Event Reviews

Los Angeles occupies a singular place in jazz history. Though many accomplished musicians have moved there, beginning with prominent New Orleans jazz pioneers early in the twentieth century, in many ways it has remained...

On two huge walls upstairs in the U-M Museum of Art are twenty-three small photographs. From a distance, they’re simple, unassuming, black and white. Don’t be fooled. This collection and its photographer, Manuel...

The Ann Arbor Symphony will open its 2016-17 season on September 10 with the Festive Overture, written in 1954 by Dmitri Shostakovich. A friend who watched him dash off this cheerful piece at lightning speed later compared its...

Some performers are beloved by hard-core fans of a genre but hardly visible at all to the wider public. It’s worth chasing down such favorites, for eclecticism is overrated as an artistic philosophy–in the main,...

Watching Jive Colossus take the stage before a set, it’s difficult to know exactly what sort of music to expect. Looking at the predominantly Caucasian ten-person lineup, with a wide variety of fashion senses and ages,...

Singer Petra van Nuis (pronounced Pay-tra van Nouse) and guitarist Andy Brown could legitimately be called Chicago’s First Couple of Jazz. The married pair is a fixture on Chicago’s vibrant jazz scene, frequently...

Peter Ho Davies’ new novel, The Fortunes, tells four stories of Chinese Americans over their long collective history in the United States.The first and longest is about Ling, the fictional servant of the very real Charles...

Unlike this one-act musical comedy’s title, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is short and sweet–and blunt. Conceived by Rebecca Feldman, with a book by Rachel Sheinkin and music and lyrics by William Finn,...