Olivia Chaney kicks off her spring tour with performances in Manchester, Edinburgh ... Devendra Banhart, Andy Cabic tour Spain, Portugal ... Rhiannon Giddens plays a weekend of sold-out shows at SFJAZZ ... Kronos Quartet performs in Wisconsin ... Audra McDonald sings in Virginia ... Joshua Redman quartet headlines the SLO Jazz Festival in San Luis Obispo ... and more ...
Olivia Chaney celebrates the recent release of her debut album, The Longest River, with a spring tour, which kicks off with two performances in the UK this weekend—at Manchester’s Band on the Wall on Saturday and Edinburgh’s The Voodoo Rooms on Sunday—followed by a special hometown record-release show at Kings Place in London on Tuesday. She performs at the Göttingen International Handel Festival in Germany later this month then returns to North America in June for a full month of touring.
On The Longest River, released in April on Nonesuch Records, Chaney balances her original compositions with a broad array of covers she has newly arranged, from jazz to Purcell to folk. The album has been added to the Daily Telegraph’s list of the Best Folk Music Albums of 2015 and is included in the Guardian’s playlist of new music this week. "Once a student at the Royal Academy of Music," writes the Guardian's Robin Denselow, "Olivia Chaney is an impressive instrumentalist, either on acoustic guitar, harmonium or piano, who specialises in thoughtful, exquisite and often highly personal songs."
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Devendra Banhart kicks off a two-week tour of Spain and Portugal with longtime friend and collaborator Andy Cabic (Vetiver) at the Music Box Festival in Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, Sunday night. When asked about their decision to tour together last year, Banhart told Paste magazine, “Andy and I are doing this tour we try to do once a year where we go back to how we started playing music, which is just backing each other up with each others’ songs—some we wrote together, some we wrote separate … It’s just nice to kind of hang out and try to do a tour that’s more enjoyable than the machinery of touring that our lives became later on.” Banhart made his Nonesuch Records debut with the release of his album Mala in 2013.
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Rhiannon Giddens, who was just nominated for Artist of the Year and Album of the Year for her debut solo album, Tomorrow Is My Turn, in the Americana Honors & Awards, closes out the California leg of her tour with the final three of four consecutive sold-out performances at SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium in San Francisco this weekend. She is joined by her fellow Carolina Chocolate Drops Hubby Jenkins (who was nominated for the Americana Honors & Awards for Instrumentalist of the Year), Malcolm Parson, and Rowan Corbett, along with Jamie Dick on drums and Jason Sypher on bass. "She owned the evening," says the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of her recent performance there, "not with ostentation … but with liveliness."
The tour heads up to the Pacific Northwest in the week ahead.
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Kronos Quartet closes out the annual Lawrence University Artist Series at Lawrence Memorial Chapel in Appleton, Wisconsin, tonight.
Kronos will celebrate the 80th birthday of composer and longtime friend Terry Riley with the release of a five-disc box set, One Earth, One People, One Love: Kronos plays Terry Riley, and an individual album, Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector: Music of Terry Riley, on Nonesuch next month.
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Audra McDonald performs at the Attucks Theatre in Norfolk, Virginia, tonight. “Audra McDonald introduced a song that she has made her daily mantra, and even thought it doesn’t always work out, she keeps trying to ‘make someone happy, make just one someone happy,’” writes the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Sharon Eberson in a review of a concert there earlier this week. “On Monday night at the Byham Theater, she made a lot of someones very happy, several who jumped out of their seats to applaud song after nearly every song.”
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Joshua Redman and his quartet—pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Marcus Gilmore—headline the SLO Jazz Festival in San Luis Obispo, California, on Saturday night. A quartet of a different sort, The Bad Plus Joshua Redman, releases its self-titled debut album on Nonesuch later this month and begins a tour in June.
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