Fans will have less than 24 hours to soak in the new Brandi Carlile album In These Silent Days before the singer-songwriter takes the stage on Friday, but if lead single “Right on Time” is any proof, it’ll be another country-pop-rock powerhouse of cathartic high notes and comforting lows. A virtuoso at swirling together joy, sorrow, longing and hope, Carlile’s ten new tracks crafted during quarantine are sure to deliver the same warm, enchanting harmonies she so effortlessly binds with driving guitars, soaring strings and glittering pianos. Live, new songs will undoubtedly be paired with favorites like the strikingly raw ballad “The Joke,” and the sweetly gut-wrenching “The Story.”

Brandi Carlile
Fri, 6:30pm, $69.95
Frost Amphitheatre, Palo Alto

Dreamers’ Circus is a trio out of Copenhagen, Denmark that fuses classical music and Nordic folk (with jazz influences as well), a formula that has made them one of the most big-ticket acts in their home country. Using the basic ingredients of piano/accordion, violin and cistern (a string instrument similar to a lute), the three young men emerged a decade ago to perform around the world, occasionally in collaboration with symphony orchestras. They’ve also played alongside many of the most luminous names in contemporary Celtic folk. They come to Stanford’s Bing Studio unaccompanied, just the three of them, as a showcase for their hybrid style.

Dreamers’ Circus
Thu, 7pm & 9pm, $40+
Bing Studio, Stanford

Three decades after his death, Stanford Live brings Robert Mapplethorpe’s legendary photographs back to life. Created by composer (and guitarist for The National) Bryce Dessner, librettist Korde Arrington Tuttle and director Kaneza Schaal, Triptych (Eyes of One on Another) “explores the origins and impact of Mapplethorpe’s controversial photography.” A multimedia event, the evening features the vocal group Roomful of Teeth and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, as well as the poetry of Patti Smith and Essex Hemphill. Smith’s book about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2010. Admission is $10 for students.

Triptych
Thu, 7:30pm, $28+
Memorial Auditorium, Stanford

Where is AI taking human agency and democracy? It’s not a question for Alexa. Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, will moderate a conversation between Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor of computer science, and Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Li, a former vice president for Google Cloud, has been identified as a top mind in AI by Forbes; he co-created ImageNet, changing the face of deep learning. Harari, a historian and author from Israel, counts Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as fans. Together the three will ruminate upon “The Coming AI Upheaval.”

AI Upheaval
Mon, 7pm, Free
Memorial Auditorium, Stanford

Stanford’s Taiwanese Cultural Society celebrates the Bay Area’s diverse Asian population by indulging visitors with a traditional Taiwanese open-air market. Student associations and vendors will share the cultural and culinary customs of Taiwan and the surrounding region. By virtue of its location—near mainland China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and Korea—the island state has long served as a crossroads for various Asian countries and as a gateway to the wider world. Visitors can snack on báhn mì while taking in contagious K-pop performances and punchy martial arts demonstrations.

Stanford Night Market
Sat, 5pm, Free
White Plaza, Stanford

Miramar’s musical knowledge is staggering. Over the course of an hour, pianist Marlysse Simmons Argandona and singer Reinaldo Alvarez cover classical, salsa, reggae, tropicalia and bossa nova.

But what they really want to talk about is boleros.

“To me, the bolero is the ultimate expression of joy, and the ultimate expression of sadness,” says Reinaldo Alvarez, one of the Richmond, Virginia, group’s two singers. “It’s a celebration of sadness, a sadness that’s almost necessary to life. And it’s a celebration of the love, the mad love you have to go through to get to that one dream love.”

In other words, the bolero is romance personified. A ballad form originating in Cuba in the late 1800s, it is slower and more contemplative than salsa, and exalts the tumultuous side of love, wringing it for all its emotional weight in songs of great loss and want.

Like goth, emo and trip-hop music (and as a predecessor to all three), the bolero finds catharsis in the deep end of the human spirit, and it quickly struck a chord across all of Latin America. After emerging in Cuba, boleros spread throughout Puerto Rico and Mexico, into Central and South America, as musicians all over the western hemisphere took up the form.

Among them, one composer stands out: Puerto Rican songwriter Sylvia Rexach.

“She’s a pretty amazing woman,” Simmons Argandona says. “She only released one album, but her name is known because other musicians performed her songs a lot.” So much so that in 2001, Rexach was posthumously inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame. Along with composing boleros, Rexach wrote screenplays for radio, joined the U.S. Army during WWII, and formed Las Damiselas, the first all-female group in Puerto Rico.

But outside of Puerto Rico, her name is hardly known. In fact, when Miramar began choosing which boleros to cover, Simmons Argandona didn’t even know who she was.

“I grew up knowing about boleros, but not the ones Miramar does,” says the group’s pianist, who is first generation Chilean American. “Rei is an avid record collector and DJs on the side, so he had a lot of records of Puerto Rican bolero albums, and they were performing a lot of Sylvia Rexach songs. We were discovering these songs and realizing it was all her.”

Soon they found themselves with a list of boleros comprised mostly of Rexach works, songs like “Alma Adentro,” an homage to Rexach’s deceased brother, which, on Dedication to Sylvia Rexach, takes on a timeless quality thanks to the gently purring organ part played by Simmons Argandona.

In addition to covers of Rexach boleros, Dedication to Sylvia Rexach also features three originals by Miramar, songs that are woven seamlessly in with the selection of tunes from the mid-20th century. For their originals, Alvarez looked inside himself, searching for the exact kind of sadness to evoke.

“There’s a word particular to the Brazilian musical culture called saudade,” he says. “And saudade is about finding some kind of comfort or happiness within sadness. I’m definitely trying to evoke sadness, but I want to make it beautiful. When I write a song, I don’t make it about something particular that I remember or somebody in particular that I knew. I try to make it about a particular kind of sadness that I’ve felt before, and illustrate it in a way that somebody can look at the lyrics and say ‘I’ve felt that before.’”

While at first blush Miramar might seem like some curio of a distant past (Cuban music from the 1800s?), Dedication to Sylvia Rexach, the band’s first album, is very much alive, filled not just with nostalgia but with incredible musicianship and a modern spirit—a spirit even more on display on their upcoming single for the legendary soul label Daptone Records.

And though they will tell you there is nothing political about their music, Miramar comes at a time when the U.S. president has demonized Latin Americans and turned his back on Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Coming when they do, Miramar are a welcome counterargument to the blustering of a conman: a moving reminder of the value of Latin American cultures, music and lives.

Miramar
Dec 1, 7pm, $35
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford

Barber Shop Chronicles is a funny, poignant journey through community and culture. Written by playwright Inua Ellams, Barber Shop Chronicles traverses African barber shops in Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala and Lagos, and eventually winds up in London. Along the way, the play explores how the barber shop is a central hub of activity in society—a place where people can learn, confess, share wisdom and grow through collaborative knowledge. Tickets for Thursday and Friday night’s presentations are sold out. Matinee and evening showings are still open on Saturday.

Barber Shop Chronicles
Sat, 2:30pm & 7:30pm, $55+
Roble Studio Theatre, Stanford

The first time Evan Ziporyn heard David Bowie’s album Blackstar, it was from the other side of a wall. The Boston composer was at an artists retreat in Florida when he heard his neighbor in the next room playing music way too loud.

Ziporyn plays bass clarinet, and he was trying to practice. No one would have blamed him if he yelled, banged on the wall or pleaded for quiet in a less aggressive manner. But he didn’t do any of that.

“I remember vividly practicing to it through the wall,” he says. “He was listening to it obsessively. So I just played along with it.”

Ziporyn’s decision to go with the flow turned what could have been an annoyance into a bold new artistic direction. On Nov. 7, he comes to Stanford’s Bing Concert Hall, leading his 26-person Ambient Orchestra (featuring cellist and soloist Maya Beiser) in a symphonic interpretation of Bowie’s Blackstar, presented to his audience just as he first heard it through the wall, from its first song to its last.

Two days after Blackstar was released in January 2016, Bowie died. Ziporyn got the news through an alert on his cellphone in the middle of the night. “I just thought it was a dream,” he says.

The Chicago-born Ziporyn, 58, is an accomplished post-minimalist composer and musician, best known for his work interpreting Balinese gamelan at MIT, where he is a professor, and for his contributions to the avant-garde ensemble Bang On a Can.

Like millions around the world, he is a big Bowie fan. Unlike many others, however, Ziporyn’s work brought him into the orbit of the pop-music icon. Bowie had developed an interest in Bang On a Can, and the two musicians met more than once. “He was an astonishingly normal guy,” Ziporyn recalls.

News of Bowie’s death—of liver cancer, two days after his 69th birthday—deeply rattled his fan base, including Ziporyn. “Slowly, over the course of a couple of days, I began connecting to all sorts of people, from different parts of my life,” he says. “And everyone was in a state of shock. I kept thinking, ‘This is really important. We need to do something with all this energy.’”

When Ziporyn returned to Boston from his Florida retreat, he thought immediately of doing a Bowie tribute in the classical world. He reached out to his contacts with the idea; within a couple of weeks he had signed up 80 musicians, and the Ambient Orchestra was born.

But then there was the question of the program. Bowie’s music had been interpreted by orchestras a couple of times over the years, but nothing felt right. “We didn’t want to do the standard pops concert where you get a Led Zeppelin-like band and just add some strings to it,” he explains. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But to treat this music like we treat all the other music in our lives, we had to find our own take on it.”

That’s when he again thought of the music he first heard coming through the wall. It had to be Blackstar.

Bowie’s final album will be forever associated with his death, but judging from its critical reception, it has slowly emerged as one of the strongest works of his career. “It’s a self-requiem,” Ziporyn says, “but it’s also something else. It’s kind of a guide to confronting death. He made sure to get it out before he died, because, in a certain way, it was preparing us for his death.”

Ziporyn’s Ambient Orchestra will not feature a singer, but instead cellist Beiser takes on Bowie’s vocal parts—“Maya’s kind of our Ziggy,” he says—and he’s enlisted a number of young musicians who feel comfortable traversing the idioms of classical, jazz and pop.

“What I was really taken with is right there in the first song,” he says of Blackstar. “That song moves through this central, swaggering, bluesy thing toward this humanism on his part, which is to talk to us about what he is experiencing, what it’s like to think of yourself as moving from life to death. And musically, I don’t feel like I’m giving up on anything. I feel like my whole musical being is called on. And what more can I ask for?”

The Ambient Orchestra
Nov. 7, 7:30pm $32+
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford

The Stanford Jazz Festival is back. This year’s lineup is packed with a total of 28 concerts. Saxophonist Joshua Redman and his quartet help kickoff the festival with a performance on Saturday. A Grammy winner, Redman has worked with musicians such as jam band Umphrey’s McGee, collaborative band James Farm and performed at the Kennedy Center Honors for Herbie Hancock. Other notable musicians performing this summer include Spanish trumpeter Andrea Motis and saxophonist Jimmy Heath.The Stanford Jazz Festival runs from June 22 through Aug. 4 at the Bing Concert Hall, Dinkelspiel Auditorium and the Campbell Recital Hall.

Stanford Jazz Festival
Fri, 8pm, $18+
Multiple Venues, Stanford

Some of Silicon Valley’s most talented percussionists will be pounding on very big drums this weekend as a part of the Stanford Taiko Spring Concert. The university’s 18-piece resident taiko ensemble has prepared a brand new show to celebrate the season. Titled “Wavebreak,” the concert will feature new arrangements from the group’s current repertoire, along with three new compositions. Stanford Taiko will also share the stage with student a cappella group Talisman for a special collaboration. Combined, the two groups boast a legacy of more than 50 years of telling stories through music. (YK)

Stanford Taiko
Sat, 7:30pm, $15
Bing Concert Hall, Stanford