IN THE NEWS:
The Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City will host more than 80 shows during the month of June as part of the inaugural Blue Note Jazz Festival.
Beach Boys legend Brian Wilson has announced plans to embark on his first cross-Canada tour. The nine-city tour gets underway June 15 in Kitchener, Ontario, and wraps up June 28 in Vancouver.
Veteran performers stormed the U.S. album-sales chart this week, though none posed much of a threat to Eminem's "Recovery," the only album to sell more than 100,000 copies in the week that ended Aug. 22.
David Gray, "Foundling" (Downtown/Mercer Street)
Gray returns to his folk-music roots on his self-produced, London-recorded follow-up to last year's much more lush "Draw The Line." The 11 songs on the main disc -- there is an eight-song bonus disc -- were recorded at the same time as "Draw the Line," only at moments when his band was not around. He spent six months recording, and by the end of the sessions he realized he had made two records with completely different identities. The album's first single, "A Moment Changes Everything," was a tune Gray composed for a soccer commercial on television in the U.K. The Guardian in the U.K. called it high-quality adult pop.
Anyone looking to place a bet on the five discs that will be nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy should start with Brian Wilson's Gershwin disc. There might not be a better lock.
Brian Wilson's George Gershwin project, which includes the Beach Boys founder putting the finishing touches on two of Gershwin's incomplete tunes, will be released digitally on Aug. 17 and vinyl on Aug. 24.
Seamlessly swirling together shimmering melodies with spoken-word, autobiographical tales of dreams and love, legendary artist Brian Wilson makes "That Lucky Old Sun" his personal love letter to Southern California. 
