Event Reviews

Sang

Mar 1, 2005 | , |

I went to high school outside of Toledo, our blue-collar neighbor city that Ann Arborites like to joke and feel culturally superior about. It's industrial, it's dark, and it has one foot in the 1950s, when America was...

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Tomasz Stanko 2005

Mar 1, 2005 | , |

In the early 1960s in Poland, jazz was no longer illegal, but records were scarce, so young fans and budding musicians sat late into the night trying to catch Willis Conover’s shortwave radio program on the Voice of...

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Innovations in Basketry

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

"Las Vegas trilobite" comes to mind while one examines John Garrett's wild silvery swirl of woven metal strips dripping in jet and gold beads. This glittery work nutshells the recent rise and flowering of the craft...

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Craig Holden

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

Novelist Craig Holden continues to resist categories. After a first couple of novels that could be classified as mysteries or crime fiction, his books have become increasingly complex, following darker paths through the soul to...

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Thomas Sayers Ellis

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

This past fall, poet and teacher Thomas Sayers Ellis offered "Literary Arts and the New Black Aesthetic," a class he designed "for black writers interested in destroying the false boundaries between prose and...

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The Juggernaut Jug Band

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

The Juggernaut Jug Band — Roscoe Goose, the Amazing Mr. Fish, Big Daddy T, and Smiley Habanero — come from Louisville, where jug band music began. If you're not familiar with jug band music, it's the closest...

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Junior Mance

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

A good many years ago when I was visiting Toronto, I made my way in the evening to the Café des Copains, a well-known jazz club that specialized in presenting pianists. On the bill that night was Junior Mance, and quite...

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Rennie Harris Puremovement

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

If pluralism is the enlightened catchword in this post-9/11 era of cultural and geopolitical conflict, concert dance may be the ideal art form to do it justice. In Facing Mekka Rennie Harris has mapped a profound and profoundly...

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Sparklemotion

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

There's nothing wrong with pretty music. I've certainly heard enough ugly music to feel grateful for a local band that is easy on the ears and eager to please. Sparklemotion, with its collage of 1970s jazz-inflected rock...

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The Takács plays Bartok

Feb 1, 2005 | , |

At one time Béla Bartók was the epitome of musical modernism. During his compositional career, Bartók wrote hard-edged, sharp-cornered, and utterly unsentimental music in every genre, but his strongly argued and powerfully...

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Stefan Kiesbye

Jan 1, 2005 | , |

Small presses still have a function. In a time of creeping homogeneity, perhaps they have even a greater function than ever before. They look farther and deeper into our culture to find new writers doing interesting things that...

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The Lahti Symphony

Jan 1, 2005 | , |

These days, the best conductors are not German, not French, not Russian, and not even English. These days, the best conductors are Finnish. It's true. Think of Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles, creating an orchestra equally...

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A Taste of the Season

Jan 1, 2005 | , |

A weird political kitchen colander, an elaborate silver tea set from the late Ann Arbor philanthropist Philip Bach (right), and an elegant wooden mini-sleigh resembling a baby carriage on runners, once used to whiz local...

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Tumbao

Jan 1, 2005 | , |

I'm not a seasoned listener to Cuban jazz. I have to say that up front, because my brother-in-law, Marc Taras, is the host of Cuban Fantasy on WEMU and writes about Cuban music with the skill of a devotee. In comparison, I...

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Yiddishe Cup

Jan 1, 2005 | , |

It's only in the last twenty-five years that klezmer music has moved into concert halls. Before that it was always dance music, played at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and parties. Occasionally it was the vehicle of Jewish comedy....

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NoMo

Dec 15, 2004 | , |

With seventeen members, NoMo may be the biggest band in town outside of the Ann Arbor Symphony. It's got a whole crowd of horns and winds, backed up by multiple keyboards, guitars, and a large percussion section with African...

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Bill Charlap

Dec 1, 2004 | , |

When I listen to younger jazz pianists, I sometimes wonder if the instrument does not have too many keys. Most of them have prodigious technique developed by many years of classical training, and many of them take their cues...

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Jen Cass

Dec 1, 2004 | , |

If you're a music lover who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, you probably have a story about how a record saved your life, or at least got you through some dark days. If I had a dollar for every time people have told me that...

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