The Big Ears Festival kicked off last night and continues through the weekend at venues throughout downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, featuring over a dozen Nonesuch artists past, present, and future as part of the label's 60th-anniversary celebrations, including performances by Sam Amidon, Laurie Anderson, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Rhiannon Giddens, Mary Halvorson, Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Kronos Quartet, Brad Mehldau, Ringdown, Davóne Tines, Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, and Yasmin Williams; conversations with many of the above; and an exhibit at The Standard by photographer Michael Wilson of some of the many Nonesuch artists he has captured over the past 25 years.

Guitarist Yasmin Williams plays at The Standard today at noon. On Saturday morning, she joins fellow guitarists Mary Halvorson and Anthony Pirog for Guitar Radicals—a discussion of their instrument, the variability it allows, and the unique personal touch each of them brings to it—hosted by Nate Chinen in Regas Square. Halvorson helped kick off the festival last night, brining music from her albums Amaryllis, Belladonna, and Cloudward with her Amaryllis sextet at the Tennessee Theatre. She plays with Trevor Dunn's Trio at the Bijou today at noon; Tomeka Reid Quartet at The Point tonight; and Myra Melford's Fire & Water at the Bijou tomorrow afternoon.

Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, performs at Mill & Mine this afternoon at 12:30pm, with music from their critically acclaimed new album The Past Is Still Alive. On Saturday morning, Segarra joins Sam Amidon and Robin Holcomb for a panel with Ann Powers entitled The Song, Root, Weed, and Flower at Visit Knoxville Visitors Center. They discuss how they find songs both within themselves and from throughout music’s landscape, revealing what working within song forms means to them. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past Is Still Alive, was released last month to widespread critical acclaim, including a Best New Music review from Pitchfork, which calls the album “fantastic.” Amidon performs music from his 2020 self-titled album and more at The Standard this afternoon and Holcomb performs at St. John's Cathedral tomorrow evening at 6:45pm.

Darcy James Argue, Brad Mehldau, and flutist and tenor saxophonist Anna Webber join Nate Chinen for a talk titled Composure in Regas Square this afternoon at 2pm. Their conversation explores what it means to bring an improviser’s instinct and understanding to the table as a composer, and how, then, a compositional mindset informs the improviser’s art. Mehldau performs solo at the Tennessee Theatre tonight at 7pm and returns to the stage for a duo set with bassist Christian McBride tomorrow at 1pm. Following his Big Ears performances, Mehldau heads to Virginia for a solo recital at the University of Richmond’s Camp Concert Hall on Sunday. Argue leads his Secret Society ensemble in performing music from their 2023 album, Dynamic Maximum Tension, at the Bijou Theatre tonight at 10:45 pm. The album made year’s best lists from NPR Music, Slate, PopMatters, and Stereogum, which calls it “simply some of the most exciting music being made right now … Argue’s music shifts and whirls like an entire galaxy in orbit around itself, and it’s breathtaking to listen to.”

Brad Mehldau’s After Bach II and Après Fauré are due May 10 on Nonesuch Records.

Ringdown, the cinematic pop duo of creator-musicians Caroline Shaw and Danni Lee, plays at Old City Performing Arts Center at 4:15pm this afternoon. The duo’s new single, "Two-Step," was released this week on Nonesuch and can be heard here.

Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway take music from their critically acclaimed new album, City of Gold, to Mill & Mine at 5:15pm this evening. City of Gold, which won the GRAMMY Award for Best Bluegrass Album following last year's win in the category for their debut album, Crooked Tree, made year’s best lists from PopMatters, Folk Alley, No Depression, AllMusic, WFUV, and Holler, which calls it Tuttle’s “most captivating record yet … A heady 48 minutes of joy, Tuttle is single handedly making bluegrass her own.”

Composer, pianist, and electronic musician Wayne Horvitz and his Gravitas Quartet perform at St. John's Cathedral tonight at 8:45pm. Horvitz released three albums on Elektra-Nonesuch between 1987 and 1992—This New Generation and two albums with The President, Bring Yr Camera, and Miracle Mile—and produced and/or performed on several Nonesuch albums by Robin Holcomb, Bill Frisell, and John Zorn.

Laurie Anderson brings her Let X=X program, named after the track on her 1982 debut album, Big Science, with the band Sexmob—Steven Bernstein, Briggan Krauss, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen, and Doug Wieselman—to Knoxville Civic Auditorium tonight at 9pm. Her 1986 film Home of the Brave screens at the Regal Riviera at 11:30am tomorrow morning, followed by a one-on-one conversation about her career with Ann Powers at 1pm. On Sunday, Anderson heads home to New York City for a conversation with Buddhist philosopher and teacher the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi at the Rubin Museum for the sold-out third installment of About Time, a series of on-stage conversations in which Anderson tackles questions to help reframe the concept of time and perhaps one’s perspective on life. Anderson received the Recording Academy’s 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award during GRAMMYs weekend in Los Angeles last month.

Rhiannon Giddens is in residence at Big Ears for the weekend, performing several different programs. She brings music from her latest album, You’re the One, and more to the Tennessee Theatre tonight at 10pm, and returns to the stage tomorrow at 8pm, for a trio set with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi and bassist Christian McBride. She joins the Silkroad Ensemble, of which she is Artistic Director, for a performance at Mill & Mine at 1pm on Sunday, when Davóne Tines has his own set with The Truth at the Tennessee Theatre, and concludes the weekend with a conversation with Tines and Nate Chinen entitled Voices and Visions at Visit Knoxville Visitors Center at 3:15pm. The topic is the voice as an instrument and a catalyst, and the ways in which Tines and Giddens keep challenging every category they inhabit. You’re the One, released last summer on Nonesuch, is Giddens’s third solo studio album and her first of all original songs.

Kronos Quartet takes its Kronos: Five Decades tour to Big Ears, performing at the Knoxville Civic Auditorium tomorrow at 2pm. The program, which features special guest collaborators Brian Carpenter and Tanya Tagaq, includes works by Steve Reich, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Sun Ra, Philip Glass, Peni Candra Rini, Moondog, and others. As part of the Kronos: Five Decades celebrations, Nonesuch released the group’s award-winning 1990 album Black Angels on vinyl last month; the Evening Standard included it among the “100 Definitive Classical Albums of the 20th Century.” Late last year, Nonesuch released the first-ever vinyl edition of the acclaimed 1995 album Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass, which the Washington Post called “an ideal combination of composer and performers.”

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In addition to all that’s going on at Big Ears, there’s lots of great live music being made around the world this weekend.

Composer John Adams conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the world premiere of Timo Andres’s new concerto, Made of Tunes, written for pianist Aaron Diehl, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles this morning, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon. The program also includes Adams’s own City Noir and Aaron Copland’s Quiet City. Nonesuch released the Grammy-winning recording of City Noir, performed by the St. Louis Symphony, led by Music Director David Robertson, and featuring saxophonist Timothy McAllister, in 2014. At Disney Hall tonight, Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the San Francisco Symphony and violinist Lisa Batiashvili in a performance of Adams’s Naive and Sentimental Music. The piece was originally commissioned by the LA Phil, and the recording, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, was released on Nonesuch in 2002.

Adams leads the LA Phil in Girls of the Golden West, his eighth music theater work to be released by Nonesuch, on an album due April 26. The recording was made in Disney Hall, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale led by Grant Gershon, starring Julia Bullock, Davóne Tines, and others.

Timo Andres’ new album, The Blind Banister, out today on Nonesuch, comprises three works by the composer/pianist: the piano concerto The Blind Banister (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.

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Pianist Richard Goode performs an all-Beethoven program at the Seligman Performing Arts Center in Beverly Hills, Michigan, on Saturday. On the program are Six Bagatelles from Op. 119, nos. 6–11; Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109; and 33 Variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, Op. 120. Gramophone calls Goode's famed 1993 set of the complete Beethoven sonatas “one of the finest interpretations ever put on record.” Timo Andres, in his recent Nonesuch Selects video, says: “Here’s a box you can’t live without.”

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Pianist Tigran Hamasyan and his trio—bassist Evan Marian and drummer Arthur Hnatek—take their North American tour to California, performing music from Hamasyan’s 2020 album, The Call Within, and more, at Alex Theatre in Glendale on Saturday and Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Sunday. Hamasyan followed The Call Within, which Jazzwise calls “an exceptional recording for exceptional times,” with 2022’s StandArt, his first album of American standards which led Jazziz to call him “one of today’s most revered and distinctive voices in jazz and creative music.” Earlier this week, Hamasyan’s Nonesuch Selects video was published, in which he chose the aforementioned Goode Beethoven box set and music by Brad Mehldau Trio, Pat Metheny & Brad Mehldau, Kronos Quartet, and Fleet Foxes; you can watch it here.

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Emmylou Harris performs at Parx Casino in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, tonight, and Chevalier Theatre in Medford, Massachusetts, on Sunday. 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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The Magnetic Fields kick off their 69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary tour in their original hometown of Boston, performing at Roadrunner on Sunday and Monday. These concerts, which feature all the original musicians from the album for a limited run, present the full album, all 69 songs in order, over two nights at each tour stop.

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Mandy Patinkin brings his Being Alive tour—a collection of his favorite Broadway and classic American tunes from the likes of Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter, Harry Chapin, and more—to Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, accompanied by pianist Adam Ben David. Patinkin's latest album, Children and Art, was released on Nonesuch in 2019.

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Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is performed by Luminos Chamber Orchestra and Luminos Ensemble at St. Paul’s Church in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, on Sunday, as part of the Earth Voices program. Mass for the Endangered is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. The first recording, released on New Amsterdam / Nonesuch Records in 2020, features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch. CandyStations created the music videos for all of the tracks on the album, which you can watch here.