Chris Thile co-hosts public radio's A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor … John Adams's Saxophone Concerto is performed by the St. Louis Symphony and saxophonist Timothy McAllister ... Rhiannon Giddens plays Berlin and Amsterdam … Joshua Redman joins WDR Big Band in Germany ... and more ...
Chris Thile co-hosts the beloved public-radio program A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor Saturday afternoon at the San Diego Civic Theatre. This week's special guests include Gillian Welch and Heather Masse. Folks in the US can tune in on their favorite public radio station this weekend, and fans around the world can listen to the live broadcast online at prairiehome.org starting at 5 PM CT on Saturday. Thile will guest host the show from its home base of St. Paul, Minnesota, later this month and early February, and will join Keillor again as co-host from New York City in April.
Thile and his fellow Punch Brothers, who can all be heard on A Prairie Home Companion on January 30, have been nominated for three Grammy Awards this year: Best Americana Album for their latest album, The Phosphorescent Blues, produced by T Bone Burnett, and Best American Roots Song and Best American Roots Performance for the album track "Julep." "This band," says NPR, "makes the unimaginable contagious and fun. They push boundaries and make music like no one else." The band’s upcoming tour dates include a show with Dave Rawlings Machine in Charleston and sets at New Orleans Jazz Fest, Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and RockyGrass Festival.
---
John Adams's Saxophone Concerto is performed by the St. Louis Symphony, conductor David Robertson, and saxophonist Timothy McAllister—the artists who earned the Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for the 2014 first recording of the piece on Nonesuch—at Powell Hall in St. Louis this morning and Saturday night. Also on this weekend's program in St. Louis is Mahler's Symphony No. 5.
On the Grammy-winning album, Saxophone Concerto is paired with Adams's City Noir, leading the New York Times to exclaim: "Dense, brash and exuberant, these two stellar works by John Adams are love letters to the confidence of the 1950s and a time when some of the greatest feats of virtuosity were often performed in smoky jazz clubs ... McAllister sizzles."
---
Rhiannon Giddens kicked off a tour of Europe in Gent and Cologne earlier this week. The tour continues with stops at Columbia Theatre in Berlin tonight and the North Sea Jazz Club in Amsterdam on Saturday. Following a performance in Paris next week, Giddens heads to the UK for a set at Celtic Connections and a tour with the Transatlantic Sessions, featuring a band of artists from both sides of the Atlantic.
Giddens was recently the subject of a feature profile on CBS Sunday Morning. You can watch the piece here. Her solo debut album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, has been nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. NPR says: "Tomorrow Is My Turn runs on an engine of irrepressible enthusiasm and a degree of sheer talent that, when encountered at full strength, is, fittingly, downright giddy-making."
---
Joshua Redman closes out his European tour as a special guest of WDR Big Band with two shows in Germany: at the Philharmonie Essen in Essen tonight and at Kölner Philharmonie in Cologne on Saturday. He returns to the United States next week, for a four-night Midwest run as a special guest of Umphrey’s McGee.
Redman is a Grammy nominee as well, in the run for Best Improvised Jazz Solo for his performance of his tune "Friend or Foe" off the self-titled debut album from The Bad Plus Joshua Redman. "The album is a knockout," exclaims the New York Times.
- Log in to post comments