Event Reviews

Oz’s drumming class

Steve Osburn definitely has a way with kids. He's kind and funny, yet he easily manages a potentially unruly group without being a girly man. He also gives each kid in his drumming class a big colorful drum, a clever trick...

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The Prism Quartet

For a musical experience that is full, rich, warm, and smooth, try a sax quartet. A string quartet may be the most human-sounding ensemble and a woodwind quartet may be the most diverse-sounding, but a sax quartet is...

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Le Concert Spirituel

From 1688 through 1697, the French waged war against the Spanish, the English, the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes, the Germans, and the Holy Roman Empire in what was later called the War of the Grand Alliance. Louis XIV, the aging...

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Raymond McDaniel

In his first book of poetry Raymond McDaniel has created a fascinating, mysterious story and then shattered it into sixty glittering, polished fragments that, as McDaniel puts it in his preface, “describe by accretion,...

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Brian Wilson

In the beginning was Brian Wilson's "Good Vibrations." Given its world premiere by Wilson's Beach Boys in 1966 in Hill Auditorium, the song sold a million copies within a week of its release, and 16 million in...

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Howl-O-Ween

Let me just say this right up front: I am not a cat person. Oh, I know this just sets me up to receive hate mail, but (1) I don’t like boxes of shit in my house, and (2) they get mad at you and pee on your stuff anyway....

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Humble Boy

Humble Boy, the season opener at the Performance Network, is a perfect storm of transcendent script, stellar ensemble acting, and the directorial hurricane force of Malcolm Tulip. Tulip can usually be counted on to deliver...

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Margaret Cho

Comedian Margaret Cho is barnstorming swing states this month, hoping to provoke her fans to vote the president out of office. A lot of protest singers are doing the same this fall, but they aren't calling Laura Bush a...

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Ollabelle

The music of Ollabelle is at once lush and spare. The four men and two women who form this New York City-based group let their blending, bleeding voices rule, backed by restrained accompaniment — sometimes just drums,...

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Rashied Ali

Many of today's younger improvisers look back with awe to the 1960s and early 1970s, when political, social, and cultural upheavals in American life were accompanied by radical challenges to the jazz tradition. Most of the...

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Rising Star Fife & Drum Band

Othar (or Otha) Turner died in February 2003 at ninety-five. He learned to make and play a bamboo cane fife as a youth, from an old man who told him that the drumming that accompanied the fife came from Africa. Turner worked a...

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Blackie & the Rodeo Kings

Maybe if I ever do something really important, a trio of esteemed Canadian singer-songwriters will record an album in my honor. And that tribute album will be riotously successful and make me famous — and them too, of...

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The Kerrytown BookFest

No, this isn't that big-budget spring event that celebrates publishing, literacy, and other profundities. The Kerrytown District Association BookFest is much homier than that. A neighborly get-together that features...

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The Emerson String Quartet

When the Emerson String Quartet was in Ann Arbor early last December, it played Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. When it returns to town on Sunday, September 26, it will play Tower, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. From the...

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Jack Wright

The semi-underground world of free improvisation has its own heroes, its own publications, and its own network of dedicated supporters and performance venues. But even in this small world there are hierarchies and conformities...

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Ralph Stanley

I've seen and heard Ralph Stanley any number of times, once in a high school multipurpose room with the acoustics of a seashell. He's the greatest living exponent of bluegrass music, and just a few years ago, you'd...

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Nancy Reisman

Award-winning short story writer Nancy Reisman, U-M visiting professor for the past several years, has written one of those novels that alter your perception of the world before you even realize they've done so. At the very...

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