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Nonesuch Events This Weekend

Here is our weekly list of just some of the many events going on across the globe this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists:

John Adams's opera A Flowering Tree received its Midwest premiere in Chicago's Millennium Park on Wednesday, with the composer conducting. The Chicago Opera Theater continues its production on Saturday with Adams conducting again. Tickets: chicagooperatheater.org.

On Sunday, at The Kennedy Center Concert Hall in Washington, DC, The Choral Arts Society of Washington, under the direction of Norman Scribner, will perform Adams's oratorio El Niño, which received its world premiere at the Châtelet in Paris in 2000, directed by Peter Sellars with soloists Dawn Upshaw, Lorraine Hunt-Lieberson, Willard White, who recorded the piece for its Nonesuch release. Tickets: kennedy-center.org.

Also on Sunday, the San Fransisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, led by Benjamin Schwartz, will perform Adams's 1995 piece Lollapalooza at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, along with Stravinsky's Le Chant du rossignol and Dvořák's "New World" Symphony (sfsymphony.org); and the American Philharmonic Sonoma County, led by Gabriel Sakakeeny, will perform Short Ride in a Fast Machine at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California (wellsfargocenterarts.org).

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Laurie Anderson will bring her latest performance piece, Homeland, to Spain this weekend: at Auditorio de Garcia in Santiago de Compostela in the country's northwest tonight and Auditorio de Murcia, in Murcia in the southeast on Sunday night.

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After a couple of days in New York that included stops at Late Night with Conan O'Brien and WNYC's Soundcheck and a sold-out show at Terminal 5, The Black Keys are moving on to Philadelphia for a sold-out set at the Electric Factory tonight, then to Boston for a show at the Orpheum Theatre Saturday night. Its the last gig on this leg of the US tour before they head to Europe. Tickets: boston-theater.com.

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The European leg of the Raising Sands tour continues, with T Bone Burnett joining Robert Plant and Alison Krauss on stage in Stockholm, Sweden, tonight at the Stockholm Hovet (globearenas.se), and Oslo, Norway, on Sunday at the Oslo Spektrum (oslospektrum.no).

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Richard Goode joins the Orchestra Philharmonique de Radio France, with Peter Oundjian conducting, tonight at Salle Pleyel in Paris for a program of works by Jacques Hétu, Mozart, and Brahms. Tickets: sallepleyel.fr.

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Kronos Quartet is in Europe this month, performing tonight at the Internationales Congress Center as part of the Dresden International Music Festival in Dresden, Germany. The Quartet performs Terry Riley's 2002 piece Sun Rings, which was commissioned for the group by the NASA Art Program among many others. Tickets: musikfestspiel.com.

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Nicholas Payton began a four-night residency at Dimitriou's Jazz Alley in Seattle, Washington, as the special guest of vibes master Bobby Hutcherson. For this presentation of KPLU 88.5 NPR and the Pacific Jazz Institute, Payton and Hutcherson are joined by Joe Gilman on piano, Glen Richman on bass, and Eddie Marshall on drums. Remaining performances this weekend include two sets each tonight and tomorrow night, plus a 7:30 set on Sunday. Tickets: jazzalley.com.

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Punch Brothers are back in full swing with the next leg of their US tour. They'll be at the the Satellite Ballroom in Charlottesville, Virginia, tonight (satelliteballroom.com); the Rams Head On Stage in Annapolis, Maryland, for two all-ages sets on Saturday, at 1 PM and 4 PM (tickets.ramsheadonstage.com); and the Mountain Stage Little Theatre in Charleston, West Virginia, on Sunday (mountainstage.org).

You can check out a recording of the band in concert on Live from Folk Alley now on folkalley.com. There's both video and streaming audio, as well as downloadable audio for members of the site, from a performance at The Kent Stage in Kent, Ohio, on April 2.

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Laura Veirs's solo tour continues with three stops this weekend: tonight at The 9:30 Listening Room in Louisville, Kentucky (the930.org); Saturday at The Basement in Nashville (thebasementnashville.com); and Sunday at The Earl in Atlanta (badearl.com); all with opener Liam Finn.

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Wilco two sold-out shows at The Pageant in St. Louis, Missouri, with opener Retribution Gospel Choir, featuring Alan Sparhawk of Low (thepageant.com). It's their last scheduled tour date before they ramp things up again for two shows in Alaska at the end of July with The Whipsaws.

Laurie Anderson Talks to "The Progressive" About "Homeland"

Laurie Anderson recently appeared on Progressive Radio, the weekly broadcast hosted by The Progressive magazine's editor Matthew Rothschild, to discuss her latest project, Homeland, and the many socio-political issues it addresses, most notably the war in Iraq and the challenges of forming a coherent opposition to it when faced with an administration so well-schooled in framing the issue, or as she sees it, story telling. In light of this, her response was to tell her own version of the story, through Homeland.

"As an artist," she tells Rothschild, "I don't think that art is the best way to do politics. But I can't help it now. It's invaded too much of my own life, and it's invaded it in a way that's very basic, which is on the level of story telling." The method, she reveals, is a basic one: "I really do try to open my eyes. You don't have to make anything up. All you have to do is point over to various things that are happening."

Anderson points out that she when she set out to respond to very real threats, like the events of 9/11 and the resulting restrictions on civil liberties, her aim was never to react blindly to them but to open up the dialog about possible solutions. It is something she feels the government ignored, acting with little or no transparency, and few demanded.

"I'll tell you," she says, "I don't hear those voices. I don't hear, now that Susan Sontag is gone, who's speaking up? Where are the American intellectuals, the American artists, standing up and saying things. I just don't hear it. It's like a deafening silence."

With Homeland, Laurie hopes to open the dialog by bringing its absence to light. She performs the piece tonight at the Teatro Central in Sevilla, Spain, and then at the Auditoria de Garcia in Santiago de Compostela, in that country's northwestern region, on Friday.

To read excerpts from the transcripts and to listen to the complete 28-minute interview, visit progressive.org.

Happy Birthday to David Byrne; Bryne to Create Sound Installation from NYC Building This Month

"Today is an important occasion," says David Byrne in the opening words to his 2007 Nonesuch release, The Knee Plays. Indeed. Today is his 56th birthday, and Nonesuch wishes him a very happy one. We don't know how he'll celebrate the occasion or what birthday gifts will be heading his way, but here you can enjoy "(The Gift of Sound) Where the Sun Never Goes Down," also from The Knee Plays:

Byrne will celebrate the gift of sound in a different way in downtown New York this summer. He'll be turning an entire building in lower Manhattan---the landmark Battery Maritime Building---into an interactive and, in his humble words, "very large musical instrument" called Playing the Building. (It's 9,000 square feet.) The exhibit opens on May 31 and runs through August 10; it will be free and open to the public on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. On davidbyrne.com, David describes it this way:

Playing the Building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure---to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes---and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.

This exhibit (the photo at right is a mock-up) is presented by Creative Time, which has organized a number of unique, site-specific sound installations in the city, throughout its 30-year history, including 2002's Sonic Garden at the World Financial Center with David Byrne and Laurie Anderson.

For more information, visit davidbyrne.com. or creativetime.org/byrne.

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Click here to add The Knee Plays CD/DVD directly to your Shopping Cart for $16 and download the album MP3s at no extra charge.

Nonesuch Events This Weekend

Here is our weekly list of just some of the many events going on across the globe this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists:

John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine receives two very different performances this weekend: first, tonight, at the Frauenthal Center, Muskegan, Michigan, by the West Shore Symphony Orchestra, led by Scott Speck. On Saturday night, the piece will be one of many Adams works included in the Hamburg Ballet's performance of choreographer John Neumeier's Parzifal: Episodes and Echo (pictured at right) at the Staatsoper in Hamburg. Also included are Tromba Lontana, Christian Zeal and Activity, The Wound-Dresser, El Dorado, and The Dharma at Big Sur. Tickets: hamburgballet.de.

The Black Gondola, the composer's orchestration of Liszt's La Lugubre Gondola, will receive two performances this weekend by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra under Trevor Pinnock, first at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam tonight, and then at de Vereeniging in Nijmegen, Netherlands, tomorrow. Tickets: concertgebouw.nl.

Also receiving two performances is Road Movies, which violinist Midori and pianist Charles Abramovic will play Saturday at Zeche Zollverein, in Essen, Germany, and on Sunday at Zehntscheuer in Rottenburg.
Also on Sunday, Adams's Chamber Symphony will be performed by the Tokyo Sinfonietta, led by Yasuaki Itakura, at Cité de la musique in Paris.

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Laurie Anderson brings her Homeland tour to the sparkling KKL Luzern Concert Hall in Switzerland tonight (tickets: kkl-luzern.ch) and then to Modena, Italy, for a performance at the Teatro Communale on Sunday.

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The European leg of the Raising Sand tour continues with T Bone Burnett joining Robert Plant and Alison Krauss in a sold-out concert at Philipshalle in Dusseldorf, Germany, Saturday night, and the Forest National Arena in Brussels on Sunday. Tonight, BBC Two will air the group's performance on Later ... with Jools Holland. You can watch a video preview of their set, the song "Killing the Blues," at bbc.co.uk/later. Also on Later tonight: Emmylou Harris, with a song from her forthcoming Nonesuch release, All I Intended to Be.

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Kronos Quartet has begun its tour of Europe, heading to Leon, Spain, tonight, for a performance that includes John Adams's Fellow Traveler, written for Kronos in celebration of Peter Sellars's 50th birthday. The Quartet will then bring the piece to Bucharest, Romania, on Sunday for a performance at Sala Radio that also includes Steve Reich's Triple Quartet, which the group premiered in 1999 and recorded for Nonesuch in 2001.

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The Blues Alley in Washington, DC, hosts Nicholas Payton tonight for the second night in a row; there will be an 8 PM and a 10 PM set. Tickets: bluesalley.com.

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Dawn Upshaw celebrates Mother's Day at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall on Sunday with Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra in a program including the New York premiere of She Was Here, composer Osvaldo Golijov's arrangement of Schubert Lieder. (Tickets: carnegiehall.org.) Dawn spoke on WNYC's Soundcheck with host John Schaefer earlier this week on being dubbed "The Composers Muse," as she will be honored at a Meet the Composer benefit later this month.

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The next stop on Laura Veirs's solo tour, with opener Liam Finn, is Denver, Colorado, tonight for a show at the Walnut Room presented by Radio 1190. (Tickets: thewalnutroom.com.) On Sunday, they'll head to Omaha, Nebraska, for a set at the Slowdown's Front Room. (Tickets: theslowdown.com.)

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Wilco heads to the Southwest, with openers Retribution Gospel Choir (featuring Alan Sparhawk of Low), for a concert tonight at the University of New Mexico's Pope Joy Hall in Albuquerque (tickets: unmtickets.com), before heading to Austin, Texas, for two sold-out nights at Stubbs BBQ, beginning Sunday.

Laurie Anderson's "Homeland" Leaves UK's Norfolk and Norwich Festival "Blown Away"

Laurie Anderson brings her Homeland tour to Italy today for a performance at the MaxLive auditorium in Vicenza. This past Monday, she was in the UK, where, after finishing her four-night residency at the Barbican in London, had taken the show to Norwich for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. The Norfolk Eastern Daily Press's Ian Collins calls it "a blissful and blistering show" that left him "blown away."

In Homeland, Anderson "produces a mix moving with a slow fuse towards incendiary conclusions," writes Collins, that, for all their gravity, gain "fresh poignancy with some great jokes." In the end, he concludes, "Norwich loves Laurie Anderson."

To read the review, visit new.edp24.co.uk.

Observer: Laurie Anderson Weaves Tales of "Humane, Watchful Wonder at the World"

Laurie Anderson performed the last of four Barbican shows in her Homeland tour Saturday night, with her next performance tonight at the Theatre Royal Norwich as part of the Norfolk & Norwich Festival of jazz, classical, dance, and performance art. The Observer's Carol McDaid sums up Laurie's appeal this way:

What people really love about Laurie Anderson are the stories she tells, and the way she tells them: her singular lullaby voice a perennial balm ...; her humane, watchful wonder at the world---America in particular---and the mess it's in, conveyed through everyday tales that buttonhole the listener.

This time around, those tales come without the giant-screen visuals Laurie has often used in her work. McDaid says there's plenty to take from what's being said to trigger the visuals, "as all-too-familiar images from Iraq and Guantánamo flash up on cue inside your head."

In addition to the political components of the piece, Laurie offers "touching glimpses of family" says McDaid, "and moments of sparse beauty, too, as the violin magically spins its own web of accompanying lines. Anderson asks questions but doesn't claim to have the answers ..."

To read the review of the final Barbican performance, visit music.guardian.co.uk. For more information on tonight's event, visit nnfestival.org.uk.

Nonesuch Events This Weekend

Below are just some of the many events going on across the globe this weekend featuring Nonesuch artists:

The San Francisco Ballet will perform to John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony (2007) each night this weekend in Mark Morris's new piece, Joyride, for the final nights of the Ballet's New Works Festival Program B, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. "If you appreciate ballet that offers dazzlingly sophisticated musicality," says the San Francisco Chronicle, "then you could hardly do better than Mark Morris's Joyride." Tickets: sfballet.org.

The Thüringer Symphoniker, led by Oliver Weder, will pair Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine and Tromba Lontana for performances in Unterwellenborn, Germany, tonight and Saturday. Both pieces appear on the 1987 Nonesuch recording, The Chairman Dances. More info: boosey.com.

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Laurie Anderson continues her four-night residency at the Barbican in London through Saturday. Folks in the UK can catch Laurie on Later with Jools Holland tonight at 11:35 PM GMT, on BBC Two.

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Toumani Diabate will play a special concert in the intimate space of LSO St. Luke's in London, performing songs from his new solo CD, The Mande Variations, as part of the Barbican's Spring 08 Contemporary Events series.

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Bill Frisell's new quintet, featuring Chris Cheek on sax and clarinet, Larry Grenadier on bass, Ron Miles on cornet, and Rudy Royston on drums, will make its European debut on Sunday in Cheltenham, England's Everyman Theater as part of the Cheltenham Jazz Festival. Tickets: cheltenhamfestivals.com.

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Kronos Quartet plays its last US date of the season this Saturday before heading to Europe for the rest of May. The group will perform at Disney Hall in Los Angeles, with special guest Tanya Tagaq, for the LA premiere of their collaboration Nunavut and the world premiere of Derek Charke's Tundra Songs. (The Canadian Press has a profile of Tagaq, a throat singer from Arctic Canada, and Charke, a Nova Scotian composer, at canadianpress.google.com.) Kronos will also give the LA premiere of Tusen Tankar, the Nonesuch Store-exclusive bonus track on its latest release, The Cusp of Magic, and perform Sigur Rós's Flugufrelsarinn. Tickets: laphil.com.

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After making her way across Australia, k.d. lang returns to the Sydney State Theatre with her Watershed tour tonight and for a just-added second show, on Saturday, before heading to New Zealand next week.

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The Brad Mehldau Trio will perform two sets tonight at Western Michigan University's Williams Theater in Kalamazoo as part of the Gilmore Keyboard Festival's Jazz Club series. Tickets: thegilmoreiscoming.com.

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Friends of the Sheldon in St. Louis, Missouri, present Randy Newman at that city's Sheldon Concert Hall Sunday night for a concert to benefit the Hall's education programs, both in schools and at the venue. Tickets: thesheldon.org.

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Nicholas Payton, fresh off his performance at the New Orleans JazzFest last weekend, headlines the Main Street JazzFest in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, on the festival's Main Stage Saturday at 7:30 PM. "Opportunities to see a jazz artist of Payton's caliber in the Middle Tennessee area are few and far between," says the Nashville Scene. All events are free and open to the public. For a complete schedule of events: mainstreetjazzfest.com.

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Punch Brothers' Chris Thile will play a late-night solo set at the Living Room on New York's Lower East Side at 11 PM Sunday night. Tickets: livingroomny.com.

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Steve Reich's 1994 piece for two marimbas, Nagoya Marimbas, will be performed tonight at the Royal Northern College of Music's Haden Freeman Concert Hall in Manchester, England, by the RNCM Percussion Ensemble's Ian Wright and Paul Patrick. On Satudray, the full, 46-minute version of the composer's Desert Music (1983), for amplified voices and orchestra, will be performed at Fairfield University's Quick Center in Connecticut, by New York's Shen Wei Dance Arts ensemble.

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Wilco will be in Winnipeg, Manitoba, tonight to play the Burton Cummings Theatre (named "one of Winnipeg's Seven Wonders" in a recent Winnipeg Free Press reader survey) and will head back south of the 49th parallel for a sold-out show at the Emerson Cultural Center in Bozeman, Montana, Sunday night.

Times (UK): Four Stars for Laurie Anderson's "Passionate, Poignant" "Homeland" at the Barbican

Laurie Anderson began a four-night residency at London's Barbican Theatre on Wednesday with musical accompaniment from Eyvind Kang on viola, Peter Scherer on keyboards, and Skuli Sverrisson on bass. The Times (UK) gives the performance four stars, with writer Sam Marlowe calling Homeland, the latest piece from the "high priestess of the New York avant-garde," one that is both personal and political, "a passionate and erudite work whose references range from Thomas Paine and Kierkegaard to Aristophanes and Oprah Winfrey" with "twinkling observations on the everyday business of living in the most powerful nation on Earth."

While the political remains at the forefront of Homeland, Marlowe finds that Laurie is "equally riveting when her focus is more intimate. A description of a funeral ... is delicately heartbreaking, and her assertion that we can live inside one another, and bury loved ones in memory, has a poignant simplicity."

Whether commenting on the power wielded by experts in contemporary society or of larger-than-life underwear models, says Marlowe,

Anderson has a compelling presence. Elfin, crop-haired, she speaks in a rhythmic rush, the volume of her mellifluous voice dying away towards the end of each phrase. The effect is part soothing, part unsettling, and entirely hypnotic ... Anderson is a unique talent whose work has a resonance of insistent potency.

To read the review, visit entertainment.timesonline.co.uk. For further tour dates, click here.

Laurie Anderson Begin Barbican Residency, Appears on BBC Radio

Laurie Anderson kicks off her four-night residency at the Barbican Theatre in London tonight. The shows are part of the Barbican's bite08 festival of music, dance, and visual art taking place over the next month, as well as the Spring 08 Contemporary Events series, which also includes a sold-out performance by Toumani Diabate at the LSO St. Luke's this Friday and the UK premiere of Philip Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians in June.

Before tonight's show at the Barbican, Laurie will stop by the BBC studios for an appearance on the Nemone radio show, which begins 1 PM GMT on BBC Radio 6 Music. To listen live online, visit bbc.co.uk. You can also listen again to the show online for the following week.

Laurie made an earlier appearance on BBC radio yesterday on the Radio 4 program Woman's Hour. You can listen to that now at bbc.co.uk/radio4.

Times (UK): Laurie Anderson Fascinates with "Homeland" at the Baribcan This Week

"If Laurie Anderson didn't already exist," writes Dominic Maxwell in The Times (UK), "some New York novelist would have to invent her. Artist, musician, singer, storyteller, intellectual, inventor and one-time pop star ... She's four decades of downtown art scene in a lullaby voice."

Laurie spoke with Maxwell leading up to the four-night residency of her Homeland tour at the Barbican in London, which runs from Wednesday through Saturday of this week. In the article, Maxwell examines Laurie's long and varied career and finds that her greatest appeal unifying all that she does may derive from the fact that "she remains the eternal student." He writes:

Steady in tone, wide of eye, she is fascinating because she is fascinated ... [A]s she speaks and sings and speak-sings about the images that burrow their way into our brain, from Aristophanes to underwear models, from presidents to terrorists, there's no denying she's an American determined to look beyond her own backyard.

To read the profile, visit entertainment.timesonline.co.uk.

For ticket information on this week's performances, visit baribican.org.uk.

LA Times: Laurie Anderson Reclaims Public Narrative with "Homeland"

Laurie Anderson was in Southern California this week for two performances of her new piece, Homeland, first at Santa Barbara's Campbell Hall on Wednesday, and last night at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed attended the earlier show, where, he writes, she proved to be "a 21st-century bard" who has "given herself the task of taking back the narrative" from the politicians who have co-opted it and a media that has rendered it ineffective.

This, writes Swed, "happens to be something she is very good at. For all her ability to exploit visual symbolism, her real talent is as poet and performer." He concludes:

As the most important multimedia artist of our time, Anderson once led us to believe that story and song were not enough, however much they were at the center of her enterprise. Now, faced with the extinction of old media ... she's reclaimed that territory with a rare, profound maturity.

To read Swed's review of Homeland, visit latimes.com. (Photo by David Bazemore.)

Following performances in Boulder, CO, tomorrow and Madison, WI, on Monday, Laurie will participate in a round-table discussion called "People Who Shape Our World" at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art Tuesday evening, free with museum admission, before bringing Homeland to that city's Harris Theater on Wednesday.

Laurie Anderson to Receive Honorary Degree from RISD, Deliver Commencement Address

Laurie Anderson will receive an honorary degree from the Rhode Island School of Design at the school's Commencement ceremony this year, Saturday, May 31, when she will also deliver the commencement address. According to RISD's website (via mediabistro), "Honorary degrees are conferred upon exceptional individuals who have made groundbreaking contributions to the world of art and design." Other recipients of the 2008 degrees include Yo-Yo Ma and Ed Ruscha.

Laurie is currently making her way across the States with her Homeland tour, with a performance at Royce Hall in Los Angeles tonight before she heads to Boulder this Saturday. Westword, out of Denver, has an in-depth Q&A with Laurie, in which she discusses politics, the changing meaning(s) of the word "homeland," and the corporatization of America.

"It's that kind of stuff that really fascinates me," she states. "It's an overall direction that things are going in, and when I try to put that into work, I also try to put it into a context of seeing it in a different way, rather than haranguing people about some sort of social science lesson."

To read the full interview, visit blogs.westword.com.

After the Colorado show, Homeland will move on to Madison, Wisconsin, and two nights in Chicago before heading to Europe at the end of the month. Laurie and her band will perform at the Barbican in London for four nights, April 30 to May 3. Previewing the event, The Guardian's John O'Mahony spoke with her about the show and some unexpected protests it brought in Boston at the March 29 performance there.

"I was literally shocked," she tells O'Mahony. "With everything that's been going on, it has been impossible to avoid putting politics in this work. On the one hand, I was pleased I was provoking a response. But before I was pleased, I was very surprised. I thought, 'This is not at all controversial.'"

To read the article, visit music.guardian.co.uk.

New York Magazine Celebrates 40 Years of New York Culture

New York magazine is celebrating its 40th year with a special anniversary issue. In it, the magazine's culture critics give their take on the most essential New York works of art since the publication's inception, creating "The New York Canon: 1968-2008."

The classical music list, written by Justin Davidson, offers a wide range of artists and events, from Steve Reich's Drumming, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, to the John Adams-curated opening-week festival of Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall in 2003. Among the other quintessential New York moments in between are Laurie Anderson's United States I-V, the epic, two-night event in 1983 from that "great American raconteuse"; the US premiere of Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1991, which, despite the surrounding controversy, "contained ravishing music"; and Audra McDonald's 1998 debut solo album, Way Back to Paradise, with music by emerging songwriters like Adam Guettel, and the "killer concert at Joe's Pub" that launched it.

Listen to Audra perform "The Allure of Silence" (Adam Guettel / Lindy Robbins) from Way Back to Paradise:

Included in the theater canon, according to New York magazine's Jeremy McCarter, is the arrival of Stephen Sondheim's Company in 1970, which "brought new complexity and darker shadows to Broadway" ("Even now," McCarter writes, "other songwriters are struggling to catch up."), and the 2005 revival of the composer's 1979 work Sweeney Todd.

On the pop music list, by Hugo Lindgren and Ben Williams, is Talking Heads' 1980 album Remain in Light, on which David Byrne and Brian Eno create a sound that would inspire for decades to come, and The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs, "a distinctly New York masterpiece."

To read the complete list from New York magazine, visit nymag.com.

Boston Globe: Laurie Anderson's "Homeland" May Be Her "Most Intruiging Work" Yet

Laurie Anderson began the national tour of her new piece, Homeland, with the US premiere in New York's Zankel Hall last Wednesday, before moving on to Massachusetts this past weekend for a performance at Boston's Opera House on Saturday.

The Boston Globe's Tristram Lozaw calls the new piece "an austere, epic examination of contemporary American culture," though one that is "more social satire than political diatribe and always delivered with a poetic zeal." Lozaw suggests that "musically, Homeland is perhaps Anderson's most sophisticated and intriguing work," and asserts:

For all her avant-garde reputation and coded contemplations on the human condition, Laurie Anderson remains one of our most charismatic modern storytellers, the gold standard in musical commentary. Softly chilled, a bit eerie, and uniquely curious, yes, but above all she's provocative, amusing, and friendly.

To read the complete review, visit boston.com.

The next stop on the Homeland tour is Akron's EJ Thomas Hall this Friday, April 4.

Laurie Anderson to Give NY Premiere of "Homeland" at Carnegie Hall This Week

Laurie Anderson takes her latest work, Homeland, across the United States over the next month, starting with its New York premiere in Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall this Wednesday. Homeland takes an in-depth look at modern-day America and the interplay between freedom and fear in a time of ongoing war; the Guardian called the piece "breathtaking" upon its performance at the Melbourne International Arts Festival last year. The New York premiere comes on the heels of last week's sold-out event, co-organized by Laurie, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn marking the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq.

In an interview for the website wowowow.com posted last week, Laurie describes Homeland this way:

As I wrote more and more songs, it became clear to me that Homeland was getting more and more political. Several of the songs focus on the seismic changes in the United States in the last few years, and include subjects ranging from the war to the media, the environment, and the creation of a surveillance culture.

Ticket availability for Wednesday's event is limited. For more information, visit carnegiehall.org. The tour continues in Boston this weekend with a performance at the city's Opera House. For information on that event, visit worldmusic.org.

David Byrne, Laurie Anderson Mark Iraq War Anniversary with Anti-War Benefit

Earlier this week, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, and a number of other artists marked the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq with Speak UP!, a music, dance, spoken-word, and art event organized by Anderson and the singer Antony at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse to benefit the anti-war groups NYC United for Peace and Justice and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

Among the performance highlights, according to Rolling Stone magazine, was Byrne's two-song set, in which he, "armed with a four-person choir, led an art-gospel sermon full of huge choruses ... Byrne's mesmerizing presence kept his pair of originals spiraling heavenward."

MTV reports that the aforementioned choir comprised two members of Scissor Sisters, Damien Rice, and Norah Jones, whose own set included a rendition of Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today."

For photos from the event, visit brooklynvegan.com.

David Byrne, Laurie Anderson Participate in "Speak UP!" Benefit Tonight

Tonight at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, Laurie Anderson and David Byrne will join a number of artists, including Antony, Blonde Redhead, Bill T. Jones, Norah Jones, Moby, Lou Reed, Damien Rice, and The Scissor Sisters, for Speak UP!, a sold-out benefit concert for peace in Iraq and justice at home. The event marks the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, and will also include an exhibition of photos from Alive Day Memories, portraits of soldiers injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (including the photo at right, of John Jones). Emceeing the evening are actor Richard Belzer and Air America Radio host Laura Flanders. 

The concert will be preceded by Speak Out!, a free event beginning at 4 PM at the nearby powerHouse Arena. Featured speakers include Flanders, author Naomi Klein, and Donna Lieberman, head of the New York Civil Liberties; among other highlights will be the screening of footage from the documentary Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan.

For more information, visit stannswarehouse.org.

David Byrne and Laurie Anderson to Participate in "Speak UP!" Benefit Concert

Laurie Anderson and David Byrne will join a number of artists, including Antony, Blonde Redhead, Bill T. Jones, Norah Jones, Moby, Lou Reed, Damien Rice, and The Scissor Sisters, for Speak UP!, a benefit concert for peace in Iraq and justice at home. The event will be held at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn on March 18, marking the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, and will also include an exhibition of photos from Alive Day Memories, portraits of soldiers injured in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

For more information and tickets, on sale now, visit stannswarehouse.org.

Brad Mehldau to Play a Week of NYC Shows

This past Saturday, Brad Mehldau kicked off a week of New York City shows with a sold-out solo gig at Washington Irving High School that was part of the People's Symphony Concerts' Artists' Series. The New York Times includes the event in a starred listing for Brad, whom the paper's Nate Chinen calls "one of the standout jazz voices of his generation." Up next is a series of twice-nightly sets, Tuesday through Thursday, at the Village Vanguard (limited ticket availability), featuring Brad's "exceptionally good trio" with bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard.

Also in this week's Times listings is a concert this Thursday at John Zorn's East Village club, The Stone, by guitarist Marc Ribot, who plays on the Black Keys' forthcoming Nonesuch release, Attack & Release. He'll be joined by Laurie Anderson for the later of two sets this Thursday. For more information, visit thestonenyc.com.

To read this week's Times jazz listing, visit nytimes.com.

Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass Portraits by Chuck Close in 2008 Tacoma Exhibit

The Tacoma Art Museum will present the exhibition A Couple of Ways of Doing Something: Photographs by Chuck Close, Poems by Bob Holman, March 1–June 15, 2008 . The exhibit includes portraits by Close of such esteemed artists as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, and Robert Wilson, among many others (including the self-portrait at right), along with praise poems written in conjunction with Close's work by Holman, the founder of the Bowery Poetry Club.

For more information, read the preview of the exhibit in artdaily.org or visit tacomaartmuseum.org.

N'Dour, Diabaté, Anderson Presented by Boston's World Music/CRASHarts

Boston-based World Music/CRASHarts will be presenting Youssou N'Dour and the Super Étoile band this Monday, December 10, at the Somerville Theatre. Today's Boston Globe previews the next phase of the organization's winter and spring schedule, which includes a broad range of artists from around the world, from Toumani Diabaté's pan-African Symmetric Orchestra, also at the Somerville, on February 2, to New York's own Laurie Anderson, who will bring her new piece, Homeland, to the Boston Opera House on March 29.

To read the Globe preview, visit boston.com. For the complete schedule and ticket information, visit worldmusic.org.

Kronos Quartet, Laurie Anderson to Perform at Toronto's Luminato Festival

Toronto's new Luminato Festival of Arts and Creativity, which earlier this year, in its inaugural run, presented the world premiere of Philip Glass's Book of Longing (based on poetry by Leonard Cohen), has unveiled its program for 2008,  and the Globe and Mail calls it "an ambitious agenda of dance, music, theatre, film, and visual arts."

On the bill for the June 6–15 event, which will focus in large part on Canadian artists, are that country's premieres of Nunavut by Kronos Quartet and Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq, as well as Laurie Anderson's Homeland, which the Guardian has called "breathtaking." Also at the festival will be a performance by the Alberta Ballet of The Fiddle and the Drum, a collaboration between Joni Mitchell and the dance company's artistic director, Jean Grand-Maître.

For more information, read the Globe and Mail's preview at theglobeandmail.com or visit the festival's site at luminato.com.

David Byrne, Laurie Anderson in "New York Noise"

Paula Court, the photographer for the famed New York performance space The Kitchen, has released New York Noise, a new book of photos from the city's underground art scene during the economically down-and-out but culturally vibrant years of the '70s and '80s. Included in the book are photos of everyone from Madonna and Michael Stipe to Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne. Also in the book are short essays by some of the artists whose portraits are featured inside, including Anderson and Byrne.

The Times (London) has put together a photo gallery along with a few of the texts from the book. Below are excerpts from David Byrne's note:

New York was a scary and legendary place—and downtown was like a Bohemian living museum, which was pretty thrilling for an aspiring artist and musician.

Legends walked the streets—well, from a skewed boho POV. It was all very new and exciting, at least for me—and it was incredibly funky, the sleaze and poverty were everywhere ... The cheapest hookers in town were on Chrystie Street, where Talking Heads once shared a loft. Now there’s a Whole Foods and luxury condos on the corner.

I’m not complaining or nostalgic for the bad old days—some things are genuinely better ... What might have gotten lost was that one could incubate one’s work inside the supportive bubble of a close and sometimes desperate community. Now that period of incubation is incredibly short, the chicks are thrown out of the nest immediately ...

And Laurie Anderson had this to say:

It was dark, dangerous, exciting. We knew we were creating a brand new art scene. We then watched that scene disappear. There weren’t boundaries or categories. We all worked on each other’s pieces and it didn’t matter that one was a dance-like thing and another was a sculpture-like thing.

At one point almost everyone I knew was working on an opera. You’d walk down the street and everyone you met would say, "How’s your opera?"

I guess opera was just a loose way to say big indefinable things. The definitions came later—applied, for example, by art schools to keep order in their curricula.

Read more and see some of Paula Court's photos from New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978-88 at timesonline.co.uk.

Guardian Names 1,000 Must-Hear Albums (Part 1: A-M)

With iPods now holding up to 160 gigabytes of your favorite music, it might not be such a bad idea to start thinking of the 1,000 or so albums you just can't live without. Or, as the Guardian (UK) has put it, the 1,000 albums you must hear before you die. All this week, the Guardian is revealing, day by day, the records its music team thinks are must-hears "before you shuffle off your mortal coil."

Out so far on the list, released alphabetically by artist, are groups A through M. Here's some of what the Guardian's music mavens had to say about the Nonesuch albums they included:

• Amadou & Mariam: Dimanche à Bamako (2005) "This husband-and-wife rhythm and blues pairing from Mali were already huge in France before they added even more sparkle by hiring Manu Chao as producer. A sublimely paced record of pedal-to-the-metal acceleration and relaxed, freewheeling charm."

• Laurie Anderson: Big Science (1982, r. 2007) "Her dry humour, abrasive instrumentation and technological obsessions sound as current as ever: 'So hold me Mom, in your long arms. In your petrochemical arms. Your military arms. In your electronic arms.'"

• Buena Vista Social Club: Buena Vista Social Club (World Circuit/Nonesuch; 1997) "A bunch of elderly Cubans were unlikely candidates to displace Portishead as the dinner party soundtrack du jour but, with Ry Cooder's patronage ... the power and charm of its protagonists ensured theirs was a long-told tale ..."

• Brian Eno & David Byrne: My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981, r. 2006) "Underloved at the time but hugely cherished since, this album sees Byrne and Eno travel into the heart of darkness, their art-rock fuelled and flavoured by African percussion, Egyptian pop singers and samples of crabby radio DJs and a real-life exorcism. An experiment, but utterly absorbing nonetheless."

• Ali Farka Touré: Savane (World Circuit/Nonesuch; 2006) "Ali Farka Touré, who died in March 2006, was the finest and best-loved African guitarist of his generation. Often described as the godfather of the desert blues, he proved through his hypnotic instrumental work and singing that the blues must have originated from his home country of Mali ... He recorded a series of classic albums, ... but this album, released after his death, is arguably his finest. That's certainly the way he saw it ...  [On this album,] he produced some of the most compelling guitar work of his career ..."

• Ibrahim Ferrer: Buenos Hermanos (World Circuit/Nonesuch; 2003) "Backed by Ry Cooder's dream team—the jazz bassist Cachaito, the surf-rock guitarist Manuel Galbán and the Blind Boys of Alabama on backing vocals—Ferrer's effortlessly soulful voice has never sounded better: crooning the boleros, rolling his Rs on the salsas and making staggering vocal improvisations sound as casual as clearing his throat."

• Bill Frisell: Have a Little Faith (1993) "Jazz, folk, classical, pop—like a small-town electrical store, Frisell's landmark album has it all. Made with an unusual jazz quintet that includes Guy Klucevsek's accordion, it's a kind of love letter to American music, with John Hiatt's rolling title track and tunes by Copland, Ives, Foster, Rollins, Dylan and even Madonna."

• Kronos Quartet / Pat Metheny / Steve Reich: Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint (1990) "Different Trains, with its locomotive rhythms and melodies generated by the cadences of speech, is a meditation on Reich's wartime childhood and the fate of Jews in the Holocaust; it's the composer's most moving work."

• Orlando Cachaito López: Cachaito (World Circuit/Nonesuch; 2001) "Even though the Buena Vista Social Club franchise had thoroughly shaken up world music, nobody was quite ready for this sprawling, eclectic and slightly bonkers album from bassist Cachaito and producer Nick Gold, which mashes reggae, jazz, and French hip-hop with Cuba's finest."

Also on the list were Ry Cooder (Chicken Skin Music), k.d. lang (Ingénue), The Magnetic Fields (69 Love Songs), Brad Mehldau Trio (The Art of the Trio, Vol 4: Back at the Vanguard), and Pat Metheny (80/81).

For all the artists A through M, visit music.guardian.co.uk. Stay tuned for N through Z!

Laurie Anderson Accepts Gish Prize

In a ceremony held at Manhattan's Hudson Theater last Tuesday, Laurie Anderson was awarded the esteemed Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize. Named in memory of the early-film era stars, each year, the prize honors “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” The following is a transcript of Laurie Anderson's acceptance speech from the event:

Thank you. First let me thank all the people associated with the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize—the advisors Pamela Johnson and Alberta Arthurs and Erica Berg Gavin and the chair Adele Chatfield-Taylor as well as the selection committee.

I love, in the wording of the prize, the phrase about making a “contribution to the beauty of the world”—words that almost seem to come from another era. And it really made me start to think about what the word beauty actually means these days in America.

As an artist I work with lots of different media, but mainly what it comes down to is story telling. I tell stories. And I love stories. They’re illusions. You can make them up. You can get a lot of people to believe them. You can even get a lot of people to believe a story about how they’re in great danger and how there’s an evil despot with lots of hidden weapons who wants to kill you. I mean you can actually start wars with stories. That’s how magic they really are.

And if it’s a really good story, you can tell it again. Just add a few new details about mushroom clouds hanging over US cities and invasions of the homeland. Just change a few names and places and you can tell the exact same story again and you can start another war. Because everyone forgot that the first story wasn’t a true story. But of course the point was never that it was a true story. The point was that it was that it was a good story. A really scary story. Scary, convincing, and beautiful.

So what do stories mean in a country where the government promotes violence and is also very media-savvy, very story-savvy? What does a true story mean now? What’s a beautiful story? And what does it mean when labels are slapped onto concepts? When the Geneva Convention for example is suddenly labeled quaint? How do concepts like beauty and truth work these days? Have they also become quaint? Something from other simpler times?

One of the big stories now, one of the most-told stories is about how the world is getting hotter. More crowded and dangerous. It’s about arctic floods and disappearing resources and entropy and the world winding down. And nobody knows whether it’s fiction or not. But it’s such a complicated story, and like with many complicated stories about the future, there’s no way to absolutely prove which version is true. It’s just sort of a matter of preference. Which story do you like better?

Recently I spent a couple of years as artist in residence at NASA, and one of the things I loved about NASA was that they also have stories with very long time lines. But many of their stories are really upbeat. And who knows? Maybe even true. One of these is a story about a project with a 5,000-year time line. And the idea of this story is to move all the manufacturing off the earth onto the moon and Mars and then to gradually remove all the toxic and radioactive materials and to ship this off. And this, along with extreme population control, would allow the earth to repair itself, to return to its original state, back to a kind of Garden of Eden, whatever that was.

Of course, there are a few problems with this plan. One is an issue currently in the international courts involving ownership and a claim by a Chinese realty company that they own the moon. Of course, this is a pretty big problem, because the Russians are saying, “Wait a minute! We got there first. We planted the first flag.” And the Americans are saying, “No, no. No way! We had the first man there.” And the Italians are saying, “OK, OK. But we saw it first.”

So who owns the moon? As we leave the earth and begin to make colonies elsewhere, we’ll have to figure out how to cooperate. Otherwise it will be pretty much like the race to the New World in the 15th century. The one who owns the New World is the one with the fastest ships. The one with the most resources. So what’s the real story here? Where are we really going? Or trying to go?

Last year I read an amazing book, a book that many of you might know called Within the Context of No Context. It was written in 1980 by George Trow and it explains a lot about what’s happening in culture and media today, and the book begins like this:

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?

I thought: Wow! Stop right there! And I’ve been trying to think about this ever since. What is the engine that’s driving our culture? What makes something true? What are we looking for?

As I mentioned I was at NASA as the first artist in