What's Next

Some of the most exciting moments in any season are the ones that don’t fit neatly anywhere else.

This page is for those performances: the interdisciplinary collaborations, the genre crossings, the artists living at the edge of what their form is right now.

At the Crystal Ballroom

Four nights in February, four artists you won’t find on any other Boston stage this season. New-music powerhouse Sō Percussion joins indie-folk storyteller Kate Stables (This Is the Kit) and avant-pop innovator Helado Negro for a thrilling, spontaneous collision of rhythm, song, and invention.

Bosnian singer-songwriter Damir Imamović brings the gorgeous melancholy and narrative power of sevdah—sometimes called Bosnian blues—with a trio that keeps the tradition vibrantly alive.

Grammy Award-winning violinist and vocalist Charles Yang (one-third of audience favorites Time for Three) fuses Rachmaninoff and Brahms with the Beatles and B.B. King into something completely his own.

And Latin Grammy winners Flor de Toloache close out the run: bold, virtuosic, and pushing mariachi somewhere it has never been before.

Across the Season

Emmet Cohen has built one of jazz’s most devoted audiences through his Harlem apartment webcasts. When his trio plays a concert hall, the welcome is just as genuine. He’s joined this night by vocalist Georgia Heers, whose velvety voice is steeped in tradition and entirely her own.

Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson brings a program that only he could map, drawn from his own Deutsche Grammophon discography: Philip Glass’s etudes, suites by Baroque master Rameau, the modernist shimmer of Debussy.

Edgar Meyer and Mike Marshall have been making music together for twenty years, encompassing Bach duets, Brazilian choros, old-time fiddle tunes, and more. Joined by George Meyer, they bring the informal, casually virtuosic spirit of backstage festival picking to Sanders Theatre.

Béla Fleck has spent a career doing things with a banjo nobody thought possible. Paired with harpist Edmar Castañeda, who plays bass, melody, and harmony simultaneously, and drummer Antonio Sánchez, the trio takes you somewhere new with their strong melodies, gorgeous harmonies, and sinuous grooves.

Taiwanese choreographer Huang Yi has been dancing with his KUKA industrial robot arm for more than a decade. Four nights at the Museum of Science’s Public Science Common, presented in partnership with the Museum, prove that the push and pull between humanity and technology doesn’t always have to be a battle. It can also be a duet.

Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan closes the Jazz Festival at the Museum of Science with her Tentet. This can't-miss debut maps constellations onto music's Circle of Fifths, finding geometry in the stars and meaning in the cosmos. 

Neighborhood Arts

The spirit of discovery runs through Vivo Performing Arts' free Neighborhood Arts series, inviting all audiences to explore and enjoy. 

In a partnership with Roxbury Concert Series at the Shaw-Roxbury Boston Public Library branch, Berklee sophomore Pelin Su Yavuz—Boston Calling headliner, Boston Pops performer—blends jazz, neo-soul, and R&B into something entirely her own. 

Amanda Shea and Tim Hall Trio bring spoken word and saxophone into dialogue in an afternoon of alchemical artistry at First Church Roxbury. 

Gregory Groover’s North to Boston draws on the stories of his own congregation — people who migrated to Boston between World War II and the 1980s — in a program that makes the personal and historical inseparable.

And saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, heard on the Jazz Festival with his Quartet and named our first-ever Artist-in-Residence, teams with trumpeter Jason Palmer and his Quintet for a performance rooted in the stories and sounds of Boston itself.