This week's new live music

Hackney Weekend, London Those who scored free tickets for this Radio 1 event will be witnessing the business class end of hip-hop and R&B (Jay-Z, Rihanna), successful locals such as Plan B and Professor Green, and a few indie randoms like Kasabian. Most interesting, though, will be a rare chance to see Azealia Banks. Banks has lately cancelled shows to work on her debut album, an indication of both her serious focus and her prospects. So far, we've had her excellent debut single 212 and her Missy Elliott-like 1991 EP, and, like MIA, having wowed with her DJ/microphone set, her show is showing greater sophistication. Hackney Marshes, E9, Sat & Sun John Robinson Nicki Minaj, On tour Charmingly, Nicki Minaj has described the feel of these upcoming shows as "intimate but big", which suggests she may need to recalibrate the exact scale of her career. Still, if anybody has the personality (or personalities) to fill these rooms, it's the Trinidad-born, New York-raised Minaj. She is, after all, a swell bunch of guys, with a style to suit nearly everyone: from her base camp in club pop, Minaj branches out towards girly (she's obsessed with Barbie, and has been rendered in Barbie doll form) and hardcore (her bitches-and-money rhymes are well at home on Lil Wayne's Young Money Entertainment; Wayne himself guests on her current album Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded). A whole maze of alter egos, rapping styles and occasionally contradictory positions, then; Minaj is big but interesting enough to spend time getting to know. HMV Apollo, W6, Sun, Mon; NIA, Birmingham, Tue; O2 Apollo, Manchester, Thu JR Wooden Wand, On tour A former freak folker lately turned inland to fractionally more orthodox country rock material, James Jackson Toth is another musician who specialises in a kind of endless diversification, his many styles recorded under different aliases. Toth himself, meanwhile, retains a strong sense of self throughout: a man unafraid of making himself a character in his work, his songs have a picaresque quality in which Toth runs up against a parade of grotesques in an imaginative number of decidedly unsavoury situations. Whether he's playing with a band or on his own, witty but slightly scathing is his dominant tone. Toth generally does his thing with an acoustic guitar, a mode with which we probably think ourselves very familiar – within the hallucinatory atmospheres of his songs, however, almost anything can happen. Trades Club, Hebden Bridge, Tue; Night & Day, Manchester, Wed; Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Thu; Cafe Oto, E8, Fri JR Hugh Masekela, On tour When the 73-year-old South African trumpeter, former pop star, political activist and unfaltering dynamo Hugh Masekela played London's Barbican in March, he set the packed house pogoing in the aisles, just as he's been doing all over the globe for decades. Masekela is adept with many styles, whether as a jazz pioneer in South Africa's Jazz Epistles group in 1959, hit-maker of Grazing In The Grass in 1968, lyrical flugelhornist, anti-racism campaigner, or playful guide to the music-making of children. For these gigs, Masekela returns with his exciting young South African band. Grassington Festival, nr Skipton, Tue; Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, Fri John Fordham Robert Glasper, Glasgow Don't pack your diary too tight if you go to this gig by American jazz pianist, hip-hop sideman and Mos Def producer Robert Glasper. When he was last in London, Glasper doubled his Barbican show to three hours, and then played an unscheduled jam at Village Underground the next night. Glasper and his resourceful crossover band make more memorable music out of pop/jazz fusions than almost anybody else on the international circuit, and this gig showcases their new Black Radio repertoire. Glasgow's unlikely to tempt the star cast of the album – among them Erykah Badu and Mos Def – but straddling of idiomatic divides, spontaneity and unflashy virtuosity are all sure to win over the audience. R&B remakes of Afro Blue, vocoder manipulations of Smells Like Teen Spirit, electric bass reinventions of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy: they're all likely to be in the mix, and a lot more. Old Fruitmarket, Thu JF Walden, Birmingham Heiner Goebbels's works so consistently blur the boundaries between art forms that now, as he approaches 60, he holds a singular position in European music. Goebbels is as much a dramatist as he is a composer, as much a stage director as he is a librettist, and each of his pieces – whether designed for a concert hall, a theatre or a gallery – brings a mixture of delight, surprise and enchantment. Walden, for "extended orchestra", was first performed in 1998, and is Goebbels's tribute to the environmentalist Henry David Thoreau; the UK premiere involves both Ensemble Klang and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, with Keir Neuringer as narrator. mac, Sat Andrew Clements