Event Reviews

Rootstand

There isn't much room with eight musicians on stage, but that's okay. The folks in Rootstand are completely comfortable with themselves, their instruments, and each other. Two separate drum sets monopolize the back half...

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Wiard’s Country Fair

Agreed, Wiard's is a wee bit hokey. But it's a mistake to get all snooty instead of enjoying what for me turned out to be a silly, interesting, and even mystic afternoon. After jolting down a washboard road and shelling...

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The Forbes Brothers

Attention Ann Arbor academics, information technology professionals, environmental activists, vegans, proteomics researchers, silversmiths, and art historians: you don't have to pretend anymore. Your secret love of...

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Oh Susanna

Although her new songs are written with a band in mind, Oh Susanna is a single individual, Suzie Ungerleider. Born in California and raised in Vancouver, she's now based in Toronto. Her music falls under the generously broad...

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Duck Hunter Shoots Angel

A sentence like "Duck hunter shoots angel" could signify only two things: a tabloid headline, or a meditation on the meaning of life by Mitch Albom. In the case of the current play at the Purple Rose Theater, it is...

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Flirtation

Seeing a show by Jo Serrapere and the Willie Dunns is like a languid Sunday drive through the country. Serrapere’s stage presence is so reassuring, so soothing, that before she even starts to sing I’ve snuggled under...

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Killing Ground

A tiny blotch of blood stains the wide green lawn backed by a distant line of trees and a speeding car’s rising dust cloud. The photograph shows the modern-day appearance of the Virginia Civil War battlefield where Ann...

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U.S. Army Field Band

China has more than 2 million soldiers in its army. North Korea has more than 1 million. Both Russia and the United States have fewer than half a million each. But no other army in the world — not the Chinese, the North Koreans,...

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Elwood Reid

On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man later known as D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane in Seattle, collected a ransom of $200,000 in used twenties, and parachuted into the forest of Washington or Oregon. He was never heard...

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They Might Be Giants

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in a desperate attempt to make her cantankerous children happy, a young mother loaded them in the car for a "mystery trip" to a motel on Lake Michigan. It was raining and cold...

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The Siegel-Schwall Band

There are no six degrees of separation between the Siegel-Schwall Band and the Chicago bluesmen who so powerfully influenced rock 'n' roll. Corky Siegel and Jim Schwall, white college students in the early 1960s, honed...

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Taj Mahal

The music Taj Mahal has been making recently with his band the Hula Blues has its origins in the folk bluesman's move to Hawaii several years ago. It's both very low-key and unlike anything you've ever heard before,...

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As You Like It

Nature's ability to restore and transform is a long-standing theme in Western life and culture. In the eighteenth century, Queen Marie Antoinette often found it amusing to escape the perfumed protocol at Versailles by...

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Richard Buckner

Something about Richard Buckner's music makes people want to drink and break things. After one Buckner show, friends of mine split a whiskey bottle with him and took him to the nearby public radio station to surprise the...

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Rodney Crowell

Rodney Crowell's Fate's Right Hand mines the tunnels of a dangerous cave; issues of life, death, faith, and fate can easily sink the songs of a lesser writer. But Crowell's a master. The eleven songs here dig and...

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Steve Forbert

Few can match Mississippi-born songwriter Steve Forbert's way with a crowd. Although he always records with a band, he tours solo, with just a guitar. I saw Forbert play at a Vermont club a few winters back, with the outdoor...

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Jeff Haas

Embracing diversity is a major theme running through Jeff Haas's music. You see it in the bilingual (Hebrew and English) titles of his recordings, L'Dor VaDor — Generation to Generation and HaGesher Chai —...

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Judith Guest

Back in 1980 we all knew about Judith Guest. Her first novel, Ordinary People, a story about a dysfunctional midwestern upper-middle-class family originally published in 1976, was turned into Robert Redford’s directorial...

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