On January 12, 2010, an earthquake struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti 10 miles west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, damaging nearly 190,000 houses and displacing some 500,000 people. In November 2011, Nonesuch Records staffer Stephanie Bauman joined four fellow Warner Music Group employees for the 28th annual Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Habitat for Humanity work project in Léogâne, Haiti. She and the WMG team joined President Carter and 400 other volunteers from all over the US in helping to rebuild. Read about Stephanie's unforgettable experience here and see photos from the project.

Punch Brothers celebrated the release of their new album last month with a special show at NYC's Rockwood Music Hall. Their performance of the song "Movement and Location" from that night has premiered in a video on The New Yorker's site; watch it here. Salon's Seth Mnookin calls the song "a propulsive masterpiece that sets the tone, both musically and thematically, for what’s to come" on the album. "Punch Brothers have achieved a kind of mind-meld that’s only possible when preternaturally talented musicians spend hours pushing themselves, and each other, to explore their passion and creativity." 

Punch Brothers are currently on tour in North America and has made its way to California for shows at The Fillmore in San Francisco tonight and El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles Saturday. The band has "further refined its sound on its latest album," Who's Feeling Young Now?, writes the Los Angeles Times. Its "rich and evocative tracks capture a white-hot musical mind coming into his own and collaborating with stellar peers." Last month, following the release of the new album, the band stopped by the studios of NYC public radio station WFUV to perform a few songs off the record. Watch them here.

As part of their 2011-12 Centennial Season, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony launch a month-long American Mavericks Festival of music by pioneers of the American sound. The Festival begins at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall tonight, with performances there through March 18, followed by a national tour to Chicago's Orchestra Hall, Ann Arbor's Hill Auditorium, and Carnegie Hall in New York through March 30. The American Mavericks Festival explores the music of path-breaking composers like Steve Reich and builds on their visionary spirit with world-premieres, including John Adams's "Absolute Jest." Watch Adams discuss the piece here.

k.d. lang has added a number of new dates to her North American spring and summer tour with her band the Siss Boom Bang, which was announced last month. The newly announced dates include additional stops across the United States and into lang's home province of Alberta, as well as a three-night run at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.The first date on the tour is slated for May 8 in Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Björk closed out her month-long, ten-show Biophilia NYC residency last night at Roseland Ballroom. The residency also included shows at the New York Hall of Science, which collaborated with Björk on a Biophilia education series on the scientific concepts at the core of the album. One such concept is DNA, in the song "Hollow," the video for which has premiered on NPR's All Songs Considered. "It takes an artist like Björk to turn the complex process of DNA replication and transcription into something as simple and beautiful as a pop song," says NPR. "For the video of her song 'Hollow,' Björk has collaborated with biomedical animator Drew Berry to create a partly-scientific representation of the haunting song." Watch it here.

Nonesuch Records will make a series of special releases available on Saturday, April 21, in honor of the fifth annual Record Store Day, a celebration of the unique culture surrounding over 700 independently owned record stores in the USA and hundreds of similar stores internationally. Included are a deluxe vinyl edition of The Black Keys' El Camino; Dr. John's new album, Locked Down, on vinyl; a 3CD/DVD set of Billy Bragg & Wilco's Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions; and limited-edition 7" vinyl singles of Sara Watkins covering The Everly Brothers and Carolina Chocolate Drops taking on Run-DMC.

The Black Keys kicked off the first leg of their months-long North American arena tour with performances in Cincinnati, Detroit, and Columbus and hit the East Coast this week. Friday night's tour opener was "90 minutes of their patented hard-chopping blues," reports MTV. Playing arenas is "an amazing accomplishment for a group that has put in more than their share of road work and had the kind of slow-and-steady climb that rarely happens in this era of rocket-straight-to-the-top pop stars or grind-'em-out club bands." The Columbus Dispatch reports from Sunday's show: "The tunes were loud, the musicianship tight but relaxed and the vibe just right."

Carolina Chocolate Drops are on tour in North America, performing music from their new album, Leaving Eden, in New England this week. During a recent tour stop in NYC, the band performed three songs off the album live on WNYC's Soundcheck and spoke with host John Schaefer about the new album. Listen to the show and watch the performance of "Boodle-De-Bum-Bum" here. Glide gives the album four stars: "On Leaving Eden, Carolina Chocolate Drops move music forward, paying homage to the past while remaining rooted in the present. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable work that challenges our definition of string band music."

The new album pairing works by Krzysztof Penderecki and the works they inspired by Jonny Greenwood is due out next week and is streaming in full all this week as an NPR First Listen. "The results are ear-tingling," says NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas. "What we hear on this album is a meeting of two artistic visionaries connected in a real dialogue, the decades separating their work and their chronological ages all but collapsed and deflated."

Punch Brothers are currently on tour in North America, performing in the Pacific Northwest this week. Prior to heading out on tour, the band spent some time with The New Yorker’s Alec Wilkinson for a "Talk of the Town" piece published in this week’s magazine. Punch Brothers was recently in Minneapolis and stopped by MPR's The Current to perform a few songs and discuss their new album, which PopMatters calls "an essential document and a mesmerizing step forward." Listen to the show and watch their performance of "Movement and Location" in The Current studios here.

Randy Newman continues his tour of Europe with stops in Germany this week, following several shows in the UK and Ireland last week that brought rave reviews, not least five-star reviews of his London show from the Guardian and the Independent. "Newman’s songs express a set of values and concerns that touch on the work of other greats—Toms Waits and Lehrer both spring to mind, likewise Stephen Sondheim—but he remains essentially uncategorisable," says the Independent. "On occasions the experience—a packed auditorium, an artist alone on stage with his piano—was akin to a Schubert recital, so exquisite and so deft was Newman’s rendering of human experience." The Times insists "that Newman's work as a songwriter and social commentator is quite simply peerless."