Gabriel Kahane joins Chris Thile on Live From Here … Sam Amidon begins UK tour in Birmingham … Laurie Anderson brings The Language of the Future to Lithuania … Timo Andres plays New Sounds Live in NYC … David Byrne launches American Utopia UK tour in Leeds … Tigran Hamasyan is in California … James Farm concludes European tour in Germany … Kronos Quartet premieres new program at Stanford … Natalie Merchant headlines Hudson Valley Votes benefit … Mandy Patinkin continues Diaries 2018 NYC residency … and more …
Gabriel Kahane joins Chris Thile as his special guest on the public radio show Live From Here at the show’s home base, the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on Saturday. Kahane performs songs from his new album, Book of Travelers. Also on the show as special guests this week are The War and Treaty and comedian Negin Farsad. Aoife O'Donovan joins Thile as his duet partner, as she did on “Douglas Fir” for Thile’s latest album, Thanks for Listening, a collection of new studio recordings of songs originally written as Songs of the Week for the show.
Folks in the US can tune in on their favorite public radio station this weekend, and fans around the world can watch live online at livefromhere.org starting at 4:45 PM CT.
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Sam Amidon begins an autumn tour of the UK, featuring music from his new album, The Following Mountain, and more, at The Cuban Embassy in Birmingham this Saturday, following a free set at the Night of Surprise festival in Cologne, Germany, tonight. The Evening Standard gives the album four stars, praising its “captivating arrangements and elegiac charm.”
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Laurie Anderson brings The Language of the Future to Congress Hall in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Saturday. The piece is her ongoing exploration of the American narrative, a collection of songs and stories about contemporary culture that crosses borders between dreams, reality, and the world of information.
Anderson and Nonesuch Records Chairman Emeritus Bob Hurwitz are honored as Friends of the Arts by The Town Hall in New York City, along with TheaterWorksUSA Co-Founder Charles Hull, at the historic venue's 97th Gala Celebration at the Princeton Club in Manhattan on Sunday. The honor recognizes as its Friends of the Arts individuals or organizations whose contributions to the arts enrich New York City's cultural life and help make it a rich and artistically diverse city.
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Pianist Timo Andres performs music by Klaus Schulze and Brian Eno at the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place in downtown Manhattan tonight as part of the culminating concert of the New Sounds Live series of free shows there this week. The pieces inspired David Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy” of albums—Lodger, Heroes, and Low—which are also being performed, one each night, in the series, including tonight’s performance of Low, by musicians from Deerhoof, Xiu Xiu, Shearwater, Dirty Projectors, Battle Trance, and the Wordless Music Orchestra. The concert will be streaming live at newsounds.org.
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David Byrne brings his American Utopia world tour back to the UK and to Ireland for eight arena shows starting at First Direct Arena in Leeds on Sunday and including concerts at the O2 Arena in London, Manchester Arena, Hydro in Glasgow, 3Arena in Dublin, and more. Benjamin Clementine is Byrne’s special guest for the shows. “If you only go to one gig this autumn,” asserts the Independent’s i, “make it this: David Byrne’s imaginative, breathtaking show is a work of art.”
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Tigran Hamasyan takes his US tour to California this weekend, playing California State University’s Fresno Concert Hall tonight, followed by two sold-out performances at SFJAZZ Center’s Joe Henderson Lab on Sunday. The pianist concludes his tour next week with a concert at New York City’s Sony Hall.
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James Farm—saxophonist Joshua Redman, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland—concludes its tour of Europe with a concert at Jazzclub in Leipzig, Germany, tonight.
Nonesuch released James Farm’s self-titled debut in 2011 and its sophomore album, City Folk, in 2014. The Evening Standard praises the band as “four crack musicians and improvisers whose fierce grooves and synergy make for spine-tingling listening.”
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Kronos Quartet gives the world premiere performance of Music for Change: The Banned Countries, a new program that highlights the rich diversity of artistic voices from Muslim majority countries, at Bing Concert Hall in Stanford, California, on Saturday. The program, a protest against the travel bans issued by the Trump administration in 2017, features music from the original seven, largely Muslim-majority countries on the list—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen—including selections from the quartet’s Fifty for the Future commissioning project, among others. Kronos will perform Music for Change: The Banned Countries throughout its 2018–19 concert season, including concerts in Oslo, Santa Barbara, New York, and Washington, DC.
“Kronos Quartet has spent some four decades on the cutting edge of new music, forging a vast international network of collaborators,” says the San Francisco Chronicle, “but the San Francisco string quartet’s global vision has rarely seemed as timely and urgent.”
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Natalie Merchant is the headlining performer and Artistic Director of the Hudson Valley Votes benefit concert taking place at Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston, New York, on Saturday. The line-up also includes performances from The National’s Aaron Dessner, Resistance Revival Chorus, Ian Felice, and more, and appearances by actors Paul Rudd and Lili Taylor, activist and author Eve Ensler, and local congressional candidate Antonio Delgado.
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Mandy Patinkin continues his ten-performance New York Theatre Workshop residency at The Connelly Theater in New York City on Saturday, as part of his Diaries 2018 tour. Joined by pianist Adam Ben David, he performs music from Diary: January 27, 2018 and Diary: April/May 2018, the first two in a series of musical installments with pianist/producer Thomas Bartlett released on Nonesuch earlier this year. A limited number of tickets are available here via a daily TodayTix lottery.
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