Jul 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The place is full and there are not one but two people videotaping. I assume the guy at the microphone is Dave Sharp. He plays upright bass in his own bands and is also a member of the Joe Summers Gypsy Jazz Trio, but tonight...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Amadeus, at the Performance Network through June 10, is as perfumed, sensual, and squishy as overripe tropical fruit and as viciously cerebral as (I imagine anyway) a tea party for Nobel Prize runners-up. The story of Wolfgang...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
"If I lived in this town, I would frequent this cafe," sings Annie Capps, "and that table in the corner would be mine most every day." Capps has a way of starting a song with an image that's simple yet...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Somehow, I'm not on the mailing list of a certain "underground" speakeasy on the west side of town — how'd that happen? — so, sadly, I didn't hear that Delta 88 was playing there on a lovely May...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
When I enter WCC's intimate but regal Towsley Auditorium, the Out Loud Chorus is singing "The Way You Look Tonight." This mixed chorus (meaning both men and women) is based in the gay-bisexual-transgender...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Shutta Crum knew exactly what kind of books young children liked when she began writing her own in 1997. By then she'd been a youth librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library for eighteen years and had had plenty of...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Soviet writer Isaac Babel published a couple of volumes of short stories in the 1920s. They were brilliantly observed and filled with irony about the human condition, often funny, yet also very bleak. He was immediately...
Read MoreJun 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Although he says not to call it a comeback, Rob Utterback’s recital at the Kerrytown Concert House on Friday, June 1, is, in fact, a comeback. Way back in the halcyon 1990s, the local classical cognoscenti eagerly...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It's not easy having a dual career as a player and a teacher. On the one hand, you have the repertoire to learn, the practicing to do, and the performances to give. On the other, there are the students to teach, the meetings...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
My family and I attended the Twenty-sixth Annual Australian Shepherd Dog Trials on a lark. At the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds, the morning was breezy and sunny, perfect for watching dogs perform. The beautifully brushed...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Her bio states that Iris DeMent started singing when she was three years old, but I bet she started earlier than that. I bet she sang the day, the minute she was born. And I bet she sang a gospel song. In the liner notes for her...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
When the annual Jewish Film Festival returns to the Michigan Theater Sunday through Thursday, May 6-10, it will bring movies from more than half a dozen countries. The range of subjects in the nineteen films featured is even...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
In 1980 Ann Arborite Joan Blos won the prestigious Newbery Medal for her young adult novel A Gathering of Days. That story was told in the form of the journal of a thirteen-year-old farm girl from the early 1830s. The journal...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
More than most genres, the blues is replete with remarkable life stories, and that of Mississippi Heat frontman Pierre Lacocque is especially fascinating. The son of a Belgian Protestant minister and often penniless Old...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Singer-songwriter and guitarist Dan Orcutt has been making music in this town for about fifteen years. Like his other bands, the Nick Strange Trio is professional and tight, and Orcutt's vocals are still rich. But in the few...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The layers of Norah Jones's voice shine softly in the illumination cast by a tune. The voice seems too ordinary to have fascinated listeners as it has, but its grain is unique. Born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar in 1979, she...
Read MoreMay 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
One highlight of the U-M Graduate Library’s absorbing transportation exhibition is a slender, pocket-size 1913 directory that lists all of the few owned cars in Michigan — “a combination social register and...
Read MoreApr 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The African Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman is a sensation in every sense of the word. Start with the name: she grew up Measha (MEE-sha) Gosman in New Brunswick; married a Swiss, Markus Bruegger; and fused their surnames....
Read MoreApr 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
George Bernard Shaw has a theater festival in Ontario dedicated to him, but that aside, he doesn't seem to have a large or enduring fan base anymore. Many people know him only obliquely through My Fair Lady, the musical...
Read MoreApr 1, 2007 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Last fall I got a call to play an opening slot at a really nice music series in Royal Oak. I jumped at the chance for the usual reasons. But one reason outshone them all: I could maybe, just maybe, meet the featured act, folk...
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