Nonesuch Records is set to release the label debut of North Carolina–based string band the Carolina Chocolate Drops on February 23. Produced by Joe Henry, Genuine Negro Jig features string band interpretations of Blu Cantrell’s “Hit ‘Em Up Style” and Tom Waits’ “Trampled Rose,” as well as a pair of original compositions, alongside a number of traditional tracks. NPR calls the band “the hottest thing to hit the old-time music community in decades.”

Wilco's European tour comes to a close this week with two shows in the Netherlands. Tonight's concert at the Paradiso in Amsterdam will be webcast live on the band's site. There are already more live performances planned for next year, including a gala benefit honoring Neil Young as MusiCares Person of the Year during Grammy week, a Canadian tour, and, now, the End of the Road Festival in England, which the band will headline next September.

Wilco's European tour concludes in the Netherlands next week, where the band will webcast Monday night's show in Amsterdam live. The group's much-anticipated contribution (with Feist and Jamie Lidell) to Beck's Record Club is now available: "Little Hands" from the 1969 Skip Spence album Oar. Also on the covers front, Peter Gabriel's forthcoming covers album will include songs by The Magnetic Fields and Randy Newman.

John Adams will be at the Art Institute of Chicago this evening to give the Chicago Humanities Festival's President's Lecture: Where Music and Literature Collide. On Saturday, he will be at the Harman Center for the Arts in Washington, DC, to receive the 2009 NEA Opera Honors Award at a ceremony hosted by actor/singer Brian Stokes Mitchell and soprano Shirley Verrett.

Youssou N'Dour's recent 50th birthday was marked with a cover article from Songlines and a BBC radio documentary. "I'd never heard a voice like it," Peter Gabriel tells the BBC of first hearing Youssou's music, "so smart and emotional at the same time." Youssou is due to perform at an event by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, this weekend and will receive the Medal of Honor from Lille, France, during next week's World Forum Lille.

The Low Anthem is set to close out its tour with Blind Pilot at the Paradise in Boston tonight. Earlier this week, during a stop in Charlottesville, Virginia, the band taped a performance of "To Ohio" for WNRN now on YouTube. The Boston Herald tracks the band's rise to larger venues while retaining the "crackling Americana ethos" fans and critics have come to appreciate. The band has contributed a track to Hard Rock's benefit album to fight hunger and poverty.

Punch Brothers recently announced via Twitter that they've "just put the finishing touches on the 18th of 18 songs that we've earmarked for our new record." Even with that to look forward to, the band also has two New York performances of A Prairie Home Companion coming in early December. Until then, Paste has published a video interview with the Punch Brothers from the CMJ music conference in which the guys give some insight into their instruments.

Steve Reich's Drumming, once described by the New York Times as a piece that "inhabits our bones and viscera," makes novelist Kim Echlin's playlist in the Times blog Paper Cuts. "It is gorgeous process music," she writes, "lasts about an hour ... and you feel surprised, as if suddenly waking from a brief dream, when it is over." So Percussion performs the piece in an all-Reich program at Stanford in January, at which the composer joins on his Clapping Music.

Nonesuch Records is set to release Realism, the new album from The Magnetic Fields and the band's follow-up to the 2008 album, Distortion, on January 26, 2010. More information will be forthcoming very shortly, but in the mean time, we've got the cover at left and a list of the album's 13 track titles.

Natalie Merchant heads to London this week for the first of several performances in the UK and Continental Europe in the coming weeks. To mark these events and Natalie's forthcoming Nonesuch debut, due out in early 2010, Nonesuch.com is taking a look back at the singer-songwriter's career in a special video piece, available now at nonesuch.com/media.

The Low Anthem is closing out its month-long US tour with Blind Pilot in Boston on Thursday. There's much more ahead, including shows in Europe and back in the States for several dates with Josh Ritter and a WFUV benefit with Rosanne Cash. Now, the band announces a two-week, ten-city tour with The Avett Brothers, across the Midwest, in February and March 2010.

Tony Allen—best known for his work as drummer and musical director for Fela Kuti—will make his Nonesuch debut with the release of Secret Agent on April 13. Following the album's European release on World Circuit earlier this year, The Guardian proclaimed, “There is no question that Tony Allen is a genius, one of the greatest percussionists in the history of popular music,” while Observer Music Monthly said, “If you’re wondering why Afrobeat is hip, start here.”