When They Might Be Giants first appeared in the 1980s it became rock critic shorthand to describe them as bouncy, bushy-tailed pop oddballs. What is amazing is that nearly three decades on that description still applies perfectly to the fiftysomething whipsmart duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh. On Join Us they never seem jaded or cynical or going through the motions, just joyous and delightful and as bouncy as ever.

Nat Baldwin’s alt cred is impeccable. Not only is he a former bassist for Brooklyn’s über-cool Dirty Projectors, he’s also responsible for a string of releases that began with 2003’s free jazz set Solo Contrabass. Also prepared to take a stroll with the less cool, he’s been heard on a TV ad for Orange mobile phones, the one with the barefoot, ladder-descending lady. Although People Changes worms intimately in, it’s hard to detect a singular voice. Formerly in thrall to Anthony Braxton, he’s now trying on Arthur Russell.

Kew the Music - the umbrella name for a series of outdoor concerts - did not look promising upon first arrival and, indeed, for quite some time afterwards. It was clear as soon as I walked through the gates that this was a day out for monied London, not the usual gig environment.

Great idea. Geeky Hasidic kid from Brooklyn's claustrophobic Jewish community finds his attention wandering during his rabbinical studies, and falls under the raffish spell of the older and wilder Yosef Zimmerman. He finds the slope is slippery indeed, and with head-spinning speed he's enmeshed in a transatlantic drug-mule racket. He's making big piles of wedge, but losing his immortal soul in the process.

Broadway may not be “just for gays any more”, as the event's unstoppably charming and funny compere Neil Patrick Harris noted in his song-and-dance opening to the 2011 Tony Awards, held last night in New York to honour that city's theatre season just gone. But it’s still very much about the Brits: some habits never die.

This series of albums is the sound of one of the most epochally important producers in soul and dance music history reworking his magic. The closest analogy I can think of that non-dance music fans would appreciate is The Beatles' Love album in which George Martin went back to the master tapes and not so much remixed as recreated their work, but there is none of the whiff of superfluous tinkering here that that project had.

Paul Merton started his three-part series on the origins of the American film industry with a deliberately clichéd shot, greeting us while standing with the Hollywood sign in view. But he quickly whizzed over to New York City, the true location of the birth of movies - or American ones at least - for it was on the East Coast that Thomas Edison, after inventing the phonograph, developed the Kinetoscope, a basic viewing device for moving pictures.

Next Tuesday, 31 May, will be a day of difficult choices for fans of New York’s Sonic Youth. London is hosting three separate shows by band members and associates. That evening their mainstay guitarist, Thurston Moore, plays the Union Chapel. SY’s drummer, Steve Shelley, is at The Borderline, guesting with Chicago’s Disappears. And Half Japanese, who both Shelley and Moore have collaborated with, are headlining at The Scala.

As The Observer once put it, an abiding theme of Adam Curtis's documentaries "has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragicomic consequences of those attempts". This neatly sums up the essence of Curtis's new three-part series - though it looks like being more tragic than comic - which began with a daring parabolic narrative which soared from the monomaniac philosophies of Ayn Rand across California's Silicon Valley to the Clinton White House and Alan Greenspan's basilisk-like reign on Wall Street.

Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore has never been constrained by being in one of the planet’s coolest and always-interesting bands. Since the late Eighties he’s released a string of collaborations and solo releases that are mainly experimental, atonal or outré – he still issues material solely on cassette. Enthusiasms define who he is and as a card-carrying record collector he’s never been shy of declaring his favourites. Holding a torch for improvisers like Derek Bailey, he’s also a supporter of outer-edge folk artists like Ed Askew. His new, Beck-produced solo album is the culmination – so far - of his fascination with the acoustic.