Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, the free, annual outdoor music festival at Hellman Hollow in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, gets underway today and continues through the weekend. As is often the case, featured among the performers are a number of artists familiar to readers of the Nonesuch Journal: Conor Oberst, Shawn Colvin, and Emmylou Harris.

Conor Oberst headlines the Rooster Stage early this evening for a special and packed set—aptly titled Conor Oberst Brings Friends For Friday—featuring Waxahatchee, The Good Life, Jonathan Wilson (who co-produced Oberst’s 2014 Nonesuch debut album, Upside Down Mountain), Sharon Van Etten, and the band Dawes, who joined Oberst on tour earlier this year . Oberst stays in the city to perform at The Fillmore on Saturday, with Wilson as special guest, and heads down the state for a co-headline show with John Prine at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday. He rounds out the US leg of his tour with one more date in Los Angeles—a sold-out solo show Tuesday to benefit the Grammy Museum—before heading to Mexico next weekend.

Shawn Colvin joins her friend Buddy Miller, who produced her latest album, All Fall Down, and others for a set dubbed Buddy Miller’s Cavalcade of Stars on the Rooster Stage on Saturday afternoon. Also in the “cavalcade” are Kate York, Striking Matches, Nikki Lane, and Tony Joe White.

Emmylou Harris, who will have performed at each of the festival’s 14 years, returns to Hellman Hollow to help close out this year’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass on the Banjo Stage on Sunday, directly following a set from Tweedy, Jeff Tweedy’s duo with his son Spencer. Harris also closes out a month of US performances and an appearance at the Americana Honors & Awards show in Nashville, which will air on PBS’s Austin City Limits in November.

---

An exhibition of artwork by Devendra Banhart opens at the Reserve Ames gallery in Los Angeles on Sunday with an Opening Reception, 4–7pm, and runs through November 11. For details, visit reserveames.com.

---

Bombino concludes his European tour with a performance at Sala de Cambra’s Auditori de Girona in Girona, Spain, tonight.

---

Jeremy Denk joins the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra for the second of two performances of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at Kodak Hall’s Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York, on Saturday. Led by the RPO’s Music Director Ward Stare, the program also features Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. The Ottawa Citizen, reviewing a recent performance in that city, says “Denk’s playing is lovely as well as clever, with crisp articulation, imaginative voicing, and a tone that radiates silver from a warm golden centre.” You can read the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle’s recent interview with Denk in at democratandchronicle.com.

Denk returns home to New York City to speak at The New Yorker Festival next weekend and to perform the Beethoven with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall October 16–18. .

---

Kronos Quartet gives the world premiere of Santa Ratniece’s silsila, written for the Quartet, at Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall on Sunday. Also on the eclectic program is Aleksandra Vrebalov’s …hold me, neighbor, in this storm…—featured on Kronos’s 2009 Nonesuch album, Floodplain—along with other works written for Kronos by Missy Mazzoli and Mary Kouyoumdjian, as well as pieces by Wiley, Lecuona, and a traditional Jewish prayer.

Last week, Kronos joined Laurie Anderson for five performances of herpiece Landfall at the Nonesuch Records at BAM celebration of the label’s 50th anniversary, after which the New York Times described the Quartet as “tirelessly innovative.” They bring the piece to Columbus and Austin in the weeks ahead.

---

Brad Mehldau and Mark Guiliana bring their Mehliana electronic duo to the Kennedy Center’s Crossroads Club in Washington, DC, on Saturday, offering selections from their debut album, Mehliana: Taming the Dragon, released on Nonesuch earlier this year. Later this month, Mehldau heads to Europe to offer a solo set in France before kicking off a duo tour with Chris Thile in Germany on October 27.

---

Pat Metheny Unity Group—Chris Potter, Antonio Sanchez, Ben Williams, and Giulio Carmassi—launches a six-city tour of Asia at the Sejong Center in Seoul on Sunday. The tour, in support of its debut album, Kin (←→), heads next to Japan.

---

Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters band perform at the Fillmore Auditorium in Denver on Saturday, followed by the final concert in their North American fall tour at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Tuesday. Plant kicks off a nearly sold-out tour of the UK on November 9.

The Toronto Star gives four stars to the band's performance at Massey Hall earlier this week, saying Plant is "still unnaturally gifted" and the band was "'sensational' in every musical sense of the word." The show sounded "stunning: offering energy, vitality, bursts of power and a pretty amazing band ... that brought the crowd repeatedly to their feet."

“Robert Plant was just brilliant Sunday night in Brooklyn,” says NPR’s Bob Boilen, who hosted a live video stream of Plant and the band’s concert in Brooklyn last Sunday. “Plant and his Sensational Space Shifters played a stunning set of music that did what Robert Plant does best: mixing up American blues, British rock, North African rhythms and even some electronica with that voice, still filled with passion after all these years.” Plant also performed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last Friday, which included a doo-wop duet with Fallon and performances of “Rainbow” and “Turn It Up” from the new album, lullaby and… The Ceaseless Roar.

---

Joshua Redman Trio—with Reuben Rogers on bass and Gregory Hutchinson on drums—continues its four-night residency at the SFJAZZ Center’s Miner Auditorium in San Francisco tonight, on Saturday, and on Sunday afternoon. The band, which performs on Redman’s latest album, Trios Live, heads south for two sets at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz in the week ahead.

“Ever since Sonny Rollins, the trio has also occupied an important place in the history of saxophone improvisation,” Redman recently told the Santa Barbara Independent. “In a quartet, your focus is maybe a bit more defined. In a trio, you still have to take care of home plate, but you can also roam—there’s a lot of freedom.”

---

Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer continue their month-long North American duo tour at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for the Arts in Virginia on Saturday and the Levine Center for the Arts’ Knight Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Sunday.

“All 10 songs are adventurous explorations of range,” writes the Nashville Scene of Thile and Meyer’s new album, Bass & Mandolin, released last month on Nonesuch Records. “Throughout the album, the duo’s playing dovetails so seamlessly that they seem to be communicating on a different level, as if through some kind of musical telepathy.”