Mar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
A collection of prehistoric tidbits, desperately scraped in 1928 from an archaeological site undergoing looting, washed up at the Kelsey Museum some sixty years later. Now on exhibit at the Kelsey, This Fertile Land offers a...
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When I saw the young bluegrass band King Wilkie at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in January, they weren't quite what I'd expected. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, they've been hailed as the next big thing in...
Read MoreMar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
As the oldest (and bossiest) of three sisters, I went into the premiere of Jeff Daniels's new comedy, Norma and Wanda, with a fair amount of arrogance. I consider myself an expert in sibling argument and allegiance,...
Read MoreMar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Last April, Penelope Crawford was scheduled to perform a recital of harpsichord music at the Kerrytown Concert House. Everything was all set — the repertoire had been picked and learned, and the hall had been booked...
Read MoreMar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Right or wrong, we expect something from Chicago writers. The prose will be hard edged, the stories realistic and tough. With Greek American authors, however, we have a different stereotype, perhaps of a certain kind of...
Read MoreMar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
For the past seven years, the Phoenix Ensemble, perhaps Ann Arbor's most versatile musical group, has performed a wide variety of programs, from folk to jazz to classical. Although the personnel of the ensemble change from...
Read MoreMar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreMar 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
"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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreJan 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
A man and a woman emerge from isolated cocoons of light and meet center stage. After a brief confrontational "monologue," the woman folds to the floor in supplication, vulnerable on her back, legs bent skyward, arms...
Read MoreJan 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreJan 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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...
Read MoreJan 1, 2005 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
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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