Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana's duo Mehliana and Joshua Redman Quartet play North Sea Jazz Festival and Gent Jazz Festival ... Richard Linklater's film Boyhood opens in UK, NYC, LA ... Devendra Banhart plays All Tomorrow’s Parties in Iceland ... The Black Keys, Conor Oberst play Bilbao BBK Live ... Oberst, Bombino play Cactus Festival ... Carolina Chocolate Drops are in Oregon ... Shawn Colvin solos in New England ... Jeremy Denk performs Beethoven in California ... Natalie Merchant plays Philly, DC ... Randy Newman's Austin City Limits debut re-airs on PBS ... Nickel Creek, Emmylou Harris are the toast of Taste of Chicago ... Robert Plant tours Italy ... and more ...
Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana take their electric duo, Mehliana, to two European festivals this weekend: the North Sea Jazz Festival at the Ahoy arena in Rotterdam, Netherlands, tonight, performing on the Darling Stage, and the Gent Jazz Festival in Gent, Belgium, on Saturday, hitting the Main Stage. Mehliana—Mehldau on Fender Rhodes and vintage synthesizers and Guiliana on drums and effects—rounds out its tour of Europe with shows in France, Malta, and Switzerland in the week ahead. The performances feature music from their debut duo album, Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, released earlier this year on Nonesuch Records.
Also at the North Sea Jazz Festival tonight is the Joshua Redman Quartet—with Aaron Goldberg, Reuben Rogers, and Gregory Hutchinson—which joins the Metropole Orkest on the Amazon Stage. Led by conductor Jules Buckley, the set features selections from Redman’s 2012 Mehldau-produced album, Walking Shadows, his first recording to include an orchestral ensemble. The Quartet goes on to perform at Théâtre de Verdure in Nice, France, on Saturday, as part of the Nice Jazz Festival, and the Main Stage of the Gent Jazz Festival on Sunday afternoon.
Redman’s latest album, Trios Live, released last month on Nonesuch, features “Redman’s powerful and inventive horn work,” says the Scotsman. The Independent on Sunday says: “The opener, a swaggering ‘Mack the Knife’, magnificently lives up to the Rollins legacy, its multiple cross-rhythms and rat-a-tat accents setting up dense internal rhymes that Redman’s tenor sax seems to both soar over and swim beneath.”
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Richard Linklater's new film Boyhood opens in cinemas across the UK and in NYC and LA today, before going wider across the US next week. Shot over 12 years with the same cast, Boyhood is a groundbreaking story of growing up as seen through the eyes of a child named Mason (a breakthrough performance by Ellar Coltrane), who literally grows up on screen before the viewers’ eyes. Starring Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as Mason’s parents and newcomer Lorelei Linklater as his sister Samantha, Boyhood charts the rocky terrain of childhood like no other film has before.
Rolling Stone gives the film a perfect four stars, calling it "the best movie of the year." The Guardian gives it a perfect five stars, calling it "one of the great films of the decade." And the New York Times film critic A.O. Scott calls Boyhood "one of the most extraordinary movies of 2014, or for that matter the 21st century so far."
To find out where the film is playing and to order tickets, click here. The pick up the film’s soundtrack, head to iTunes or the Nonesuch Store.
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Devendra Banhart brings the music of his Nonesuch debut album, Mala, and more to the former NATO base Ásbrú in Keflavík, Iceland, on Saturday, as part of the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival.
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The Black Keys continue the first leg of the Turn Blue world tour with headline sets at Passeio Marítimo de Algés in Lisbon tonight, as part of Optimus Alive, and Kobetamendi Park in Bilbao, Spain, on Saturday, closing out the main stage of the Bilbao BBK Live festival with an after-midnight set. The band played its first-ever Rome show earlier this week, leading Panorama to exclaim: “Their success is proof that, even in 2014, you can sell millions of albums without compromising the quality of the music in any way.”
Conor Oberst is performing at Bilbao BBK Live as well. Backed by the band Dawes, which is joining him as special guest throughout the tour, Oberst performs songs from his recently released Nonesuch debut album, Upside Down Mountain. He and Dawes takes the tour to two more European countries this weekend: Aix les Bains in France for Musilac Festival on Saturday; and Minnewaterpark in Bruges, Belgium, on Sunday, as part of the Cactus Festival. Oberst kicked off the European leg of his tour earlier this week with sold-out shows in Manchester and London. “The set is pretty much flawless,” said the Manchester Evening News in its four-star review. “Some would say even divine.”
Bombino, whose Dan Auerbach-produced debut album, Nomad, was released last year on Nonesuch, offers a set at the Cactus Festival in Minnewaterpark prior to Oberst’s set on Sunday. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called the Tuareg guitarist’s recent festival set in Wisconsin a “transcendent journey.”
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Carolina Chocolate Drops perform at two summer concert series in Oregon this weekend: a free set at River Bend Park in Winston tonight, as part of Riverbend Live!, and an all-ages show at the Oregon Zoo in Portland on Saturday, as part of Zoo Summer Concerts.
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Shawn Colvin is in New England this weekend, performing at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River, Massachusetts, tonight and Fairfield Theatre Company’s StageOne in Fairfield, Connecticut, on Saturday. Colvin kicks off the next leg of her solo tour out West in August and rejoins fellow singer-songwriter Steve Earle for a new round of duo dates in the Midwest in September.
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Jeremy Denk joins the Academy Festival Orchestra and conductor Edward Gardner to perform Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto at the Music Academy of the West’s Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, California, on Saturday. Also on the program are Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Ravel’s Daphnis & Chloe, Suite No. 2. Denk returns to the Music Academy to join faculty and select fellows for a program of chamber music in Hahn Hall on Tuesday.
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Natalie Merchant continues her three-week tour of the United States at the Keswick Theatre in Glenside, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, tonight, followed by two nights at the Lincoln Theatre in Washington, DC, on Saturday and Sunday.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, previewing tonight’s concert, writes: “For Natalie Merchant, music serves a high purpose: It's spiritual, it's topical, it's functional.” Glide magazine, reviewing a performance from earlier this week, calls the show “a night of thoughtful beauty.”
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Randy Newman's debut performance on Austin City Limits will receive an encore broadcast when the show airs the 2011 episode on PBS this weekend. "With songs that run the gamut from heartbreaking to satirical and a host of unforgettable film scores," says the show, "Randy Newman has used his many talents to create musical masterpieces widely recognized by generations of audiences." The show first aired in November 2011, the same week his latest album, Live in London, was released on Nonesuch Records.
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Nickel Creek—Chris Thile, Sara Watkins, Sean Watkins—continues its just-launched summer tour with two performances in the Midwest this weekend. The trio shares a bill with label mate Emmylou Harris at the Taste of Chicago in Grand Grant Park’s Petrillo Music Shell tonight. (Jeff Tweedy, whose new song, “Summer Noon,” debuted on the Boyhood soundtrack, performed by his father/son duo, Tweedy, takes to the Taste of Chicago stage on Saturday, on a bill with Lucinda Williams.) Nickel Creek plays the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor on Saturday, with an opening set by The Secret Sisters, who join the band on a number of stops this tour.
“The trio of musicians in Nickel Creek grew up performing together, but ultimately it was the nearly seven years spent concentrating on their own separate musical interests that made returning the stage together all the more exciting,” says the Associated Press. “All the years collaborating with other musicians or performing on their own helped to create a stronger, more focused sound.”
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Robert Plant and his Sensational Space Shifters perform in two Italian cities this weekend: at the Piazza del Duomo in Pistoia tonight, as part of the Pistoia Jazz Festival, and the Cavea dell’Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome on Saturday.
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