David Holt
Forty years ago David Holt visited the Appalachian Mountains for the first time and began immersing himself in the music and stories he heard there. Since then, he has studied with many people and taught many more. Today, all...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Forty years ago David Holt visited the Appalachian Mountains for the first time and began immersing himself in the music and stories he heard there. Since then, he has studied with many people and taught many more. Today, all...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
I first encountered Joe Henry's name when I heard Garth Brooks's "Belleau Wood," a fabulously detailed and evocative song about the Christmas truce of 1914. Henry started out in country and Americana music,...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
During World War II, sixteen-year-old Polish Jew Sala Garncarz was sent to a Nazi slave labor camp. She brought along a leather satchel. In between inspections and camp work, she gave the satchel to fellow prisoners, buried it,...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Still contending with the loss of George Balanchine twenty-five years on — the legendary choreographer and New York City Ballet founder died in 1983 — the dance world tends to pin its hopes for fresh new ballets on a...
Read MoreJan 15, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Like so many other classical music fans, violinist Aaron Berofsky says he grew up listening to Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And like so many other classical music fans, the full-time...
Read MoreJan 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
For the last few decades the U-M has had a graduate program in creative writing, but the town very seldom gets a sense of the students who pass through it. They are busy, after all, and here only for a couple of years. They form...
Read MoreJan 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The Carolina Chocolate Drops, young African American musicians from North Carolina, renew a fairly arcane tradition, the old-time black stringband music of the Carolina Piedmont that they learned from its handful of surviving...
Read MoreJan 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Mao Zedong’s lumpily stuffed white horse in Yanan’s Revolutionary Museum, Zhou Enlai’s black crank telephone, and a woman worker’s spartan concrete apartment-cell next to a socialist “Workshop for...
Read MoreJan 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
I'm too young to remember the Detroit rock scene of the 1960s — and I'm not that young. In fact I had to take a nap in the afternoon to stay up for the headliner of a recent three-band Blind Pig show. So when Scott...
Read MoreJan 1, 2008 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
There's only a modest audience today for the white performers of the 1960s who made pilgrimages to learn the southern black acoustic guitar music known as the country blues. But several of them are still around, and, as with...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Local music lovers know soprano Whitnie Crown Wolverton primarily from her work with Vox. Founded in 2000 in Ann Arbor and relocated to Chicago in 2006, Vox was a twelve-voice a cappella ensemble dedicated to medieval and...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
I love Christmas music — the carols, the classics, even many of the novelty tunes; perhaps a surprising admission from a Jewish boy who as a child never sang them, or even heard them much. Okay, you're waiting for the...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Don't let the name fool you (even though that last syllable is pronounced with a long A). Todd Deatherage is not goth or heavy metal or punk. This young singer, songwriter, and electric guitarist, recently transplanted to...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
A handmade sign is taped to the front door at the monthly Huron Gun Collectors meeting at the Washtenaw County Farm Council Grounds. It says, "Cameras, video equipment, tape recorders, and concealed weapons strictly...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Over the Rhine, which takes its name from a tough but increasingly creative area near downtown Cincinnati, essentially consists of vocalist Karin Bergquist and pianist and guitarist Linford Detweiler. They write almost all their...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Once a year Michigan Peaceworks throws a fund-raising party at the Ark. When I arrived last year, I found a gaggle of local singer-songwriters and musicians lining the back halls, waiting to play their one song each. Engineers...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the United States, won the National Book Award a couple of weeks ago for his most recent collection, Time and Materials. Hass has never shied away from ambitious titles — a couple of...
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Some kids want to grow up to be president. Not Sarah Cleveland. “I always knew I wanted to be an orchestral player,” says the principal cellist of the Ann Arbor Symphony. Cleveland grew up in Livonia in the 1960s....
Read MoreDec 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Whenever I stop in at the downtown Sweetwaters, I see nearly as many laptops as coffee mugs. Sure, most of those laptop tappers are probably rapping out term papers, checking emails, or instant-messaging friends, but I’m...
Read MoreNov 15, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux has climbed the Ann Arbor musical ladder all the way to the top: she’s appeared at the Ark, the Michigan Theater, and now — on Thursday, November 8 — at Hill Auditorium. Among the singers...
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