Ambrose Akinmusire, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, and Cécile McLorin Salvant all play North Sea Jazz Fest in Rotterdam, and Salvant has shows in Montpellier and Toulon. Ringdown—Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan—plays a free show for Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City in NYC. Timo Andres gives a masterclass in Santa Barbara. Jeremy Denk is at the Aspen Music Fest. Emmylou Harris is at the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Fest. Hurray for the Riff Raff tours the Midwest, in Marquette and Indianapolis.
The North Sea Jazz Festival is under way this weekend at Ahoy in Rotterdam including performances from Ambrose Akinmusire, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, and Cécile McLorin Salvant—all of whom won in their respective fields in the just-released DownBeat Critics Poll and whose new albums made its Jazz Albums of the Year list.
Ambrose Akinmusire heads from Utretcht, where he held a headline show at TivoliVredenburg last night, to Rotterdam to perform on the Amazon Stage with Metropole Orkest, conducted by Tijn Wybenga, and fellow guest artist Lizz Wright, this afternoon; and on the Hudson Stage with Meshell Ndegeocello's band on Saturday afternoon. "A quiet rush of gorgeous sound where space, tone and beauty come together in one of the most impactful albums of 2023," DownBeat says of Akinmusire's Nonesuch debut album, Owl Song. "This is one of the most interesting recordings to come along in a very long time by one of the most interesting artists of our time."
Darcy James Argue and his Secret Society ensemble take music from their 2023 album, Dynamic Maximum Tension, to the Madeira Stage on Sunday afternoon. Argue won the Jazz Journalists Association's 2024 JJA Jazz Award for Arranger of the Year and has just been named the Frankfurt Radio Big Band's new Composer in Residence; you can read what he had to say about his appointment here.
Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole—close things out on the festival's Hudson Stage on Sunday night, bringing music from her critically acclaimed 2023 album, Mélusine, and more, following two concerts in France: at Domaine d'O Amphitheatre in Montpellier tonight, for Le Nouveau Festival, and Place de la Liberté in Toulon on Saturday, for Jazz à Toulon. Salvant won the Jazz Journalists Association's 2024 JJA Jazz Award for Female Vocalist of the Year.
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Ringdown—the cinematic pop duo of creator-musicians Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee Parpan—plays a free show at The Underground at Jaffe Drive in New York City tonight as part of Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City concert series. Ringdown released its new single, “Ghost,” last month; you can hear it here. The track follows the duo’s first single on Nonesuch Records, “Two-Step,” released in March. Ringdown also co-wrote and perform on the song “Slow Motion” from Shaw’s new album with Sō Percussion, Rectangles and Circumstance. Both groups recently performed in the WNYC New Sounds studio; watch the Ringdown set here and the duo’s performance with Sō here.
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Timo Andres gives a solo piano masterclass, The Roots of Mastery, at Music Academy of the West’s Hahn Hall in Santa Barbara, California, this afternoon. His new album, The Blind Banister, comprises three of his works: the titular piano concerto (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2016), with Andres as soloist, and Upstate Obscura for chamber orchestra and cello, with soloist Inbal Segev—both of which feature Metropolis Ensemble and conductor Andrew Cyr—and the solo piano piece Colorful History, also performed by Andres. “Original and arresting,” says the Guardian’s four-star album review. “It’s a highly accomplished disc all round.”
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Pianist Jeremy Denk is at the Aspen Music Festival in Aspen, Colorado, this weekend: he performs with violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Steven Isserlis, featuring special guest violinist David Halen and violist Zhenwei Shi, for an all Fauré program at the Harris Concert Hall on Saturday. Denk, Bell, and Isserlis then join the Aspen Festival Orchestra, conducted by Jane Glover, for a performance of Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano in C major, op. 56, “Triple,” at the Michael Klein Music Tent on Sunday. The program also includes Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, BB 123.
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Emmylou Harris is in Canada, performing on the main stage at Bannerman Park in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, on Saturday, as part of the Newfoundland and Labrador Folk Festival. Harris’s second Nonesuch album, Stumble Into Grace, was released on vinyl for the first time, in a limited cream-colored edition, last year, for its twentieth anniversary. Newsweek declared: “Her stellar voice takes on new depth when tied to songs this personal.”
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Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, brings music from their new album, The Past Is Still Alive, to McPike Park’s Sun Stage in Marquette, Wisconsin, tonight, for La Fête de Marquette, followed by a show at HiFi in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Saturday. Segarra is nominated for the 2024 Americana Honors & Awards for Album of the Year for The Past Is Still Alive, which Pitchfork includes in its list of “The Best Music of 2024 So Far,” while the album track “Ogallala” is included in New York magazine’s Vulture’s list of “The Best Songs of 2024 (So Far).”
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