center at Pace University tonight. She performs in Spaulding Auditorium at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center in Hanover, New Hampshire, on Saturday. Diawara's US tour, featuring music from her recently released debut album, Fatou, continues through next weekend.

The new album, says New Hampshire Public Radio, "plays to her roots and retains an infectious pop sensibility." Diawara spoke with Virginia Prescott of NHPR's Word of Mouth about the album. You can hear the interview and clips from Fatou at nhpr.org.

In advance of Saturday's show, Diawara spoke with The Dartmouth's Kunyi Li about her music and its roots. “I grew up with traditional music,” Diawara tells Li. “In Mali, we have a strong sense of custom. You can learn modern music at school, but if you want to know more, you really have to look for it. I discovered Nina Simone, Derek Fisher, all the classics of rock, pop, jazz. I try to bring their essence into my music. The mixture between traditional music and modern music helped me to experiment with my style.”

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Richard Goode offers a recital at the Sweeney Concert Hall at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on Saturday. The program includes a pre-concert talk with Goode and an all-Beethoven program featuring late works such as Bagatelles (Op. 126), Sonata No. 30 in E Major (Op. 109), Sonata No. 31 in A flat Major (Op. 110), and Sonata No. 32 in C Minor (Op.111). Goode famously released a 10-CD box set of the Complete Sonatas on Nonesuch in 1993; his latest album is a three-disc set of Beethoven's Complete Piano Concertos.

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Kronos Quartet launches its year-long residency at Cal Performances with a free concert at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Sunday, part of the Fall Free for All Open House there. The Fall Free for All features a full day of music across six stages, all with no ticket required. The Kronos program includes works by Aleksandra Vrebalov, Omar Souleyman, John Zorn, Nicole Lizée, and more.

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Lianne La Havas joins Alicia Keys for a special show at The Roundhouse in London tonight, as part of the iTunes Festival, which lasts for 30 days and features over 60 artists from a wide range of genres. La Havas leads her own headline tour of the UK through October.

Blinded by Sound, reviewing La Havas's recently released debut album, Is Your Love Big Enough?, earlier this week calls it "an extraordinary achievement on its own merits made all the more remarkable coming from a young artist recording her debut."

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k.d. lang and the Siss Boom Bang end their massive world tour with two final shows in lang's home country of Canada this weekend. The tour, featuring music from lang and the band's album Sing it Loud, released last year on Nonesuch, comes to a close with two concerts at the Corona Theatre in Montreal tonight and Saturday night. Fellow Canadian singer-songwriter Lindi Ortega opens both shows.

lang and the band will keep the music going with two special sets at the Bridge School Benefit Concert in Mountain View, California, October 20 and 21.

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Pat Metheny and his Unity Band—featuring Chris Potter on sax and bass clarinet, Antonio Sanchez on drums, and Ben Williams on bass—conclude the California leg of their months-long US tour with a performance at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa tonight. The band then heads to the Southwest for a few shows, starting with Saturday's concert at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona.

The Unity Band performed at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica earlier this week, leading the Los Angeles Times to note Metheny's "jaw-dropping capabilities," with the band "able to follow Metheny's every whim."

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Punch Brothers, who launched the first leg of their North American fall tour last night in Montreal, play one more night in Canada, at the Phoenix Concert Theatre in Toronto tonight, before heading south of the 49th parallel for two concerts in upstate New York: at the State Theatre in Ithaca on Saturday and The Egg in Albany, where they "aim to pack a wallop," says the Albany Times Union. Tom Brosseau opens for these and most shows on this leg of the tour.

As noted yesterday in the Nonesuch Journal, the band is giving away a free three-song download of songs recorded live at the Fillmore in San Francisco to celebrate the start of the tour. To preview and download the tracks, go to punchbrothers.com/live.

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Allen Toussaint is in Washington, DC, this weekend to play shows at The Hamilton: with blues vocalist Shemekia Copeland on Saturday and a solo set on Sunday.