Thousands of dark pebbles taken from Scottish riverbeds will transform the University’s Talbot Rice Gallery as it hosts work by artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah.

Twenty five tonnes of small stones will cover the floor of Talbot Rice’s Georgian gallery space as part of Akomfrah’s first solo exhibition in Scotland.

Vertigo Sea features two video installations that capture the "beauty and the cruelty" of the sea.

It includes ‘At the Graveside of Tarkovsky’ (2012 / 2017), which has been reworked for this show.

The Georgian Gallery will be filled wall to wall with the pebbles, inviting the audience to walk on them.

The University of Edinburgh’s Sound Design department has worked with Trevor Mathison, Akomfrah’s regular collaborator, to re-engineer the soundtrack and create an immersive three-dimensional soundscape.

The free show runs 21 October 2017 to 27 January 2018.

www.ed.ac.uk/talbot-rice

Into the Mountain: A Life of Nan Shepherd by Charlotte Peacock, the first biography of the writer, is to be published on October 26.

In the 1930s Nan Shepherd was one of Scotland’s best-known writers, and is now featured on the £5 note.

Three novels, The Quarry Wood, The Weatherhouse and A Pass in the Grampians–as well as a volume of poetry, In the Cairngorms–were all published between 1928 and 1934 while she was in her 30s.

Then in 1977, came The Living Mountain, her most influential work.

www.galileopublishing.co.uk

Pianist Alan Benzie becomes the latest guest of Edinburgh’s Playtime jazz sessions this Thursday, October 12. Benzie was the first winner of the BBC Radio Scotland Young Jazz Musician of the Year, aged just seventeen, in 2007, and went on to study at Berklee College of Music in Boston where he won the Billboard Award, the first musician from the UK to win this prestigious honour. He released his first album, Traveller’s Tales, in 2015 and as well as touring internationally with his own trio, he appears with the award-winning Glasgow-based jazz/funk/folk collective Fat-Suit. He joins Playtime regulars, saxophonist Martin Kershaw, bassist Mario Caribe and drummer Tom Bancroft at the Outhouse in Broughton Street Lane. The music begins at 8:00pm.

www.playtime-music.com

Award-winning Californian bluegrass and roots music band Front Country return to Scotland for six concerts during October.

Their singer and main songwriter, Melody Walker, won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Momentum Award as one of the genre’s outstanding Female Vocalists of 2016 and has been cited as one of "Seven Women Smashing the Bluegrass Glass Ceiling" by the American arts and culture magazine Paste. They play Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh on Monday, October 16; Kilbarchan Performing Arts Centre (18th); Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline (19th); Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine (20th); Glenbuchat Hall, Strathdon (21st); and Blue Lamp, Aberdeen (22nd).

www.frontcountryband.com