Archives

The Macpodz

"We invented this style called disco-bebop," one of the Macpodz tells the crowd during a Blind Pig show not long ago. There's a lot more to it than that, but if you have to sum up the Macpodz, you could do worse...

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Stephen Petronio Company

At fifty, Stephen Petronio has a postmodern dance sensibility that remains a force of nature. Though he came to dance late, as a college student, his self-assured technique — developed in part through his experience in...

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Hoodang 2007

The Ann Arbor roots-country band Hoodang grew from a collaboration between singer-guitarist David Rossiter and bassist Rich Rickman. Rossiter is now backed by multi-instrumentalists Drew Howard and John Latini and drummer Pat...

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Marie Howe

Marie Howe's second collection of poems, What the Living Do, has a unique place in contemporary letters. It is a widely read book that appeals to many different kinds of readers, often those who don't read much...

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Ann Arbor’s big band

A long time ago, jazz big bands traveled throughout the land; many of their sidemen were as notorious as movie stars, and the leaders were treated as nobility. The days of peripatetic musical Dukes and Counts are over, and...

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The Yellow Room Gang

First of all, my wife did not want to go. We were new in town, still unpacking, wondering what life in a "small town" was going to be like after we'd spent eleven years in Chicago. "I've never heard of any...

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Whit Hill at the Ark

When I told Whit Hill I was writing an event review about her band, she started yelling into the phone, “Charmie, you can’t do that! You’re one of my closest friends. That is not appropriate.” She calmed...

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Being There

"I like to watch." This is the prophetic mantra uttered by a man named Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers). When Gardiner is befriended by socialite Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) after a minor traffic accident, he becomes...

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Kitty Donohoe

Kitty Donohoe has been making songs in Michigan for decades now, and the state's a better place for it. She's a folk-style road warrior princess, crisscrossing both peninsulas, playing for big fat festivals and for tiny...

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Mary Gaitskill

In the 1980s Mary Gaitskill exploded into the reading world with Bad Behavior, a collection of short stories that shocked and challenged what was left of complacent baby-boomer assumptions about our generation's social...

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Photographer Michael Kenna

Big things are happening in the little, lightly trafficked UMMA refuge at South U and Forest. After the mesmerizing Barsamian exhibit of whirling modern zoetrope contraptions and the enchanting and mournful Plains of Sweet...

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Small Potatoes

There's a certain mode of between-song folk-music patter that Small Potatoes, the Illinois duo of Jacquie Manning and Rich Prezioso, exemplifies to the hilt. Call it midwestern, or Keilloresque — if you go out to hear...

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Tye Tribbett and G.A.

Tye Tribbett and G.A., an African American gospel choir from Camden, New Jersey, with a young and extremely energetic leader, is coming to Hill Auditorium on Saturday, December 9. Gospel music tends to fly under the media radar,...

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Broken Social Scene

Some songs by Broken Social Scene are mood music, edgy yet soothing, atmospheric postrock. Then the Canadian indie-rock collective hits you with cacophonies that are so packed with dueling sounds, so boisterous and brash,...

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Canada

“Our house is burning,” sings local folk-rock band Canada on its debut CD, This Cursed House. “When the trees go, we go too. When the birds go, we go too.” I like to know that twenty-something kids are...

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