Guitarist Mary Halvorson and her new quartet Canis Major—trumpeter Dave Adewumi, bassist Henry Fraser, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara—perform at the Jazz Gallery in New York City, with early and late sets tonight and on Saturday. Her latest album, Cloudward, won the 2024 JJA Jazz Award, the DownBeat Critics Poll for Guitarist of the Year, and was recognized on many year-end lists including Slate, Jazzwise, The Quietus, Treble Music, The Guardian, All About Jazz, PopMatters, and more.

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Timo Andres and fellow composer/pianist Aaron Diehl give a sold-out performance at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, on Sunday, with a livestream available to watch here. On the program are works by Thelonius Monk, Bach, Julia Wolfe, and Andres’ own works How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas? and Pavane [Pour Un Compositeur Défunt]. Andres recently won the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's Elise L. Stoeger Prize—a $25,000 cash prize, awarded biennially by CMS to recognize significant contributions to the field of chamber music composition.

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Julia Bullock is in Maryland with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jonathon Heyward, for performances at the University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in College Park tonight and the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore on Saturday. Bullock joins the orchestra for Five Freedom Songs, her collaborative work with Jessie Montgomery drawing from a 19th-century anthology of spirituals to create a work that articulates a powerful expression of their shared experience as Black Americans, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4; also on the program is Dvořák’s Carnival Overture.

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Rhiannon Giddens, joined by multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, percussionist/flutist Kaoru Watanabe, and bassist Jason Sypher, performs at Blue Note Tokyo on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. On her upcoming album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Giddens reunites with former Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Justin Robinson on the fiddle, playing eighteen of their favorite North Carolina tunes. Many were learned from their late mentor, the legendary North Carolina Piedmont musician Joe Thompson; one is from another musical hero, the late Etta Baker, from whom they also learned by listening to recordings of her playing. A video of the first track, “Hook and Line,” a traditional tune from Joe Thompson’s repertoire filmed at his home in Mebane, NC, can be seen here. You can listen to her conversation with NPR’s Code Switch podcast here.

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Emmylou Harris, Jeff Tweedy, Nickel Creek, and Rachael & Vilray perform on the Cayamo cruise, a week-long music-filled cruise aboard the Majestic Gem from Miami to the Caribbean islands of St. Croix and St. John, in Antigua.

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Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra) is on tour as special guest of Bright Eyes for two shows in Texas—at The Factory in Deep Allum in Dallas tonight and Aztec in San Antonio on Saturday—and at Chelsea’s Eyes in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Sunday. Just ahead of this week’s one-year anniversary of their acclaimed album The Past Is Still Alive, Hurray for the Riff Raff released a new single, “Pyramid Scheme,” which embodies that record’s spirit of resilience and rebellion. You can hear the new song here and watch the video, here.

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Haitian American singer and composer Nathalie Joachim continues her spring tour featuring music from her album Ki moun ou ye at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon, tonight, joined by members of the Oregon Symphony and conducted by Jerry Hou. Also on the program is a new arrangement of Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Joachim concludes the West Coast leg of her tour with a solo show at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad, California, on Sunday. Ki moun ou ye takes listeners through an intimate collection of music that ponders its title’s question: “Who are you?” Inspired by the remote Caribbean farmland that her family continues to call home after seven generations and performed in both English and Haitian Creole, the work examines the richness of one’s voice—an instrument that brings with it DNA, ancestry, and identity—in a vibrant tapestry of Joachim’s voice, and intricately sampled vocal textures underscored by an acoustic instrumental ensemble.