Pat Metheny tours Northeast US with Ron Carter … Laura Anderson takes Heart of a Dog to London … The Arcs, St Germain, Mbongwana Star return to Coachella … The Bad Plus Joshua Redman concludes tour in Buffalo, Ann Arbor … Olivia Chaney performs in London … Jeremy Denk gives solo recital in Indiana … Rhiannon Giddens concludes tour at New Orleans Jazz Fest … Emmylou Harris performs in North Carolina … Kronos Quartet plays Big Star tribute in San Francisco … Lake Street Dive tours Germany, France … Brad Mehldau Trio concludes US tour in Chicago ... and more ...
Guitarist Pat Metheny kicked off a six-show tour with famed bassist Ron Carter earlier this week. The duo plays the remaining four shows this weekend with a performance at Musikfest Café in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, tonight, two shows at the Schmidtchen Theater in Cape May, New Jersey, as part of the Exit Zero Jazz Festival, tomorrow, and the final night of the run at The Newton Theatre in Newton, New Jersey, on Sunday. Metheny and Carter will reunite this summer to play several European festivals in July.
Nonesuch releases a pair of new collaborative albums from Metheny on May 6. The Unity Sessions features Pat Metheny Unity Group performing 13 songs by Metheny, one he co-wrote with Ornette Coleman, and one well known standard by Ray Noble. And Cuong Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny joins the guitarist with a trio led by longtime Pat Metheny Group trumpeter Cuong Vu. It comprises five tunes written by Vu plus one by Metheny and one by Andrew D'Angelo. Pre-orders of The Unity Sessions and Cuong Vu Trio Meets Pat Metheny are available now with instant downloads of tracks from the albums.
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Laurie Anderson takes part in a Q&A following a sold-out screening of her critically acclaimed film, Heart of a Dog, at the Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium in London tonight. The film, for which Nonesuch released the soundtrack last year, has been called “a meditation on love, loss and the meaning of life,” by the New York Times, and “warm, witty and thought-provoking,” by Uncut Magazine, adding that the film is “Anderson’s most satisfying and human work … There’s something for everyone.” All About Jazz has praised the soundtrack as being “a transcendence into another-worldly place with new and intriguing musical landscapes.”
Heart of a Dog opens in cinemas in the UK and Ireland in May, starting with a screening at the Brighton Festival, of which Anderson is the guest director this year. To see where the film will be playing, visit dogwoof.com.
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The Arcs continue the “West Coast Caravan” leg of their spring US tour with a sold-out show at The Glass House in Pomona, California, tonight. They return to Coachella, for the festival’s second weekend at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, on Saturday. Guitarist Joe Walsh joined the band along with the man who taught Walsh how to play the guitar: 78-year-old Glenn Schwartz on his homemade guitar.
St Germain and Mbongwana Star return to Coachella this weekend as well, both performing today. KCRW calls St Germain "a must see at this year's Coachella,” and the Los Angeles Times includes Mbongwana Star among “12 Coachella acts to catch beyond the headliners.” LA Weekly says the latter offers “some of the most hair-raisingly joyful sonic deviance currently available on planet Earth.”
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The Bad Plus Joshua Redman concludes its seven-city US tour with shows at Rockwell Hall at SUNY Buffalo State tonight, and the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor tomorrow. The Columbia Daily Tribune, interviewing Redman ahead of a group show in Missouri last weekend, writes that the quartet’s sound “exists in a salon of uncommon sound. It is taut at times, romantic at others, full of color and life and breath.” The Kansas City Star, reviewing one recent show, praised the performance as “wildly exuberant improvised music that might have permanently altered [the audience’s] perception of jazz,” as well as a “convincing manifesto” on the genre’s “infinite possibilities.”
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Olivia Chaney, playing throughout the UK this spring and summer, is among the musicians performing at the UnampliFire Festival, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of the acoustic folk club The Nest Collective, at the Master Shipwrights Palace in London Saturday. “Whether she’s singing old songs or her own,” says the New York Times, “Ms. Chaney destabilizes them, turning them into rhapsodic, immediate dramas, giving listeners a reason to hang on every phrase and inflection.”
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Jeremy Denk gives a solo piano recital, bringing his program of Bach, Stravinsky, Schubert, Ives, Hindemith, and more to The Palladium in Carmel, Indiana, on Sunday afternoon. There will be a pre-concert talk, open to all ticketholders, led by Heather Platt, Professor of Music & Musicology at Ball State University.
The New York Times, reviewing Denk’s performance of the program at Carnegie Hall last weekend, calls it “wildly imaginative,” noting his “compelling performance” on Hindemith’s “Ragtime.”
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Rhiannon Giddens concludes her current US tour with a set at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on Sunday and a taping of Austin City Limits at Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater on Monday. That latter performance, which marks Giddens’s Austin City Limits debut, will stream live at 8 PM CT / 9 PM ET; fans around the world can watch the entire performance via the show's YouTube Channel. The broadcast version will air on PBS as part of ACL’s upcoming season, which launches this fall.
Giddens’s set on the public television show Infinity Hall Live, currently streaming in full, was part of WNYC’s Weekly Music Roundup last week, with Soundcheck’s John Schaefer calling Giddens “an extraordinary performer: graceful, smart, versatile, and committed to a wide variety of what we now call Americana. Folk songs, spirituals, Celtic music, slave shout songs—she sings them all, and plays a mean violin or banjo besides.”
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Emmylou Harris performs at the Smoky Mountain Center for the Performing Arts in Franklin, North Carolina, on Saturday. She performs at the Stagecoach Festival in California next weekend and plays a series of shows at City Winery in Nashville in May to benefit her dog rescue, Bonaparte’s Retreat.
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Kronos Quartet joins Big Star’s Jody Stephens, Wilco’s Pat Sansone, Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan, and others in an orchestrated performance of Big Star’s album Third at the Fillmore in San Francisco on Sunday. The show then heads south to the Alex Theatre in Glendale on Wednesday.
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Lake Street Dive continues its European tour, featuring music from its Nonesuch Records debut album, Side Pony, with shows at Gloria Theater in Cologne, Germany, tonight and Café de la Danse in Paris on Saturday. The band finishes out the tour in the UK and Ireland next week, before returning to the US for an extensive summer tour.
Fans in the UK can tune in to see Lake Street Dive perform on BBC Two's Later... With Jools Holland tonight at 11:05 PM. The band, which recorded the set earlier this week, performs Side Pony tracks "Call Off Your Dogs," "I Don't Care About You," and the album's title track. The line-up for the show—the first of the new season—also includes Paul Simon, Laura Mvula, Charles Bradley, Kano, and Jason Isbell. For additional details, visit bbc.co.uk.
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The Brad Mehldau Trio—Mehldau on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Jeff Ballard on drums—concludes the United States leg of its tour, ahead of the forthcoming album Blues and Ballads, at Symphony Center in Chicago tonight. The trio heads to Europe next month for shows in Italy, Belgium, Denmark, France, and Switzerland. The Daily Gazette, reviewing the trio’s performance in Albany last weekend, called it an “electrifying” show, in which Mehldau “crafted/ignited 90-plus minutes of dense, questing or serenely lyrical trio improvisations.”
Earlier this week, it was announced that Mehldau will be given a Sonderpreis (“special prize”) at the Echo Jazz 2016 Awards for his eight-LP / four-CD box set 10 Years Solo Live, released last year on Nonesuch.
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