Alarm Will Sound and Youssou N’Dour kick off the first weekend of Nonesuch Records at BAM: Celebrating a Label Without Labels, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)’s wide-ranging series of concerts and events celebrating the 50th anniversary of the label, which got underway on Tuesday and continues through September 28. Each performs concerts both tonight and Saturday.

The 20-member ensemble Alarm Will Sound, led by artistic director and conductor Alan Pierson, performs the music of John Adams at the BAM Harvey Theater tonight. The program includes Chamber Symphony, Son of Chamber Symphony, and Hoodoo Zephyr—all of which have been recorded on Nonesuch Records—as well as the rarely-performed Scratchband. Saturday’s concert at the Harvey comprises Tyondai Braxton’s Fly By Wire, Donnacha Dennehy’s Grá agus Bás (the 2010 Nonesuch recording of which Pierson conducted), and Steve Reich’s Radiohead-inspired Radio Rewrite. The ensemble, which recorded Radio Rewrite for the Nonesuch album of the same name due out September 30, heads to Kraków to perform the piece at the Sacrum Profanum festival next week.

Senegalese icon Youssou N’Dour, “one of the greatest and most successful living African musicians,” says the Wall Street Journal, “a pop stylist and synthesist without peer,” performs songs from throughout his storied career at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House tonight and on Saturday. N’Dour goes on to perform at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC, on Sunday.

Clarinetist and composer Don Byron caps off the Nonesuch Records at BAM performances this weekend with free, late-night sets in the BAMcafé upstairs from the Howard Gilman Opera House tonight and Saturday, featuring music from his four Nonesuch albums.

In conjunction with Nonesuch Records at BAM, BAMcinématek presents Nonesuch Records on Film, a salute to the label’s rich catalogue of movie soundtracks. Last night showcased Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, featuring the music of Adams, who introduced the screening, and the series continues with films featuring the music of Georges Delerue and Leonard Rosenman through Sunday. 

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Laurie Anderson takes part in an exhibition and performance series Future Feminism: 13 Tenets of Future Feminism at The Hole in New York City on Sunday. She gives a talk in an evening with The Factress, aka Lucy Sexton, and Clark Render as Margaret Thatcher .

“Life is messy,” Anderson tells the Houston Chronicle. “I don't really know any answers, but I have learned to ask questions. It’s not like they need me to pontificate, but I can put quotes around something to draw attention to it.” She next joins Kronos Quartet to perform her evening-length work Landfall, inspired by Hurricane Sandy, at Sacrum Profanum Festival in Kraków on Thursday, before bringing it over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for a five-night run, September 23–27, for Nonesuch Records at BAM.

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The Black Keys continue their North American Turn Blue tour in three different states this weekend: at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit tonight; the CONSOL Energy Center in Pittsburgh on Saturday; and the Blue Cross Arena in Rochester, New York, on Sunday. The Keys head up to Canada for dates in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal in the week ahead, and special guest Cage The Elephant offers opening sets along the way.

“[Dan] Auerbach’s note-bending, reverb-dipped guitar jams burned bright and quick,” writes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about the Keys’ recent performance in Wisconsin. It also lauds Patrick Carney’s kick drum, “sounding like Rocky pounding those meat carcasses.” Read the full review at jsonline.com.

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Bombino plays two sets at the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival at Town Park Pavilion in Telluride, Colorado, on the Blues Stage tonight and on the Main Stage Saturday afternoon. He concludes his latest US tour with an all-ages show at Taos Mesa Brewing in El Prado, New Mexico, on Sunday. The Tuareg singer/guitaristheads to Europe later this month.

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Shawn Colvin and fellow singer-songwriter Steve Earle continue their “Songs and Stories, Together Onstage” duo tour with an all-ages show at the Music Box Supper Club in Cleveland, Ohio, on Saturday.

“There’s just a synthesis of energy you can feed off rather than it all being up to you,” Colvin tells the Plain Dealer about sharing the stage. “It takes a little bit of the pressure off to trade songs with somebody. They kind of have your back when they're playing with you or singing with you.” The September stint with Earle rounds out with two sets in Virginia in the week ahead.

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Jeremy Denk joins the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra for a performacne of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Hilbert Circle Theatre in Indianapolis on Sunday, as part of the orchestra's Opening Night Gala. Also on the program are excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake performed by the ISO and conductor Krzysztof Urbański.

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Iron and Wine continues the latest leg of his US tour with a performance at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on Saturday, as part of the Route 29 Revue, and a sold-out set at The Grog Shop in Cleveland on Sunday. He heads to the Midwest for dates in Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin in the week ahead.

Up next is a special triple bill with Devendra Banhart and Stephin Merritt at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) on September 19 for Nonesuch Records at BAM.

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Kronos Quartet performs sets at two European festivals this weekend: at Moni Lazariston’s Courtyard in Thessaloniki, Greece, tonight, as part of the Moni Lazariston Festival, and De Doelen’s Jurriaanse Zaal in Rotterdam, Netherlands, on Sunday, as part of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Gergiev Festival.

Tonight’s eclectic program includes works written for Kronos by Bryce Dessner, Terry Riley, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and Ramallah Underground, as well as pieces by Wiley, Sigur Rós, Amon Tobim, Vladimir Martynov, and Laurie Anderson. Sunday’s program features Beyond Zero: 1914–1918, a multimedia commission from Vrebalov, filmmaker Bill Morrison, and Iraq War veteran-turned-visual artist Drew Cameron of the Combat Paper Project. The piece is preceded by “Prelude to a Black Hole,” a quilt of works from that same time period by Webern, Ives, Wiley, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Rachmaninov, as well as a Byzantine chant, a traditional Greek song, and Cemil Bey’s “Evic Taksim,” which can be heard on Kronos’s new album, A Thousand Thoughts.

Kronos heads to Kraków for a three-night run at Łaźnia Nowa Theatre on Tuesday as artists in residence at the Sacrum Profanum festival, performing Terry Riley’s Sun Rings, Steve Reich’s WTC 9/11, and, with Laurie Anderson, her piece Landfall, which they will perform together as part of Nonesuch Records at BAM, September 23–27.

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Natalie Merchant, whose new, self-titled album was released earlier this year on Nonesuch Records, brings her tour to the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Saturday. She performs in Boston and upstate New York next week before returning to the city, joining fellow Nonesuch artists Kronos Quartet, Rhiannon Giddens, Sam Amidon, and Olivia Chaney for a special set at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House on September 20 for Nonesuch Records at BAM.

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Conor Oberst kicks off the second leg of a coast-to-coast US tour at the Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City on Sunday, with special guest Jonathan Wilson. He recently unveiled the new video for “Common Knowledge” from his album, Upside Down Mountain, released on Nonesuch Records this past spring. The enigmatic short film is a companion piece to the album’s first video, “Zigzagging Toward the Light.”

“I find that motion helps my brain. When I’m in New York, I walk to the East River and sing to myself,” Oberst recently told Relix about his songwriting process. “It’s like daydreaming. It’s allowing yourself space to let your mind wander, and that’s usually where I get most of my best work done.” Read the full article at relix.com.

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Joshua Redman, who performed with guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel and pianist Gwilym Simcock in London last night, closes out his brief European tour with a second set in this new trio configuration at Salle Europe in Colmar, France, tonight, as part of Festival de Jazz de Colmar. Redman’s new album, Trios Live, recorded during stands with two other trios, was recently released on Nonesuch.

Reviewing his residency at the Detroit Jazz Festival earlier this month, the Detroit Free Press writes, “Redman played his heart out, improvising with emotional abandon yet thematic unity.”

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Caetano Veloso takes his Abraçaço world tour to the United States with an all-ages show at the Jackie Gleason Theater in Miami Beach, Florida, on Saturday. The tour stops in Seattle, Davis, Oakland, and LA, and culminates in two nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) for Nonesuch Records at BAM.

Nonesuch Records released Caetano Veloso’s latest album, Abraçaço, in North America this past March. “The sound was born of the interaction in the rehearsals,” Veloso tells the Miami Herald about the new album. “But I had something more or less defined in my head.” Read the full article at miamiherald.com.