Music

The New York Fire Department delayed the first of Neil Young's six shows at the United Palace Theatre, in Washington Heights, by about 90 minutes. But it ended up being a scorcher anyway. Built in 1929 as one of movie baron Marcus Loews five "Wonder" theaters, the United Palace's elaborate detail work reflects "ancient pagan glories," according to a contemporary advertisement.

The 3,300-seat theater is best known as the home of Rev. Ike, to whom Young dedicated "The Believer," a song from his latest album, "Chrome Dreams II." Just like these church bells ringing," he sang, "I'm keeping my faith in you." The reverend, formally known as Dr. Frederick Eikernenkoetter, bought the theater in 1969 during a showing of "2001: A Space Odyssey," as Young noted after performing "Sad Movies," an unreleased song.

The night was like that. Even though Young has performed virtually the same set each night of his tour, which concludes with these shows, he made it seem tailored to the room and audience. Canceling wife Pegi Young's solo set in the interest of time, Neil settled among a circle of fine acoustic instruments for an 11-song solo acoustic set. It began with "From Hank to Hendrix" and included such relative obscurities as "Ambulance Blues" and "A Man Needs a Maid" as well as perennials like "Old Man" and "Heart of Gold."

Young brought the heat during an electric second set focusing on material from "Chrome Dreams II." He has a genius for musically illuminating the warm, safe places that shelter us from cold, dark nights. And his hearth blazed hottest during his electric set's closing song, "No Hidden Path," which he rendered in more than 10 minutes of electric thunder and lightning. Combining that number with the equally turbulent "Like a Hurricane" (the evening's final encore), Young again proved himself a guitar-punishing force of nature. Young had earlier suggested putting the evening's inconveniences behind us, and then paused before adding, "unless I happen to burst into flame." I'd say he came thisclose.

The best part of director Todd Haynes's upcoming head-scratcher of a Bob Dylan biopic, "I'm Not There," is My Morning Jacket-singer Jim James's freaky-yet-faithful version of "Goin' to Acapulco" (stream it here). Dylan recorded the song with The Band during their informal 1967 sessions in the basement of the Big Pink house in Upstate New York; Calexico, an Arizona group that effortlessly evoked The Band's shambling gait, accompanies James in the film. James and Calexico's "Acapulco" was also among the highlights of Wednesday night's "'I'm Not There': In Concert—A Celebration of the Film By Todd Haynes" at Manhattan's Beacon Theater. (The show benefited 826 National.)

The conceit of "I'm Not There" is that a half-dozen different actors, including Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett, portray the elusive songwriter at different points in his career. The film's soundtrack strives to be equally unpredictable, with Dylan songs covered by both his contemporaries (such as Richie Havens and Willie Nelson) and by performers a generation younger (like Sonic Youth, Cat Power, and Yo La Tengo). Al Kooper, Joe Henry, Dan Hicks, and other non-sound tracked Dylan fans showed up as well.

I left the Beacon glad to have caught Tift Merritt's impassioned "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," My Morning Jacket's burning "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You," and Terry Adams's "Rainy Day Women # 12 and 35." The evening's real showstopper, though, was the Roots, who reprised the 10-minute tuba-meets-Hendrix version of "Masters of War" (stream it here) they debuted at an earlier Dylan-athon. Apart from ongoing sound problems and lyrics challenges (shouldn't memorization be required of tribute acts?), the concert was undoubtedly the place to be for hardcore Dylan fans, even if the recipient of all this adoration himself was elsewhere and, as singer-actor John Doe noted, probably playing a gig. [streams via Hidden Track]

If the amazing Young@Heart Chorus has a star, it's probably Steve Martin. No, not that Steve Martin. This Steve Martin is a robust-voiced 80-year-old with the sharp-tongued spirit of a rocker a quarter his age. When Martin complains about being "just tired and bored with myself" in Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark," you believe him. And when he sings about heaven (in David Byrne's Talking Heads song "Heaven") as "a place where nothing ever happens," you're convinced he has pondered this idea more than once. Lyrics take on new meanings as they grow up, and the Northampton, Mass.-based Young@Heart Chorus, which ranges in age from 68 to 88, is there to pick up the pieces. Members have arrived and departed (dearly) since the group was formed in 1982. They've toured internationally, too, yet didn't deliver their first full-length New York performance until Sunday afternoon at the Paris Bar in Gramercy Park's National Arts Club. The show was part of the group's Road to Nowhere tour (another Talking Heads reference), as heralded by the 21 singers' stylish matching black T-shirts.

Accompanied by a five-piece band that included a couple of thirtysomethings, and led by chorus founder Bob Cilman, the Young@Hearts bookended their show with the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." They mixed classic-rock hits like the Zombies' "She's Not There" and the Velvet Underground's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side" with alternative-rock hits such as Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" and Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees." But unlike Mrs. Elva Miller, these seniors singing rock were way beyond shtick. Their material resonated with experience, loss, and even hope. After joining Steve Martin onstage in the middle of "Heaven," Young@Heart fan David Byrne led the group in a beautiful, possibly new, gospel-tinged song. "Even though a man is made of clay," Byrne sang, sneaking reading glasses up to his face to peak at the lyrics he held in his hand, "everything can change on one fine day."

Not to wax overly sentimental, but it wasn't until Nick Lowe strummed the first few chords of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" that I realized why I'd wanted to hear him sing outdoors at the base of the New York's towering World Financial Center One, a block away from Ground Zero. Has a better antiwar anthem come along since Lowe first released the song in 1974 on The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwartz? The most familiar version of the song is Elvis Costello's seething take on Armed Forces, which Lowe produced. And Curtis Stigers sang the most profitable for The Bodyguard, a hit movie whose hit soundtrack reportedly made Lowe a millionaire and allowed him to pursue his current solo trajectory.

Lowe has matured with enviable grace. Among the eleven solo albums the fifty-eight-year-old has recorded in addition to his work with pub rockers Brinsley Schwartz and rockabilly revivalists Rockpile, his three most recent are especially wonderful. Lowe reinvented himself in middle age as a deceptively mellow country crooner and marvelously expressive barroom balladeer in the tradition of say, Ernest Tubb, Faron Young, and Johnny Cash (to whose step-daughter, Carlene Carter, he was once married). From 1994's Impossible Bird through this year's At My Age, Lowe has written and sung material of increasingly dark wit and knowing maturity. The sardonic ire of "I Trained Her to Love Me," about a cad who attracts women only to break their hearts, is balanced by the redemptive modesty of "Hope For Us All," in which the singer reckons that if even a "feckless" man such as he can find love, anyone can. Having written "Cruel to Be Kind" and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" back in his own feckless youth, you know Lowe knows whereof he speaks.

Adding a cozy coda to Sunday's Farm Aid extravaganza, Willie Nelson performed for a few hundred auction winners,media, and industry types at New York's Hard Rock Cafe last night. The event marked the launch of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, a nonprofit organization founded by Nelson's wife, Annie. Nelson's set bore a remarkable resemblance to his closing Farm Aid Slot. "Jackson," "A Peaceful Solution," "Whiskey River," "Superman," "You Don't Think I'm Funny Anymore," and "On the Road Again" were all back, with Nelson evidently shifting the spotlight to his daughters, Paula and Amy, and sons, Micah and Lukas.

In addition to promoting sustainable biodiesel fuel, the evening also served to promote the sibs' own farm-fresh musical efforts. Amy Nelson's comedy-folk combo Folk Uke opened the show with a set of unadorned ditties more or less as raunchy as their name would suggest. But the evening's highlight was a short set by 40 Points, the sixties revival group fronted by the brothers. Lukas sounds uncannily like his father at times, and it's a little eerie to hear that Texas twang over Hendrixian guitar riffs and beats that echoed both the Allman Brothers Band and Santana at different times. They concluded with a topical cover of the Band's "King Harvest," which you will unfortunately not find on their excellent new album, which strangely seems available only on iTunes so far.

Separate ticket tables for "media," "VIPs," and "farmers" offered a clue as to the focus of the twenty-second Farm Aid concert, an all-day affair held yesterday on Randalls Island in the borough of Queens, New York. Sustainable local food and family farmers were the focus of the festival, with Neil Young their most eloquent spokesperson. "This song used to be about one thing and now it's about another, Young said by way of introducing "Homegrown," a former ode to marijuana cultivation now applied to organic produce. Accompanied by his wife, Pegi Young, and dobro player Ben Keith, Young stayed on message throughout an intimate acoustic set consisting of hits like "Heart of Gold," the seldom performed "Human Highway," and new material from his upcoming Chrome Dream II. Chatting between nearly every tune, Young endorsed conservative family values (moms wanting to feed their families pure, wholesome food) and railed against big agribusiness's chemically enhanced, energy-inefficient products.

Farm Aid's first few hours consisted of twenty-minute teaser sets by 40 Points, the Derek Trucks Band, the Ditty Bops, Montgomery Gentry, Supersuckers, Guster, Warren Haynes, and Billy Joe Shaver. With the exceptions of orthodox Jewish reggae star Matisyahu and Jimmy Sturr's polka group, the day's primary diversity often appeared to lie in performers' ages. Guitarists Haynes and Trucks reappeared with the Allman Brothers Band, who, along with Counting Crows, Dave Matthews, and Farm Aid founders Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Young, all played longer "festival-length" sets. Nelson joined Gregg Allman for extremely casual takes on "Midnight Riders" and "Sweet Melissa" prior to the Allmans' set. Mellencamp, who performed a couple of new songs and rearranged versions of older material, looked and sounded like a flashback to a vintage MTV era of manly hard rock. And if the exodus following his duet set with accompanies Tim Reynolds was any indication, it's a good bet that most of the (estimated) 20,000 in attendance were lured by Matthews's Southern preppie sincerity.

Willie Nelson closed the concert, as he traditionally does, with an unexpected, but not unlovable, old-fashioned family sing-along. This included daughter Paula's rendition of "Jackson," ripping guitar solos by son Lukas (who fronts the promising neopsychedelic band 40 Points with his drumming brother Micah), and "A Peaceful Solution," co-written by Willie and daughter Amy. The Youngs, Mellencamp, Matthews, and other performers joined the Nelson clan onstage for the song. So did a pair of Native Americans in colorful tribal garb and a pair of US soldiers, standing at strict attention in full dress uniforms, who sang nothing but conveyed volumes.

Jackie Greene, who I caught at Joe's Pub (NYC) Sunday night, is a great-looking twenty-six-year-old Californian who could pass for a decade younger. Greene's claim to fame these days is his recent recruitment in Phil Lesh & Friends, a Grateful Dead repertory band led by its former bassist, and the club was a little loopy with assertive Dead fans eager to hear Greene's version of the canon. And while Greene, accompanied by guitarist Tim Bluhm, delivered perfectly adequate renditions of "Friend of the Devil" and "Sugaree," the problem was that his original material, which he performed on guitar, piano, and harmonica, was equally adequate except not, you know, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Songs like "About Cell Block #9," "Farewell, So Long, Goodbye," and "The Rusty Nail" sounded unlived-in even as Greene cranked up the passion for these old-fashioned verses featuring jealous rages and do-wrong mamas. His records are a little more convincing, and he'll definitely make a certain type of Deadhead happy.

Same venue, following night, completely different story. My admiration for violinist Jenny Scheinman grows with every Tuesday she performs at her usual hangout, Barbès. But tonight she was enjoying a bigger stage and better sound system with a quartet, performing an unusually personal form of jazz-rock definitely in the spirit, if far from the letter, of the early ultraexperimental Grateful Dead (or Pink Floyd, in the case of one spacious epic). Scheinman was accompanied by her own low-key rock star, guitar experimentalist Nels Cline of Wilco, along with the nervously urgent rhythm section of bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Jim Black. And verily these cats did smoke. Scheinman has performed country, jazz, pop, and samba with the likes of Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell, and the Hot Club of San Francisco. All these experiences appear to blend together in compositions both serenely pastoral and anxiously urban. Yet it always sounded intensely intimate, of the moment, and resolutely nostalgia-free. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

We're goofing around in San Francisco for a few weeks, staying across 19th Avenue from Sigmund Stern Grove, home since 1938 to the Stern Grove Festival, the country's oldest free outdoor music series. The place smells great. Mornings, I've been running among the towering eucalypti and evergreens that surround the grove, which resembles a lush elongated bowl set surprisingly deep into surrounding neighborhoods lined with stucco houses. The grove's natural amphitheatrical landscape provides generous acoustics for the ten thousand or more picnickers, many perched high up the grove's slopes, who turn the place into a gigantic party most summer Sunday afternoons.

Breathing Under Water, a collaboration of sitar player Anoushka Shankar and laptop-computer jockey Karsh Kale, performed yesterday afternoon following the Non-Stop Bhangra Collective, a multiethnic group of local DJs, dancers, rapper, and live drummers who reignite the music of India's Punjab region. Dancers danced, picnickers picnicked, listeners listened, and gabbers gabbed as Shankar, Kale, and their group played a type of Indi-electronic-rock fusion that leaned heavily on the Hindustani (or Northern Indian) classical music semi-popularized by Anoushka's father, Ravi Shankar, who provided the melodic inspiration for at least one tune, which was dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva. Shankar and Kale's group also included a flutist, a singer, and a morsing (South Indian jaw harp) player. As Indian classical music, it was lighter than light; as picnic music for a warm, slightly foggy afternoon in a verdant natural womb, it sure beat a pops concert.

I counted thirty-four musicians onstage at the end of Frank London's Yiddish Carnival at Celebrate Brooklyn in Prospect Park's bandshell Sunday night, though it was hard to get an exact tally. The stage looked like a wild party and sounded like one, too. London, a veteran trumpeter in Downtown New York's jazz and Jewish music scenes, had assembled just about everyone who'd played during his four-hour shindig, cooking up a big-band blowout that blurred the boundaries between Gypsy brass bands, Yiddish theater music, klezmer, Brazilian maracatu drumming, Cuban percussion, folkie socialism, Downtown jazz, lounge jazz, hot jazz, modern jazz, and other strands of great Jewish music.

No act was allowed to wear out its welcome at this carnival co-produced by the Workmen's Circle/Arbiter Ring. Art Bailey's Orkestra Popilar played updated klezmer and East European music; London added his doleful horn to Jack Mendelson's timeless Ashkenazic cantorial singing; Joanne Borts belted out cabaret chestnuts with the Klez Dispensers; singer Adrienne Cooper made gefilte fish sound like a radical new dining concept with the help of pianist Marilyn Lerner; Maracatú New York combined blistering northeastern Brazilian drumming with New Orleans second-line rhythms; Wolf Krakowski and Fraidy Katz sang a kind of gritty, rocking Yiddish art music; and London's longtime band, the Klezmatics, played music with lyrics by Woody Guthrie from their terrific 2006 album Wonder Wheel.

London was always in the fray, either as ringmaster or sideman. But the day's real star turned out to be actor-singer Fyvush Finkel, who's still got it at eighty-four. Finkel brought the Borscht Belt back to his hometown, mixing cornier-than-Kansas jokes with tunes like "That Wonderful Girl of Mine." Finkel turned on the charm and danced like an exotic old bird. No carnival should really be without one.

Rhythm in general, and drums in particular, were the focus of two ear-opening shows I heard this week, each startling in its own way: Swiss keyboardist Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, which performed at Joe's Pub in the East Village, played a highly complex and nearly mechanical but extremely moving blend of jazz, classical, and ritualistic music Thursday evening. And on Sunday, the Japanese avant-garde rock band Boredoms led an army of seventy-seven drummers and drum sets in a loud and cathartic sunset ritual under the Brooklyn Bridge in its namesake borough's Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.

While Bärtsch calls his music "Zen funk," it struck me as a weird hybrid of American minimalist Steve Reich and the German electronic group Kraftwerk, both of whom are pretty funky in their own ways. The quintet's drummer, percussionist, and bassist establish polyrhythms that divided and reassembled themselves with the precision of a highly disciplined Japanese warrior and, say, a particularly sophisticated Swiss cuckoo clock. The group's fifth member, Stefan "Sha" Haslebacher, plays bass and contrabass clarinets that create a low harmonic rumble sometimes indistinguishable from the sound of the subway trains passing under the club. Echoes of Stravinsky, Bartok, and Satie could be heard alongside those of the Meters and Brian Eno. Bärtsch and Ronin's Stoa was one of my very favorite albums of 2006, and his music was even remarkable in person. Watch them perform one of their pieces here.

While Bärtsch delivers divinity in the details of his music, the Boredoms were all about simple gestures delivered on an epic scale. Their hour-long "77BoaDrum" was inspired by the auspicious date (7/7/07) as well as the Japanese star festival Tanabata. The event consisted of seventy-seven drummers arranged in a serpentine spiral, with the Boredoms on a platform in the center. Rhythmic events conducted by singer and bandleader Yamataka Eye would spread slowly outward from that platform, with drummers taking cues from the player to their right. Part of the fun was watching the progression and hearing sounds crescendo until they reached this percussive nebula's furthest flailer. With only 4,000 spectators allowed into the park, hundreds more watched from the Brooklyn Bridge or from adjacent shores of the East River. The drummers may have been somewhat less precise than your average college marching band, but this crowd scene reached for the stars and succeeded.

Yesterday dozens of African leaders convened in Ghana to debate the creation of a United States of Africa based on the European Union model. While the group's most ardent backer is Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, an even more celebrated African has stepped up to declare his willingness to serve as the Union's first president. Last week at Dakar University, Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour announced, "I pledge in front of you, student youth of Africa, to stand as a candidate to head the Union African government if the project is endorsed at the heads of state summit."

Youssou N'Dour is not the first African musician to stake this claim, however. Nigerian afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo Kuti was known as the "Black President" as early as 1976 and even released an album under that title in 1981. Kuti died of AIDS-related causes in 1997, unfortunately, but until his death he was as presidential an African presence as the continent had to offer. His legacy persists today in two musical sons, Femi Kuti and stepbrother Seun Kuti, the latter of whom performed last night at SOB's in Manhattan with his father's Egypt 80 big band.

Where Femi has carved out his own musical niche, Seun Kuti bears an uncanny onstage resemblance to his late father, whose West African take on James Brown-ian funk he also faithfully recreates. Seun's a lithe, almost serpentine presence, and Egypt 80 is still a juggernaut. In songs like "Many Things," about politics and media, or "Mosquito," an itchy number about Africa's malaria crisis (watch a Dakar performance of it here), the band would settle into a funky groove that Seun would add to and subtract from with dramatic hand gestures. Occasionally he'd break it down to just drum and bass, step up to the microphone for a saxophone solo, or make room for his three female backing singers to rotate various strategic parts of their bodies quite rapidly.

It was an inspiring show but over far too quickly. Where his father (who can be seen performing "Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense" here) was famous for all-night spectacles at his Lagos nightclub, the Shrine, Seun and his band were offstage after about ninety minutes. For anyone who didn't get enough, though, Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 perform at the Montreal Jazz Festival tomorrow.

Monday night I found myself in the Lower East Side's Bowery Ballroom watching a guy who calls himself Panda Bear sing and twirl knobs on an electronic console amid an attentive but subdued crowd. Panda Bear (AKA Noah Lennox) is the Animal Collective member behind my favorite song of the year. "Bros" is a dreamy and endlessly exhilarating quarter-hour plea for emotional space that any Pet Sounds fan could love. It's available on his challenging new solo album, Person Pitch, and you can hear a few minutes of it out on his MySpace page. Panda doesn't romanticize the sixties by any means; his beats and electronics can be dark and disturbing, not unlike Brian Wilson's own breakdown. He also seemed a little fragile alone onstage, his voice wavering uncertainly among the complicated beats and textures emerging from his rig as kaleidoscopic imagery swirled on a screen behind him. It's not easy being a one-man band.

I might not have mentioned Panda's minimalist thing if I hadn't been so struck by the contrast in performances while enjoying the heck out of Charles Gounod's Faust, which the Metropolitan Opera performed last night in the middle of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, my virtual backyard. Enjoying the opera with a few thousand families picnicking in front of a large outdoor stageful of musicians and full chorus was really no less intimate in its way than Panda's vulnerable performance in front of 500 self-conscious New York hipsters.

The Met's facility with Faust may have something to do with the fact that it was the company's first opera; they debuted it in 1883. The music was certainly ambitious and truly modern, in its way. Gounod's score is full of subtle digressions: two or three measures of, say, isolated flutes would convey enormous swaths of feeling. Tenor Fernando de la Mora, terrific as Faust, sang as though he were improvising the words on the spot, like those other great tenors Coltrane and Rollins. And you just can't beat hearing great music performed by top-notch musicians augmented by an incredibly clear sound system on a slightly chilly spring night. If you're around, the Met concludes its free park series with New Jersey performances of Faust and La Boheme this weekend.

Each time I walk into the medina, the mile-square medieval city that's the heart of Fes, Morocco, I promise myself I won't get lost in its mazelike alleyways. But of course I always do. The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music, on the other hand, is the punctual and well-ordered counterpart to the medina's chaotic and relentless mélange of sights, sounds, and smells, both charming and sometimes not so.

The Batha Museum courtyard, one of the most tranquil concert spaces ever, was the perfect location for my personal festival highlight, a Friday afternoon performance of Southern Indian classical music by vocalist Vasumathi Badrinathan. A deep-voiced, joyously improvising singer in the Carnatic tradition, Badrinathan's songs and single complete raga were accompanied by violin, mridangam (a double-headed barrel drum), and the ancient morchang (or so-called Jew's harp). The following day's Batha show was a much more sober affair consisting of Syrian singer Waed Bouhassoun, who accompanied her dry yet moving (to others, mostly) verses by the Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammmed Rumi on oud, and Uzbekistan singer Nadir Pirmatova's Uzbekistan songs reminiscent of Chinese folk music.

Lebanese singer Jahida Wahbé also concentrated on songs by Rumi at the tonier Bab Makina Friday night. Without understanding the Arabic lyrics, though, I tired rather quickly of her Streisand-esque emoting. Which made Syrian vocalist Elias Karam's following set all the more exciting. Although his music came from the same tradition of sacred poetry as Wahbé's, his arrangements shifted constantly through the course of each call-and-response tune. Karam would sing a verse with certain instruments at a certain tempo, then the orchestra would reply with a magnificent variation at a slightly brighter tempo. It was over far too soon.

The Dar Tazi courtyard, where different ensembles dug deep into the Sufi tradition every night at eleven, is another wonderful venue and a great place to wind down at the end of the day's three concerts. Sufi acts like Friday night's Chadilia Mchichia (from Tetouan, Morocco) attempted to raise audiences to a higher plane through repetitive beats and chants. As the elders looked on, however, one got the idea they were giving the younger B team a shot, and after an hour it was time to leave.

For the real Fes experience, however, one had only to enjoy each evening's free concert in the large plaza outside the medina's great gate, That's where you could hear Moroccan groups such as Mazagan and Darga\ turn up the volume for tens of thousands of fans and curious medina residents, many of whom expressed their hurling younger brothers high into the air. Darga, from Casablanca, cranked up a ten-man fusion spectacular that mixed everything from reggae, hip-hop, and acid rock with Algerian rai, Andalusia riffs, and trancey gnawa rhythms. It was exactly what a festival concerned with preserving the sacred and traditional in a complex contemporary world was supposed to be about.

For the past couple of days I've been in Morocco for the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music. The thirteenth edition of the festival is once again "presented under the high patronage of his majesty King Mohammed VI," and I'm part of a press junket that is also appreciating his patronage. The week-long event's "sacred" aspect is interpreted loosely. Some of the music heard during the fest's three or four daily concerts is religious, certainly, but much is more generally spiritual, or simply spirited.

This would apply especially to acts such as Angelique Kidjo, who was born in the West African nation of Benin and now lives in Brooklyn. She performed her energetic afropop in the Bab Makina palace courtyard to an upscale crowd that embraced her as an African sister. Kidjo was in a loquacious mood, too. "People talk about the new global community," she said in French. "But is it possible to keep your own culture and identity in such a world? I don't have the answer. I simply pose the question." She delivered something of an answer, though, in the music she performed from her new album, Djin Djin, a rooted yet cosmpolitan call for a return to African culture. Much of the audience joined her onstage for one of her final songs, "Ae Ae," which suggests that young Africans shouldn't be forced to move abroad in order to improve their lives.

Kidjo's query is at the heart of this festival, which was established following the first Gulf War as a means to reconcile the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds. And it would be hard to find a better crash course in many of the more important Islamic musical styles. Festival organizers wisely program nightly free concerts in the immense square near Bab Baoujlud, the great gate that serves as main entrance to Fes al Bali, the Arab world's largest functioning medieval city. These concerts seem to take their energy from the medina and draw audiences that would not otherwise be able to afford this music.

Wednesday night's Bab Boujloud act was the Akhtar Sharif Arup Vale. This Pakistan qawwali ensemble features the wildly soaring vocal style, accompanied by handclaps and harmoniums, made famous by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Last night's performers consisted of three great female singers, Tunisia's Sonia Mbarak, Algeria's Beidhja Rahal, and Morocco's own Fadwa el Malki, all accompanied by the Fes Orchestra. The three vocal styles may have been quite different, but they all obviously came from the same place musically.

Sufi Nights, another remarkable festival tradition, feature a different aspect of the Muslim sect each evening at 11 in the Dar Tazi courtyard garden. Wednesday's Chekouriya ensemble, from northwest Morocco, consisted of thirteen singers, arranged in a horseshoe shape, whose mesmerizing, droning songs were accompanied by a single bass drum. But last night the gnawa ensemble Ouled Kamar (AKA the Sons of the Moon, Keepers of the Invisible Sacred Music) was an eighteen-strong mass of kinetic energy that had the crowd in a near-frenzy at times and sent at least one woman into a full-on trance state.

Afternoon concerts are held beneath a giant oak tree in the serene and beautiful garden of the city's Batha Museum. Singing birds accompany all performers at this location, and yesterday their featured guests were the Piñana brothers' flamenco trio and Diapason, a Cuban string quintet. The two groups performed singer Curro Piñana and guitarist Carlos' flamenco mass. Diapason added subtle Cuban rhythmic accents to Curro Piñana's passionate evocations of the Christian liturgy. It was sacred, spiritual, and spirited all at once.

Evan Ziporyn was wailing on his bass clarinet alongside the high-octane TACTUS as I wandered into the large and light, yet cathedral-like, Winter Garden in Battery Park's World Financial Center on Saturday evening. TACTUS (the Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Ensemble) and Ziporyn were playing his aptly titled Drill, a work that peaked from intensity to intensity. It was the second piece in this year's Bang on a Can Marathon, an epic and hotly anticipated event that this year stretched out over twenty-six hours in honor of its twentieth anniversary (making last year's nine-hour version seem almost stingy in comparison). The marathon, which features dozens of composers and scores of performers, was held in conjunction with the River to River Festival, a free 500-event summer series held at different locations around the city.

Bang on a Can was formed in 1987 by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe as an outlet for composers whose works were unsuited for traditional institutions due to style, length, instrumentation, or attitude. And while the work BOAC champions and funds (through their innovative People's Commissioning Fund) is certainly "serious," it is also seriously entertaining most of the time, with an emphasis on rhythm and influences often rooted in rock, jazz, and international music. They appeal to audiences of all ages, and if a single organization can renew interest in contemporary music, this is it.

I heard maybe a dozen works during my four hours at the marathon, and (with only a couple of exceptions) they'd all be worth hearing again. De facto house band the Bang on a Can All-Stars performed four pieces by as many Myanmar composers with Kyaw Kyaw Naing, who plays the pat waing, a traditional Burmese instrument consisting of tuned drums arranged in a circle behind a kitschedelic gold-leaf screen. The music was fast and intricate and performed with nimble good humor. The San Diego percussion ensemble red fish blue fish played Signal Intelligence, an even more complex work derived from algorhythms. Composer Christopher Adler described it beforehand as his interpretation of "the secret information we get from all the spying networks." The dramatic string quartet Ethel played "Arrival" and "Memory," two movements from a larger work by Brazilian film composer Marcelo Zarvos; "Memory" involved flamboyant flamenco-like shoe stomping.

Pairs of trumpets, trombones, and bass trombones in two balconies at the rear of the space made a mountainous racket during Lois V Vierk's Jagged Mesa, a series of constantly changing fanfares that eventually evoked a vintage Western soundtrack. The Books were greeted with almost pop-star adulation and split the difference between art music and band in pieces like "Be Good to Them Always" and "The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?" that owe a great deal to Laurie Anderson. Synchronized film footage from their thrift store home-movie scavenging expeditions flickered behind the Massachusetts duo as they played their acoustic guitar, electric cello, and various electronics.

The final work I heard—and saw—was composer Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison's Gotham (the pair collaborated on a remarkable 2002 tribute to cinematic compost titled Decasia: The State of Decay) performed by TACTUS. Gotham's anxiously crescendoing music and vintage film footage relates a history of New York—from sheep grazing in Central Park to the September 2001 tragedy that occurred across the street from where I sat. The power, immediacy, and emotion of Gordon and Morrison's work seemed the perfect conclusion to the day, so I headed home. Thousands remained, however, to enjoy the twenty-one hours of sound sculpting that would follow.

Bang on a Can's next marathon takes place July 28 at their summer home at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Twenty-three-year-old Grace Potter looks like the girl next door -- if the g.n.d. happens to be wearing a low-cut mini-skort and white Nancy Sinatra go-go boots -- and she sings like a house on fire. At Joe's Pub in New York's East Village last night, Potter and her band, the Vermont-based Nocturnals, were pre-celebrating the August release of her strong forthcoming album, This Is Somewhere, with a semi-industry show. The gig felt special -- but you get the impression that Grace Potter is good at making every gig feel special, a useful skill when you spend half your life on the road.

Potter ambled onstage singing credible gospel ("Nothing But the Water," from the group's 2006 sophomore release) and sporting a Gibson Flying V. She's not a great guitarist, but you can't help getting swept up in her passionate interplay with the group's real guitarist, Scott Tournet. Potter's more impressive, at least musically, behind her B3 organ, when the Nocturnals sound like Delaney & Bonnie 2.0. It's all very 1971 meets 2007.

This Is Somewhere contains much the same understated political commentary as Norah Jones's recent Not Too Late. Somewhere's first single, "Ah Mary" (available on iTunes) rages bitterly about a girl (or nation) who "puts herself just a notch above humankind," the kind of trouble who'll "bake you cookies then she'll burn your town." Potter has a big bluesy voice with a studied country tinge that's only going to improve with age, and her band has to play big to complement it. The Nocturnals finished their show with "If I Was From Paris." Potter's stage-dominating swagger recalled Rod Stewart, with the Faces, on health food.

For many, the eight hours spent roaming among the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival's twelve Fair Grounds Race Course stages is merely a prelude to equally rich nightclubbing in the city itself. While most shows at dozens of area clubs start at nine or ten, many kick off much later, at two or three; these entail either a post-fest nap or a commitment to a kind of ongoing fugue state if you plan on hitting the Fair Grounds in anything less than a zombie trance the following morning.

On Thursday, the evening prior to Jazz Fest's second weekend, our posse warmed up at the legendary Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n Bowl, where Geno Delafose & French Rockin' Boogie and Keith Frank and the Soileau Zydeco Band were playing Creole dance music like "He-Haw Breakdown" and "Stole My Chicken" while we rocked and bowled and ate rice and beans. Chicago improvising rockers Umphrey's McGee worked all kinds of complex grandiosity until 5 a.m. at the House of Blues on Friday night. Saturday night began with the Joe Krown Organ Combo's deeply satisfying funk at the Banks Street Bar, followed by a surprisingly fresh-looking 3 a.m. crowd for a live rap group whose name I never caught. And Sunday night at the Blue Nile belonged to Skerik, a versatile saxophonist-composer whose music sounds richer, fresher, and more daring each time I catch him.

The Sunday Fair Grounds were hot though less crowded than Saturday. The Black Eagles Mardi Gras Indians were in full plumage at the Jazz & Heritage Stage as we drifted in. After picking up coffee and beignets, we made our way over to the Congo Square/Louisiana Rebirth Stage, where Elder Edward Babb & the Madison Bumble Bees of Winnsboro, South Carolina, were praising the Lord with more than a dozen trombones and tubas. Babb, who used to lead New York's McCollough Sons of Thunder Brass Band, is an elder of the United House of Prayer for All People, and his music is a high-energy gospel "shout" tornado inspired by a literal interpretation of Psalm 150 ("Praise him with the sound of trumpet").

With the exception of enjoying Steely Dan with 60,000 others at the Acura Stage, I concentrated on local sounds: the old-timey Savoy-Doucet Cajun Band, Terrance Simien & the Zydeco Experience, Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, the funky Soul Rebels Brass Band, and, last of all, Beausoleil. Jazz Fest, it has been said, is as much about the music you miss as the music you hear; so if I had to do it over again, and next year I probably will, I might try to find more time for Allen Toussaint, Harry Connick Jr. (seated behind me on our Jetblue flight home), Gilberto Santa Rosa, Dr. Michael White, Galactic, and on and on. Or maybe not.

If this year's edition of Jazz Fest is any indication, things are looking up a little in New Orleans. Attendance obviously exceeded last year's 250,000, and you could detect defiant optimist everywhere—not least of all in John Boutte's references to both Friday's monsoon and Katrina when he sang "They're tryin' to wash us away" in Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927."

The second weekend of the thirty-eighth annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival went by in a blissful blur of music, food, and extreme weather conditions. For me, it began Friday morning at the Cajun-centric Fais Do-Do Stage with the youngish Lost Bayou Ramblers' high-spirited contemporary Cajun sounds, and it ended at the same place three days later with fiddler Michael Doucet's majestic Beausoleil, who performed the same style with more than thirty years' experience and almost classical finesse.

Friday's inauspicious gray skies broke open shortly after noon, resulting in a monsoon of biblical proportions. The downpour would have given me the blues, except that we were fortunate enough to take cover in the Blues Tent. A slowly growing lake in the middle of the crowd provided a slightly ominous echo of Katrina as we passed the time with traditionalist blues brothers Po' Henry and Tookie, country bluesman Louis "Gearshifter" Youngblood, and zydeco soul slinger Sunpie and the Louisiana Sunspots as the torrent waxed and waned outside. As the water inside reached dancers' knees, we made a break for the jazz tent where John Boutte, a singer's singer who deserves to be much better known outside the Crescent City, was singing Stevie Wonder.

Saturday was sunny, hot, crowded, and nearly perfect. It began with college rock from Rotary Downs and the punky comic funk of the Morning Forty Federation. The latter geniuses bit the hand that booked them by referring repeatedly to the event they were playing as the "Shell AT+T Sprint Southern Comfort Acura Festival" in honor of the branding deals that keep this six-day, twelve-stage shindig afloat. We fueled ourselves with mini-meals of cochon du lait po-boys, tajadas (fried plantains and barbecued pork), oysters and spinach, muffaletta sandwiches, and several of the nineteen different crawfish dishes on hand as we wandered from stage to stage. Nicholas Payton played nearly as many different styles of trumpet in the jazz tent, and the blind guitarist Snooks Eaglin dusted off vintage R&B tunes much of the audience probably danced to in high school four decades ago. For the second time in as many years, the day ended with Donald Harrison's onstage transformation from suave jazz trumpeter into a majestically befeathered Big Chief of the Congo Nation Mardi Gras Indian tribe. David Letterman keyboardist-bandleader Paul Shaffer and British jazz singer Corinne Bailey Rae joined the chanting, stomping party and if there was anyplace better in the musical world to be, I couldn't imagine it.

I'll wrap up Sunday's highlights and the equally fine nightlife I stayed up way too late for a little later.

Nellie McKay does a remarkable impression of an utter ditz. The singing, songwriting pianist arrived onstage at Manhattan's Zankel Hall Friday night carrying an awkward armful of notebooks and sheet music, which she smooshed onto the Steinway's music stand before sitting down and tearing into the very funny "Feminists Don't Have a Sense of Humor." For ninety minutes, and minus the strings that accompanied her prior local gig, McKay pinballed between her diverse musical personas. "Gladd" evoked the torchy heyday of Julie London, "Old Enough" the piano-stool toppling antics of Jerry Lee Lewis, "Waiter" the cabaret sophistication of Annie Ross, and an improvised atonal interlude acknowledged our location directly underneath Carnegie Hall's better-known Stern Auditorium. She sang tunes from both of her double-CD albums, Get Away From Me and Pretty Little Head, as well as material from an unprintably titled upcoming album.

What ties all her music together, I think, is the sense of a young performer (she's only twenty-five) with a sense of history, many beautiful ideas, and a body full of raw urban nerve endings struggling with a world of hurt. There was a new global aspect to McKay's performance tonight. At different times she sang (poorly, it must be admitted) in Japanese, French, German, and Mandarin. The latter tune involved a three-part audience sing-along (ending in a group primal scream) and an impassioned rant about Gongtan, a 1,700-year-old southwestern Chinese town that will be flooded when a downstream hydroelectric dam is completed later this year. McKay is a reluctant vegetarian and ardent animal-rights advocate possessing no qualms about using her stage status as a bully pulpit. As refreshingly talented as she can be vaguely annoying, McKay is definitely one of New York's more organically homegrown artists.

Who would have expected to hear Ricky Skaggs sing Rick James's "Super Freak"? More to the point, Who would even want to watch a God-fearing, bluegrass-loving disciple of Bill Monroe do such a thing?

Skaggs's relatively minor debasement came at the end of jazz-rock pianist Bruce Hornsby and Skaggs's show at New York's Concert Hall last night. Padding their recently released collaboration with lots of amiable patter (except when Hornsby, in Dennis Miller mode, went over Skaggs's head entirely with his references to the likes of Elliot Carter), the pair delivered a nicely paced set of briskly picked tunes.

Hornsby turned out to be a fluid, spidery-fingered addition to Skaggs's Kentucky Thunder sextet, which assembled into a four-guitar acoustic army formation when Skaggs wasn't chopping rhythms on his mandolin or delivering short elegant solos. Hornsby songs like a "Mandolin Rain" (naturally), "The Way It Is," and "The End of the Innocence" (his hit collaboration with Don Henley) sparkled in their new arrangements. Skaggs stepped up to Hornsby with "Gulf of Mexico Fishing Boat Blues," an instrumental they touted as "the first bluegrass song in 5/4 time."

Skaggs also introduced Hornsby to the music of the late Kentucky traditionalist Roscoe Holcolm, whose "Across the Rocky Mountains" they performed as a long, meditative one-chord vamp. And they of course dipped into traditional bluegrass with Bill Monroe's "Uncle Pen," Doug Kershaw's "Sally Joe," and the folk ballad "Little Sadie." The latter song famously recounts how the singer is sentenced to death for the seemingly blithe murder of his lover or wife. Look to the old songs for the real super freaky.

Located directly under Carnegie Hall's main stage, 650-seat Zankel Hall completed the institution's musical triplex in 2003 and has turned out to be one of the most acoustically accommodating venues in New York. I found myself there twice this weekend, enjoying a pair of shows that couldn't have been more different yet provided an unexpected bridge between otherwise distant musical cultures.

Friday night's spectacular performance by Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra began with Fode Lassana Diabate sauntering onstage and hammering out rhythmically complex and melodically enticing patterns on a wooden balafon, West Africa's xylophone. He was soon joined by a djembe drum, a small ngoni guitar, a drum set, electric guitar, bass, and piano, each of which generated radically distinct rhythms that eventually fused into a joyously kinetic whole.

Toumani Diabate let things settle down before seating himself behind his twenty-one-stringed kora, a thumb-plucked combination of lute and harp whose cascading tones and percussive bite resemble an African harpsichord. Diabate's music was ancient at heart, with roots extending back to the consolidation of the Mandinka tribal empire in the thirteenth century. And most of the bandmembers were the latest in long family lines of musicians known as djelis, or griots, whose original function was to praise the rich and powerful through song. Diabate's band does a lot more than that, however. By adding jazz, funk, and salsa to the mix, they create arrangements that rose to remarkable heights again and again as two singers praised the bandleader, their multi-country homeland, and the old ways. Hear them on last year's Boulevard de l'independence and get a rough visual approximation of it here.

After basking in Diabate's kora afterglow for a couple of days, a friend took me back to Zankel Hall last night for what turned out to be an unexpectedly complementary delight: pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's lecture-performance titled "A Promenade in 88 Keys and 300 Years." Where kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate had compressed some 700 years of Mandinka musical history into ten players onstage for ninety minutes, Aimard, alone at a piano, performed thirty-two piano works, either in part or in their entirety, that did much the same for his own percussive stringed instrument. (Aimard discusses the "intensity, meaning, and renewal" he seeks in music in this New York Times interview.) Beginning with Scarlatti and Bach and ending with contemporary composers Marco Stroppa and George Benjamin, Aimard's narrative used the piano to reflect three centuries of Euro-American cultural history. While powerful Africans employed kora-playing griots to enhance their brands, Western composers looked to the piano to convey their best ideas. The mutual bottom line? Africa and the West are almost unimaginable without them.

Aimard continues his Time Signature series at Zankel on May 10 with a program of twentieth-century piano-percussion pieces by Bartok, Ligetic, Reich, Nancarrow, and others.

I missed pianist Andrew Hill's free concert in lower Manhattan's historic Trinity Church yesterday afternoon, alas. But I just discovered a wonderfully shot and recorded video steam of Hill's inspired hour here, so huzzah! My real consolation prize, though, was the first set of guitarist Nels Cline's two evenings at the Jazz Standard, where he's leading a sextet in raucously illuminating interpretations of Hill's music.

An undersung jazz giant, Andrew Hill released a beautiful album titled Time Lines on Blue Note last year as he was (and still is) battling cancer. Cline's quintet took apart, reassembled, and electrified Hill's often labyrinthine compositions. Cline is a contemporary guitar god, a longtime jazz experimentalist enjoying semipopular adulation as a recent addition to Jeff Tweedy's constantly evolving country-rock band, Wilco. Last night's band, an augmented version of the (strictly instrumental) Nels Cline Singers, added trumpeter Bobby Bradford, electronic accordionist Andrea Parkins, and clarinetist Ben Goldberg to Cline's usual rhythm section of bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola. You can hear them do what they do on New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill.

It was hard to tell when compositions ended and improvisation began, particularly since Cline had arranged several Hill tunes into long suites. Shards of Hill's melodies were passed between players like beautiful yet fractured balls of energy. The last of the set's three works, "McNeil Island"/"Pumpkin," worked up to a thoroughly rocking conclusion. It was Hill's music, alright, but it had never been played like this before.

Seeing record producer Joe Boyd read from his new memoir, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, at Joe's Pub last night brought a couple of Woody Allen movies to mind.

The first was Zelig. Raised in New Jersey, Joe Boyd seems to have been everywhere any music fan of a certain age, and with a certain passion for hardcore blues, folk music, and the psychedelic sixties, would have wished to have been. Boyd has illuminating stories about booking the likes of nearly forgotten Southern blues greats Lonnie Johnson and Sleepy John Estes while still a student during the early-sixties East Coast folk revival. He became a believer after hearing Bob Dylan serenade a pair of girls with "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Masters of War" in a tiny bedroom during a party. He recorded classic albums by Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, and Richard and Linda Thompson. And he enjoyed both the peaks and valleys of the sixties as founder of legendary London psychedelic ballroom UFO and manager of the Incredible String Band during their Woodstock debacle.

And there was a little bit of Marshall McLuhan's appearance in Annie Hall during Boyd's enhanced reading, too. Discussing his collegiate passion for the blues, he was able to invite longtime co-conspirator Geoff Muldaur onstage to perform Johnson's "He's A Jelly-Roll Baker." He enlisted Geoff and Maria Muldaur's daughter, Jenni, to evoke the oceanic folk spirit of the late Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny's "The Sea." And Robyn Hitchcock, as sophisticated yet pixielike a musical eccentric as could be, blew us away with his renditions of the Incredible String Band's "Chinese White" and Nick Drake's "River Man."

White Bicycles ends prior to Boyd discovering the joys of non-Western popular music and subsequently producing the likes of Cubanismo, Balkana, and Toumani Diabate. I think there may be a sequel in there somewhere. Until he gets around to it, you can still catch Boyd reading in Philadelphia, Cambridge, and Los Angeles over the next few days.

The Roches made it sound as though it were nearly impossible to get a hometown gig, but a few nights ago the New York Society for Ethical