Percussionist, producer, and composer Makaya McCraven, who celebrated a birthday last weekend, returns to his hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, for another birthday celebration—the centenary of the late drummer, composer, bandleader, activist, and educator Max Roach. McCraven and his band—trumpeter Marquis Hill, saxophonist Greg Ward, and bassist Junius Paul—honor Roach in concert in the Frederick C. Tillis Performance Hall at UMass tonight. Max Roach was a family friend and mentor to McCraven’s father, jazz drummer Stephen McCraven, and helped found Jazz in July, UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center’s summer jazz education program, which Makaya McCraven attended while growing up in town.

McCraven’s latest album, In These Times, made several year's best album lists, including those of Pitchfork (“a high-water mark”), NPR Music's Nate Chinen (“the culmination of a years-long experiment in groove ... just might be Makaya McCraven's manifesto”), and Treble (“McCraven's masterwork”).

---

Composer John Adams’s 1998 piece Hallelujah Junction is performed by Yuja Wang and Vikingur Ólafsson at Grosse Tonhalle in Zürich, tonight. Wang’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic can be heard on the forty-disc box set John Adams Collected Works, released on Nonesuch in 2022, as can the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra’s 2009 Nonesuch recording of his Doctor Atomic Symphony, which the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Roderick Cox, performs at Atlanta Symphony Hall, on Saturday. The Times of London named the latter album the Classical Album of the Decade.

---

Jeremy Denk continues the celebration of Charles Ives’s sesquicentennial with a free performance at Yale’s Battell Chapel in New Haven in the composer’s home state of Connecticut on Saturday. The program features Ives’s “Concord” Sonata—a remastered recording of which can be heard on Denk’s new album released last week, Ives Denk—along with works by Beethoven, Joplin, Gottschalk, Nina Simone, and William Bolcom. Also on Ives Denk are the composer's four violin sonatas, performed with violinist Stefan Jackiw, as well as a remastered version of his First Sonata. “An album of Ives music, especially one as well played and thought provoking as Ives Denk, is worth engaging with at any time,” NPR says. “That it has been released during an election season fraught with opposing views of what it means to be an American adds a distinct gravitas.” You can get the album and hear it here.

---

Kronos Quartet performs at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Saturday, with special guest Jlin. The program includes “Tusen Tankar,” from the 2014 Kronos album A Thousand Thoughts, Steve Reich’s Triple Quartet, Terry Riley’s “Good Medicine” from Salome Dances for Peace, and works by Sun Ra, Aleksandra Vrebalov, John Coltrane, Nicole Lizée, and Jlin.

---

The Magnetic Fields continue the US fall leg of their 69 Love Songs 25th Anniversary tour at the Boulder Theatre in Colorado on Saturday and Sunday. The concerts feature the full album, all 69 songs, over two nights at each tour stop. “A 172-minute indie rock spectacular,” says the London Times in its review of the band’s shows at Edinburgh earlier this year. “As the crowd erupted into applause and even a few cautious whoops, there was a shared feeling of having witnessed a spectacular of the first order.” The band’s later multi-disc set, 50 Song Memoir, released on Nonesuch in 2017, was just included in the Independent’s list of The 20 Most Underrated Albums: “Every bit as varied, emotional and melody-packed as his more celebrated earlier opus ... An as-yet-undiscovered classic.”

---

The music of Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass is featured on Pianographique a free program at The New School in New York City on Saturday, performed by pianist Maki Namekawa and conductor-pianist Dennis Russell Davies on Saturday. The duo performs Steve Reich’s Piano Phase; Laurie Anderson’s Song for Bob, written for former Nonesuch president Bob Hurwitz and performed by Timo Andres on the 2020 Nonesuch album I Still Play; and various works by Phillip Glass. Davies, who led the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra on recordings of Glass’s second, third, and fifth symphonies for Nonesuch twenty-five years ago, conducts the Filharmonie Brno on Laurie Anderson’s new album, Amelia. Across the Atlantic, ensemble unitedberlin, conducted by Christoph Breidler, performs an all-Reich program at Gesellschaftshaus in Magdeburg, Germany, featuring Radio Rewrite, Double Sextet, and Reich/Richter.

---

Cécile McLorin Salvant and her band—pianist Sullivan Fortner, bassist Yasushi Nakamura, and drummer Kyle Poole—perform at BASF–Feierabendhaus in Ludwigshafen, Germany, tonight, before joining DR Big Band at the Copenhagen Concert Hall for a sold-out set on Saturday. 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.

---

Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion are in Vermont this weekend, performing music from their 2024 album, Rectangles and Circumstance, at Middlebury College’s Olin C. Robison Concert Hall, tonight, and Spruce Peak Performing Arts Center in Stowe, on Saturday. Ringdown, Shaw’s duo with Danni Lee Parpan, performs as well, both on the Rectangles and Circumstance track “Slow Motion,” which the duo co-wrote and performed on the album, and in a mini-set during the shows. Sō Percussion can also be heard on Shaw's original score to Ken Burns's upcoming documentary LEONARDO da VINCI, out today, along with Attacca Quartet, Roomful of Teeth, and John Patitucci; you can get the  album and hear it here.

---

Chris Thile joins the Wheeling Symphony, conducted by John Devlin, at Capitol Theatre in Wheeling, West Virginia, tonight, to perform his piece ATTENTION!—A narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolinist and orchestra. Also on the program are works by Brittany J. Green, Verdi, and Leonard Bernstein. The San Francisco Classical Voice, reviewing the West Coast premiere of ATTENTION! with Thile and the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, called it “always entertaining … an eclectic soup that takes in bluegrass licks, rock, folk, and classical strains.”

---

Guitarist and composer Yasmin Williams is in Michigan this weekend, performing music from her new album, Acadia, at The Block in Muskegon, tonight. "Yasmin Williams is one of the most inventive guitar players of the last decade, an artist devoted to deploying seemingly every technique imaginable to coax new sounds and ideas out of her instrument,” Pitchfork exclaims in its review of Acadia. “Bright and gregarious yet focused, the inventive guitarist’s latest release draws on the warm camaraderie of her collaborators for an imaginative expansion of her sound." You can get the album and hear it here.