Randy Newman makes two rare festival appearances this weekend: the Burlington Discover Jazz Festival at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont, tonight, and headlining the main stage at the Nelsonville Music Festival in Nelsonville, Ohio, on Sunday evening.

“He’s a legend,” Brian Koscho, the marketing director of the nonprofit theater behind the Nelsonville Music Festival, tells the Columbus Dispatch in a feature article about Newman. “He is one of those people who is literally ingrained in film and music.”

Label mates Lake Street Dive also perform at the Nelsonville Music Festival this weekend, preceding Newman by a day with a set on Saturday. The band is currently touring the US with music from its Nonesuch debut album, Side Pony, performing at Pisgah Brewing Outdoor Stage in Raleigh, North Carolina, tonight, and Mountain Stage at the Clay Center in Charleston, West Virginia, on Sunday.

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Devendra Banhart is in Japan, signing copies of his new art book, I Left My Noodle on Ramen Street. He is in Tokyo this weekend, signing at Bookmarc today and Vacant on Sunday, and then in Kyoto, signing at Metro on Tuesday.

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Rhiannon Giddens, who will soon make her Broadway debut in Shuffle Along, recently toured Australia. Her performance at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne, featuring songs from her debut solo album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, can be heard on ABC RN's Live Set this weekend, streaming now at abc.net.au.

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Richard Goode gives two performances at the National Forum of Music in Wroclaw, Poland, this weekend. He performs Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5 in E-flat major, Op.73, “Emperor,” with the National Forum of Music Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Benjamin Schwartz, tonight, and gives a solo piano recital on Sunday. Goode's latest recording is a collection of the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos made with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and released on Nonesuch in 2009. The Financial Times, in a five-star review, called the three-disc set a "landmark recording of the Beethoven concertos."

That same paper, reviewing Goode’s recent performance at Royal Festival Hall in London, gave the show four stars and wrote that Goode was “completely in his element … He set off at a perfectly modulated pace, the music lent a quiet buoyancy through the sophistication of his articulation and dynamic colourings.”

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Brad Mehldau—having just completed a tour with the Brad Mehldau Trio in support of the new album Blues and Ballads, out today—launched a trio tour of a different sort this week, reuniting with drummer Mark Guiliana, with whom he paired up for Grammy-nominated album Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, and guitarist John Scofield. This trio continues its six-night, multi-set residency at the Blue Note in New York City, as part of the Blue Note Jazz Festival, through the weekend, with performances tonight, Saturday, and Sunday. "The omnivorously eclectic trouble these three get into will be worth the price of admission," exclaims the New Yorker.

Brad Mehldau Trio's Blues and Ballads has already received critical acclaim, with Mojo exclaiming: "A spellbinding set whose salient features are subtlety and understatement ... Sublime stuff." The Times of London gives the album five stars, calling it “yet another rhapsodic rollercoaster from this master of romantic complexity.” The New York Times, in a review of the Scofield/Mehldau/Mehliana trio show, calls Blues and Ballads "beautiful."

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The Staves embark on a 19-city North American tour, with music from their new EP, Sleeping In A Car, and Nonesuch debut album, If I Was, beginning with a sold-out show at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis tonight, followed by two dates in Wisconsin this weekend: a set at the High Noon Saloon in Madison on Saturday and a sold-out show at Club Garibaldi in Milwaukee on Sunday.

The Staves recently joined Bon Iver on stage in Australia. In review of their show at the Sydney Opera House, the Daily Telegraph writes that the sisters “provided the perfect ghostly choral blend for Vernon’s vocals.”