Cécile McLorin Salvant inaugurates four-part Carnegie Hall concert series. John Adams conducts NY Phil at David Geffen Hall. Laurie Anderson continues premiere of new piece in Manchester. Rhiannon Giddens and Silkroad Ensemble take American Railroad to Georgia. Mary Halvorson plays Elbphilharmonie's Marc Ribot festival in Hamburg. Hurray for the Riff Raff plays Mexico City's Corona Capital Festival. Kronos Quartet performs at Bozar in Brussels. Mandy Patinkin performs in Charleston. Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane are in Oregon. The Staves are in Atlanta and Birmingham. Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway tour the East Coast.
Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole—kick off her four-part Carnegie Hall Perspectives concert series at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in New York City, on Saturday. As part of the series, Salvant will return to Carnegie Hall throughout the 2024–25 concert season with a duo set, a full orchestra concert, and her multimedia theatrical piece Ogresse. Salvant was named Female Vocalist of the Year in the DownBeat Critics Poll, and her latest album, Mélusine, made the Jazz Albums of the Year list. “The massively creative vocalist delivers a tour de force in several languages recounting the legend of Mélusine,” the magazine says.
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Just up the block, John Adams returns to David Geffen Hall’s Wu Tsai Theater at Lincon Center in New York on Saturday to conduct the New York Philharmonic in a performance of his City Noir and works by his fellow American composers. The program, first performed last night, includes works by Pärt and Copland and the New York premiere of Gabriella Smith’s Lost Coast. Adams’ 2017 opera Girls of the Golden West, the recording of which was released by Nonesuch earlier this year, was just nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Opera Recording and Best Engineered Album, Classical, for engineers Alexander Lipay and Dmitriy Lipay.
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Laurie Anderson continues the first week of her two-week residency at the Hall at Aviva Studios in Manchester, England, for the world premiere of her new live stage work ARK: United States Part 5, tonight and Saturday and through next weekend. Fueled by Anderson’s fascination with humanity’s current reality, ARK: United States Part 5 brings together new and old music, cinematic imagery, stories, and songs at her largest scale yet with contributions from fellow artist Ai Weiwei, the band Sexmob, and Sacred Harp singers from across the country. ARK is a personal interrogation of where we are now, asking: what has brought us here and how much time do we have left? Anderson’s new album, Amelia, about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight, was released earlier this year; you can get the album—“mesmerizing from the first line to the last," per V magazine—and hear it here.
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Rhiannon Giddens and Silkroad Ensemble, of which she is artist director, continue the fall leg of their American Railroad tour, with music from their new album of the same name, out today, in Georgia this weekend: at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in Atlanta tonight and University of Georgia’s Hodgson Concert Hall in Athens on Sunday. American Railroad is the culmination of four years of research, collaboration, and music-making, having brought Silkroad artists all across the US to uncover and uplift stories of those who built the transcontinental railroad and connecting railways across North America. "The result is a tapestry of stories, traditions, and music that have shaped our multifaceted cultural identity, and that must be heard and recognized," Giddens says.
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Guitarist/composer Mary Halvorson is in Europe, performing at Linard Lavin in Linard, Switzerland, tonight with her trio Thumbscrew—bassist Michael Formanek and drummer and vibraphone player Thomas Fujiwara—for Jazz Linard 2024, before heading to Reflektor Marc Ribot festival at Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, joining Marc Ribot Quartet on Saturday and reuniting with Thumbscrew at the festival on Sunday. Halvorson, whose latest album, Cloudward, was released in January, won the 2024 JJA Jazz Award and the DownBeat Critics Poll for Guitarist of the Year.
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Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, brings music from their new album, The Past is Still Alive, to Hermanos Rodríguez Racetrack’s Escenario Corona Cero in Mexico City, on Sunday afternoon for the Corona Capital Festival. Hurray for the Riff Raff has just announced that they will tour with Bright Eyes this coming February and March.
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Kronos Quartet performs at Bozar in Brussels on Sunday. On the program are Terry Riley’s “Good Medicine” from Salome Dances for Peace, Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, and works by Sun Ra, Jlin, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Nicole Lizée, and Nina Simone. Prior to the concert, as part of the Kronos Fifty for the Future commissioning program, twenty-seven string quartets and three ensembles will play a free Fifty for the Future Marathon throughout Bozar.
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Mandy Patinkin kicks off another leg of 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—at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina, on Saturday, with pianist Adam-Ben David. The tour continues across the US through the spring.
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Caroline Shaw and Gabriel Kahane continue performances of their new collaborative work Hexagons, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s 1939 short story “The Library of Babel,” at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts in Beaverton, Oregon, tonight. Shaw wrote the score for Ken Burns’ new film, LEONARDO da VINCI, which premiers on PBS this Monday and Tuesday; the album, featuring performances by Roomful of Teeth, Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and John Patitucci, is out now. Shaw and Sō's new album, Rectangles and Circumstance, just received a Grammy nomination for Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance.
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The Staves—the duo of Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor—continue their US acoustic tour in support of their new album, All Now, with a show at Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta tonight and at Saturn in Birmingham, Alabama, on Saturday. “One of the strongest releases of the band’s career,” Atwood Magazine says of the new album. “A product of passion and perseverance, soul-searching and self-knowing, All Now is an emboldened, cathartic release that sees The Staves basking in beautiful folk rock pastures as they take on the world ... utterly enchanting—a catchy, cohesive, and many-sided listening experience with endless returns.” The duo recently released an acoustic cover of the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home,” from their upcoming digital EP, Happy New Year, out next week; you can hear it here.
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Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway perform at the Jefferson Theater in Charlottesville, Virginia, tonight; the Fillmore in Silver Spring, Maryland, on Saturday; and Tarrytown Music Hall in New York on Sunday. Earlier this year, the band won the IBMA Bluegrass Music Award for Album of the Year for their Grammy-winning album City of Gold and released a six-song EP, Into the Wild. The EP features three new songs—the title track, “Getaway Girl,” and a cover of Kate Wolf’s “Here in California”—as well as previously released covers of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Olivia Rodrigo’s “good 4 u,” and an alternate version of the City of Gold track “Stranger Things.” You can hear it here.
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