Raaginder, a San Francisco Bay Area–based violinist, composer, and songwriter, is known for blending the depth of Indian classical music with the textures of R&B, pop, and hip hop to create a sound that is both soulful and contemporary.

Lau Noah presents an introduction to her next project: a meeting between classical, jazz and folk musicians through the power of oral tradition. Music created, passed on and recorded using human ear, memory and skill, without it ever being written down on paper, yet not improvised. Noah's ambitious project highlights the complexity and depth of oral tradition as both modern and ancestral human language worth preserving and championing. Noah and her team will be presenting a short film, an early listening to some songs from the record and a live performance.

Family Affair, a new album by Senegalese bassist and composer Alune Wade in collaboration with New Orleans's Neighborhood Story Project, is rooted in Afro-Atlantic memory and contemporary dialogue. In the fall of 2026, it will be released alongside their documentary film TUKKI: From the Roots to the Bayou and accompanying book A Family Affair: Conversations Across the Atlantic (University of New Orleans Press). Building on the acclaimed New African Orleans (2025), which drew widespread praise for its fluid dialogue between West African traditions, contemporary jazz, and Louisiana heritage, Family Affair has the feel of a reunion — one that stretches across centuries of shared and scattered memory. It is not a tribute project. It is a celebration of what these connections actually sound like when musicians on both sides of the Atlantic meet in a room.

Something sacred is crossing the bridge. DVT — the trio of composer Damani Rhodes, vocalist VADIA, and poet Tongo Eisen-Martin — makes its New York City debut at National Sawdust for one night only. What happens when piano keys build cathedrals, a voice moves between shadow and flame, and words cut through silence like light through stained glass? DVT is the answer — a collision of jazz, poetry, and soul that doesn't ask you to listen so much as surrender.

On October 17, 2026, Weeksville Heritage Center and VisionIntoArt invite you to a day-long community experience in Brooklyn. The program weaves together performance, creative workshops, and community conversations that explore the key themes and questions of We Were Fridays—cultural memory, Gullah Geechee heritage, diaspora, and intergenerational storytelling.

There is a hush most of us only knew as children, the warm drift between familiar household sounds and being carried to bed, a place that belongs to you and to some self you have not met yet. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, lives in that dream space and then keeps walking, slipping out of time and waking somewhere new, barely familiar enough to feel like home yet wholly your own.