Birthed via a Black Country communion which saw Robert Plant and his new, largely unknown bandmates enjoy a lengthy courtship off-radar, Saving Grace feels guileless, almost serendipitous.
What might happen, Plant mused, if he shipped what he’d learned from T Bone Burnett, Alison Krauss et al home and duetted on choice blues, alt-country and folk covers with Brum-born former music teacher, Suzi Dian? Across 10 intimate songs deftly ornamented by guitarists Matt Worley and Tony Kelsey and cellist Barney Morse-Brown, magic happens.
As much avuncular vibe-master as Golden God, Plant cedes some lead vocal terrain to Dian (‘Too Far from You’) and Worley (Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Soul of a Man’) while bringing…
Tag Archive: Nonesuch
With Ride Into the Sun, pianist/composer Brad Mehldau returns to themes he introduced in the wake of his rumination on the COVID phenomenon, Suite: April 2020. That very same year’s revisitation of influence from the Beatles, Your Mother Should Know, presaged a rediscovery of his roots in progressive rock titled Jacob’s Ladder.
The latter two works set the stage for this recognition of Brad’s rapport-by-proxy with the late Elliott Smith. However, it’s not really necessary to be familiar with the source works to come away impressed by the ingenuity on display here: that surplus of inspiration lends itself to enough solo piano from Mehldau to anchor the narrative and remind us why he is so worth listening to in the first place.
Molly Tuttle, following back-to-back Grammy-winning albums with her band Golden Highway, along with a Best New Artist nomination, releases her new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, on Nonesuch Records.
Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson), the fifth full album from the singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist marks a sonic departure from her recent work and features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one cover, of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.” The album’s first single, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark,” which she co-wrote with Kevin Griffin (Better Than Ezra). After a summer of festival sets and headline shows, Tuttle and her new live band lead The Highway Knows tour…
Three months ago, Nonesuch brought out an updated version of its superbly comprehensive survey of Steve Reich’s collected works. The 27 discs included the first recordings of Reich’s most recent scores, Traveler’s Prayer and Jacob’s Ladder, and now, for those who already owned the set from its previous incarnation, it has released those two works together on their own. Both pieces were composed during the Covid lockdown, and are scored for four singers and an instrumental ensemble; in both cases, too, they have Hebrew texts taken from the Old Testament.
In almost every other respect, though, the two pieces are very different. Traveler’s Prayer, first performed in 2021, is meditative and static, floating, almost ritualised.
However edgy and angular Mary Halvorson’s music gets, powerful melodies and inviting harmonies always drift below even the stormiest surface, giving the much-lauded New York composer and guitarist an appeal way beyond the avant garde. About Ghosts features an expanded version of her Amaryllis ensemble, which made one of 2024’s standout jazz albums, Cloudward. The lineup retains Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Jacob Garchik (trombone), Patricia Brennan (vibraphone), Nick Dunston (bass) and Tomas Fujiwara (drums), augmented by Blue Note Records’ fiery, gospelly alto-sax star Immanuel Wilkins and the rugged, Wayne Shorter-like tenorist Brian Settles.
These two players give this release a crucially different feel, lending richer tonalities…
Nonesuch Records releases Steve Reich Collected Works, a twenty-seven-disc box set featuring music recorded during composer Steve Reich’s forty years on the label, on March 14, 2025, available to pre-order here.
The collection represents six decades of Reich’s compositions, ranging from It’s Gonna Rain (1965) to first recordings of his two latest works: Jacob’s Ladder (2023) and Traveler’s Prayer (2020). Two extensive booklets contain new essays by longtime Nonesuch President Robert Hurwitz, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, Steve Reich and Musicians percussionist Russell Hartenberger, producer Judith Sherman, and composer Nico Muhly, as well as a comprehensive listener’s guide by pianist and composer Timo Andres.
The debut album from cinematic electro-pop duo Ringdown, featuring Danni Lee Parpan and Pulitzer and Grammy winner Caroline Shaw, Lady on the Bike. The album celebrates the feeling of possibility in myriad forms: the possibility of love; the possibility of creating connection and community in a world trying to pull those things apart; the possibility of making music in new ways. This feeling of possibility glimmers like a disco ball throughout the album, radiating with a sense of movement, transformation, and wonder. “Ecstatically blissful,” says Night After Night’s Steve Smith. “There haven’t been too many duos like this one,” says Oregon ArtsWatch’s Matthew Neil Andrews. “If Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush had made a whole album of songs…
At a time when the powers that sadly be in America are trying their damnedest to erase and rewrite history, the latest release from Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson is a welcome reminder of the rich culture of the Black community and how much it has given to the world.
Twenty years after the Carolina Chocolate Drops emerged from the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina, two of its founding members get together once more for a collection that comes quite literally from the back porches and orchards amid the low rolling hills of the Piedmont, a discrete province of the Appalachians.
A story of “music, place and tradition”, as ethnomusicologist Joe Z Johnson writes in one section of the album’s erudite (and footnoted)…
…9-CD Box Set: including two sets of studio outtakes, a live concert and seven “fundamentals” from the band’s recorded workshops during this same period.
It’s hard not to wonder if Wilco‘s breakthrough 2002 release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, would have been such a critical success and so eagerly embraced by the indie rock community if it hadn’t become such a cause célèbre thanks to the band being unceremoniously dropped by Reprise Records, and then signed by Nonesuch after the album had become a hot item on the Internet.
Much of the critical reaction to the album, while almost uniformly enthusiastic (and rightly so), had an odd undertow that suggested the writers were not especially familiar with Wilco’s body of…
Ireland’s Donnacha Dennehy may have come closer than any other composer to bridging the gap between modernist composition and crossover minimalism. On Land of Winter (the title comes from the meaning of Hibernia, the Roman name for Ireland, which is actually a distortion of the names they were working from), he offers a 12-section work, one for each month, on the venerable theme of the seasons of the year.
Anyone can appreciate the contrasts here between winter storms and summer doldrums, but Dennehy invests this structure with largely atonal harmonies and a good deal of structural complexity. Overtones lurk in the music and are especially audible at the solstices and equinoxes, a delightful effect. The sequence starts with…
The original score for Ken Burns’s new two-part documentary, Leonardo da Vinci, with new compositions by Caroline Shaw, was released via Nonesuch Records. The album features performances by the composer’s longtime collaborators Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and Roomful of Teeth as well as John Patitucci. Shaw wrote and recorded new music for Leonardo da Vinci, marking the first time a Ken Burns film has featured an entirely original score.
Leonardo da Vinci is directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon. The film, which explores the life and work of the fifteenth century polymath Leonardo da Vinci, is Burns’s first non-American subject. It also marks a significant change in the team’s filmmaking style…
Yasmin Williams‘ guitar playing is spring-like and buoyant, a soothing rain shower of notes or green shoots reaching for the sun. Early on in her career, she developed an idiosyncratic style that blended tapping techniques and playing the instrument flat on her lap like a dobro. This was the approach on her 2018 debut, a D.I.Y. instrumental folk record that unexpectedly made it easily onto Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. She was then picked up by North Carolina indie Spinster, which released her more refined follow-up, 2021’s remarkable Urban Driftwood. The Virginia musician’s upward trajectory continues on Acadia, her third record and first for the legendary Nonesuch label. It’s also her most diverse release to date, introducing a more layered sound that…
Amelia Earhart was the pioneering American aviator who, among her many achievements, became the first women to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932. She led the way in other areas too, using her fame to champion women’s rights, including the Equal Rights Movement, endorse commercial air travel, write bestselling books, take on sponsorship deals and, more broadly, promote her passions in public. She had the ear of President Roosevelt and blazed a trail for women in an industry where female pilots and mechanics are still woefully underrepresented.
On Amelia, Laurie Anderson tells the story of Earhart’s life as she makes her fateful attempt, in 1937, to circumnavigate the world in a Lockheed Model 10-E Electra plane. It’s a riveting…
The world premiere recording of John Adams‘ Girls of the Golden West here is taken from the opera’s 2023 Los Angeles premiere (in a concert setting) at Walt Disney Hall with the composer conducting. It brings nearly the entire cast from the 2017 world premiere (the only change being mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack in place of J’Nai Bridges in the role of Josefa). The cast is led by soprano Julia Bullock as Dame Shirley (aka Louise Clappe, whose letters were the basis for much of the libretto), and it is abundantly clear how thoroughly vested they are in their characters and Adams’ music. Rather than focusing on just one “girl” during California’s gold rush, Peter Sellers, the librettist and the opera’s director, chooses three women on which to focus: Shirley as she observes life in…
Arriving behind two acclaimed 2021 releases – the Grammy-winning Narrow Sea (with Dawn Upshaw and Gil Kalish) and their first exclusive collaboration, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part – Rectangles and Circumstance reunites vocalist/Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and the super-versatile quartet Sō Percussion. Whereas Let the Soil was built around a set of duets by Shaw and individual members of the group (and included some material by pop and gospel songwriters), the ensemble-minded follow-up incorporates 19th century poetry by the likes of Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Christina Rosetti, as well as words by William Blake, Gertrude Stein, and the musicians themselves (and, in one case, music by Franz Schubert).
The original cast recording of the current Tony-nominated Broadway show Illinoise: A New Musical features music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens based on his album Illinois, a book by Tony Award-winning director-choreographer Justin Peck (Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, Carousel) and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury (Fairview, Marys Seacole), and direction and choreography by Peck.
The New York Times exclaims: “The vocalists do not seem to sing so much as pour emotion into our ears.” Variety says: “A thrilling, genre-defying Broadway musical brings the Sufjan Stevens album to lyrical life.” The Washington Post adds: “The landmark Sufjan Stevens album springs to epic life onstage. A testament to the delicateness…
Brad Mehldau’s two latest efforts for Nonesuch Records are heady pieces of work indeed. After some digressions from his customary jazz orientation in the form of Your Mother Should Know, an album of (almost) all Beatles material, and Jacob’s Ladder, a narrative supported by covers of prog music figures including Rush, Yes and Gentle Giant, the keyboardist composer returns to works inspired by esteemed classical figures in the form of Bach and Faure.
The former is a sequel to a similarly conceived project from 2018, an interweaving of original material with select pieces that inspired them. Brad’s own compositions are reflective of, but not derivative of, the foundational pieces there, as is also the case with Après Fauré; similar in…
Whether she sings loudly or whispers, Carminho grabs listeners by the soul. As a singer of Portuguese fado, her cultural imperative is to stop listeners in their tracks so they experience the emotions embedded in each song. One of the leading ambassadors of the traditional genre, Carminho has been surrounded by fado since before she was born. Her mother, Teresa Siquero, was a successful fado singer, and the family owned a small fado house where the music was shared nightly over food and wine by the folks in the neighborhood.
For Portuguesa, her second album with the prestigious US label Nonesuch, Carminho said she is taking a more intellectual approach to the genre as opposed to the instinctual, emotional…
The news that Ambrose Akinmusire likes owls comes as no surprise once you start pondering the watchful patience and swooping accuracy of this California-raised trumpet virtuoso’s jazz creativity for the past 15 years. Showered with plaudits in that time (with comparisons with Miles Davis often among them), Akinmusire shares Miles’ belief that less is more. He called this beautiful trio album Owl Song because his favourite birds’ cool occupancy of their world mirrors this project’s search for space and precious time in a clamorous human habitat he considers “assaulted by information”.
Akinmusire could have just played Owl Song as an ambient reverie in duo with his legendarily harmonious guitar partner Bill Frisell – but it’s the mix of that vibe and the quietly swinging…
The self-titled second album by Laetitia Tamko’s Vagabon project marked a shift from the singer/songwriter’s earlier guitar-based style to a much more electronic sound, as she mainly wrote music on her laptop while touring. Her life changed considerably with the death of her best friend in 2021. She relocated to a remote village in Northern Germany, with no phone service, and worked on music by herself. Going to raves in dark clubs helped her process her grief, and she continued incorporating more dance music influences into her songs. The album was finished in Los Angeles with co-producer Rostam Batmanglij, and additional production and co-writing by several other friends.
Right from the opening song, “Can I Talk My Shit?,” her lyrics are both more blunt and more…
Well, in all fairness, he DID title it Self-Portrait...