Event Reviews

Earth Day

They've turned one of the fields next to Matthaei Botanical Gardens into a parking lot, and hundreds of cars are there. I've never seen this many at Matthaei before. Earth Day must be quite popular in Ann Arbor. I park...

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Girlyman

Quite a few young bands have gone back to draw on the folk-rock of the 1960s, having realized, perhaps, that a good hook is harder to create than any number of more outwardly strenuous effects. There's no shortage of...

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Imaginary Maps

What's the ominous whirlpool in the three-by-two-foot paper Words of Warcraft map in the Graduate Library's eighth-floor Map Library? "Oh, that's just a maelstrom," says library information specialist...

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Pianist Lang Lang

For sheer bravura technique, there's not a piano player in the world who can touch Lang Lang. His fingers are fleeter, his attacks stronger, his releases crisper, his pianissimos quieter, his fortissimos louder, and his...

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Natalia Zukerman

I'm no geneticist, but I was not surprised to hear that Natalia Zukerman, the daughter of Pinchas and Eugenia Zukerman, is a musician. Having parents who are both world-class musicians would certainly skew your odds. Can you...

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Ann Arbor PowWow

Like a bracelet around the Crisler Arena floor are ten sets of concentric circles: a circular drum, a circle of men playing it in unison with sticks and singing, and a group that gathers around them to listen. Sometimes, says a...

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Tift Merritt

The eleven songs on Tift Merritt's brand-new record Another Country were waiting for her in a series of rented flats in Paris. She just had to go there and get them. The liner notes tell the story: exhausted from relentless...

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Aging with Attitude

Imagine a sculpture of a naked reclining woman, her lips painted full and red, her eyes flirting playfully with the viewer. Now add a sagging belly and breasts and drooping wrinkled skin. Finally, put a sheep’s head on her...

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Andy Statman

You know the old fable of the blind men who use their sense of touch to try to describe an elephant. One man feels the elephant’s leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Another grasps the trunk and...

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The Blue Rubys

Of the uncountable thousands of rock 'n' roll bands on the planet, very few have the gender composition of the Blue Rubys: three women and one man. The combination gives the band a kind of collective sexiness that's...

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Donny McCaslin

It is sometimes difficult, at a time when a jazz album receives a Grammy for best musical performance, to remember the long struggle that the music has had for legitimacy in the country of its birth or to imagine that there was...

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Gary Snyder

For more than half a century now — certainly since the famous reading in San Francisco in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first unveiled his Howl, Gary Snyder read from his Riprap poems, and the Beat movement entered the popular...

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Much Ado about Nothing

When Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage," he was, of course, not referring to the Blackbird Theatre. Yet it's an apt description of Ann Arbor's newest theater. At the Blackbird the playhouse...

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Steve Earle

"Fare thee well, I'm bound to roam. . . ." With these old-fashioned, courtly words in "Tennessee Blues" — the opening cut to his Grammy-winning new album Washington Square Serenade — Steve...

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Charles Baxter’s return

Charles Baxter’s novels and short stories have often questioned the nature of their composition: Is this a story? And if so, where is the boundary between the story and the life it may or may not reflect? Where is the...

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Ahmad Jamal

Jazz critics, like pollsters and pundits, are often wrong. When in 1958 a relatively unknown twenty-eight-year-old pianist named Ahmad Jamal had a hit tune named "Poinciana" that stayed on the top-ten charts for weeks...

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Anna Ash

Never one to go with the first metaphor that comes my way, I was dismayed, as I heard Anna Ash sing at a party on New Year's Eve, to find myself thinking, "Damn, this girl sings like a bird!" But she really does....

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