Rhiannon Giddens is featured in Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued, a documentary that premieres on Showtime tonight at 9PM ET/PT. The film goes behind the scenes as Giddens, Elvis Costello, Taylor Goldsmith, Jim James, and Marcus Mumford (aka The New Basement Tapes) set to music recently discovered lyrics written by Bob Dylan in 1967 and record the songs for Lost on the River, a new album produced by T Bone Burnett. On Giddens' tunes, says NPR's Fresh Air, she takes Dylan’s lyric "and renders it with folk music purity." The New Basement Tapes were on Live with Jimmy Kimmel earlier this week; you can watch their performance here.

Giddens, Mumford, and Costello can also be heard on the forthcoming Nonesuch Records release Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” an album that captures a one-night-only concert, curated by Burnett, held at New York City’s Town Hall in 2013 to celebrate the music of the Coen brothers film Inside Llewyn Davis. That concert, too, was presented in a Showtime documentary.

Giddens, a founding member of Carolina Chocolate Drops, will release her solo recording debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn, on Nonesuch Records in February. The album was also produced by T Bone Burnett, who said that “It was clear the first time I heard her at rehearsal that Rhiannon is next in a long line of singers that include Marian Anderson, Odetta, Mahalia Jackson, Rosetta Tharpe.” Nonesuch Store pre-orders include an exclusive print autographed by Giddens and an instant download of the album tracks “Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind” and “Shake Sugaree.”

---

John Adams’s oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary receives its stage premiere by the English National Opera (ENO), directed by his frequent collaborator Peter Sellars, at the London Coliseum tonight. The new production, led by conductor Joana Carneiro, receives five additional performances through December 5. Following the piece's concert premiere in 2012, The New Yorker's Alex Ross said it "contains some of the strongest, most impassioned music of Adams’s career. Above all, it is a work of daring: a popular, celebrated artist has set aside familiar devices and stepped into the unknown."

While Adams’s 2000 piece El Niño was his take on a Nativity oratorio, with a libretto by Peter Sellars, The Gospel According to the Other Mary is a vision of a Passion, juxtaposing Biblical narratives with contemporary meditations, images, and challenging experiences. Sellars’s new libretto includes words of five extraordinary women: Louise Erdrich, Dorothy Day, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordan, and Hildegard. He wrote about the piece and its connection to contemporary concerns in the Guardian; you can read what he has to say at theguardian.com. And go behind the scenes as BBC’s Newsnight takes an exclusive look at rehearsals at bbc.com.

John Adams recently curated and hosted Contact! at SubCulture in New York City, a concert featuring musicians from the New York Philharmonic. The New York Times calls it a “program of stylistically diverse and fascinating works,” including the New York premiere of Timo Andres’s 2013 piece Early to Rise.

---

Austin City Limits (ACL) heads to Nashville for a special broadcast featuring performance highlights from this year’s Americana Honors & Awards. ACL Presents: Americana Music Festival 2014 premieres on Saturday on PBS and includes performances from Robert Plant (with Patty Griffin) and Ry Cooder (with Flaco Jimenez and as part of the evening's house band), among many others, including The Milk Carton Kids, who can be heard on the forthcoming Nonesuch release, Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of “Inside Llewyn Davis.” The show was recorded live at the Americana Music Association’s 13th Annual Honors & Awards ceremony at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium in September.

---

Sam Amidon rounds out the German leg of his European tour in three different cities this weekend: at the Franz Mehlhose in Erfurt tonight; Sparte 4 in Saarbrücken on Saturday; and Studio 672 in Cologne on Sunday. The tour, which features music from his new album, Lily-O, continues in Switzerland and Spain in the week ahead.

Amidon is a “gifted young folk singer,” writes the Guardian in a recent review of his EFG London Jazz Festival set, “whose expository voice is close to a traditional folkie’s but whose material is full of dark twists, rivetingly cohabited with [Bill] Frisell’s spacey electronics and Chris Vatalaro’s boldly polyrhythmic drumming.”

---

Singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney offers an opening set at RIO Cinema in London on Saturday afternoon, as part of the world premiere screening of Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s new feature film, Estate, A Reverie.

---

Dr. John, who celebrates a birthday today, is featured on the latest episode of Foo Fighters Sonic Highways, airing on HBO tonight at 11pm, as is Allen Toussaint and other favorite sons and daughters of the Crescent City, as the show focuses on the music of New Orleans.

---

Pianist Tigran Hamasyan, whose Nonesuch Records debut album, Mockroot, is due out in early 2015, continues the French leg of his European tour at the Théâtre le Sémaphore in Port-de-Bouc tonight and the Scène nationale de Sénart in Combs-la-Ville on Saturday. The tour heads to five more French cities, makes a quick stop in Moscow, and culminates in Paris on December 4. Stay tuned for additional details of the album release to come.

---

Kronos Quartet performs Steve Reich’s Different Trains at Sono Music Club in Brno, Czech Republic, on Saturday, as part of the Janáček Brno Festival. In addition to the Reich piece, which Kronos recorded for Nonesuch over 25 years ago, the eclectic program includes Geeshie Wiley’s “Last Kind Words” (Rhiannon Giddens’ rendition of which opens her forthcoming album, Tomorrow Is My Turn) and works by Terry Riley, John Oswald, , and Rachmaninov, as well as Aleksandra Vrebalov’s …hold me, neighbor, in this storm…, featured on Kronos’s 2009 Nonesuch album, Floodplain. The concert also includes two traditional pieces from the Quartet’s recent album, A Thousand Thoughts: the Scandinavian folk song “Tusen Tankar” and the Greek song “Smyrneiko Minore.”

---

Pat Metheny Unity Group—Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—brings the music of its Nonesuch debut album, Kin (←→), to three different Northeastern states this weekend: The Space at Westbury in Westbury, New York, tonight; the Santander Performing Arts Center in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Saturday; and the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts in Annapolis, Maryland, on Sunday. The band makes a quick trip to Mexico for the Riviera Maya Jazz Festival in the week ahead, then returns to the States to close out a year-long, worldwide tour with a week-long residency at the Blue Note in New York City.

---

Randy Newman concludes his two-week tour of the United States at the State Theatre in Easton, Pennsylvania, tonight and the Palladium in Carmel, Indiana, on Sunday. The sets feature songs from throughout his storied career, including his four Nonesuch Records releases.

In advance of his show in Easton, Newman recently spoke to the Allentown Morning Call about writing film music, the pros and cons of streaming services, his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and what he’s working on next: “one thing I’m glad about is that I’m pushing ahead a little … some of the songs have more than one voice in it.” You can read the full article at mcall.com.

---

Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters continue their 13-city sold-out tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland at Civic Hall in Wolves tonight and Ulster Hall in Belfast on Sunday. The tour continues through the end of the month with stops in Dublin, Blackpool, and Llandudno.

The Telegraph gives four stars to Robert Plant and the band’s sold-out show at the Roundhouse in London last week, saying Plant had “gathered together a brilliant musical gang to make old and new songs shine.”

---

Joshua Redman Trio with Reuben Rogers and Gregory Hutchinson—which can be heard on Redman’s recent Nonesuch release, Trios Live—concludes its tour with two sets at City Winery in Chicago tonight. “These recordings put the focus squarely on Redman’s playing, and to put it bluntly, he plays the shit out of his horn; this is one of the best records of his career,” exclaims the Chicago Reader’s Peter Margasak of Trios Live. “Its seven extended performances capture the breadth of Redman’s talent.”

Redman is also part of the collaborative band James Farm, “a group of player-composers who do fascinating and clever things with the standard saxophone-and-rhythm format,” according to the Observer. In its four-star review of the band’s sophomore album, City Folk, recently released on Nonesuch Records, it calls Redman a “true virtuoso” but also notes, “it’s not the individual performances so much as the crisp compositions and beautifully integrated playing … that combine to make this an impressive album.”