The late folklorist Alan Lomax, born 100 years ago this past January 31, collected and first recorded a good deal of what has become known as American traditional music, laboriously dragging huge open-reel tape machines around...
Read MoreJust inland from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in the Upper Peninsula, a field of jagged, white stumps named the Kingston Plains stretches as flat and bare as the nearby cliffs are high and crowded with tourists. Most people...
Read MoreEditor’s note: This event has been cancelled.Stephane Grappelli once said of Mark O’Connor, “He’s not what you would call … human.” No small compliment coming from one who many agree was...
Read MoreIn the words of poet Jacques Prevert: “It is spring, the needle goes wild in the compass.” Conditions are ideal, then, for a visit from a chamber ensemble named after an uncontainable forest goddess. On April 19 the...
Read MoreAfter we walk down the long hallway back to the cafeteria for Skyline High School’s Brick Bash, ten-year-old Little Brother stops dead in his tracks when he sees the twelve-foot-tall skyscraper, all clear glass and blue...
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Someone once wrote of the German poet Heinrich Heine that he delighted in blowing big sentimental soap bubbles and then deliberately pricking them. That’s a good description of the songs of Steve Poltz, the Friday-night MC...
Read MoreAlmost forty years ago two renowned jazz pianists, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, put their other projects on hold and went on tour together. By then they were in mid-career, approaching their forties. They had started out...
Read More“Shakey” Jake Woods’ legend is well known among Ann Arborites, but the late street performer’s legacy has taken on a surprising new dimension: a tribute band. You probably wouldn’t guess at first...
Read MoreGuard your hearts, tender people. And you tough ones may want to crack open those aortas. The current exhibit at U-M’s Rackham Hall, Responding to Chaos: Art as action, engagement, and revelation, may flood them with...
Read MoreOn the first Tuesday of every month, there’s opera at the Sidetrack in Ypsilanti. Yup–opera–in a bar. Highbrow meets Loewenbraeu. Granted, the Sidetrack’s event space, where Opera on Tap reigns, is not a...
Read MoreHilarious, brilliant, engaging, slapsticky, cerebral, challenging. And in 1999, when it was first produced, Stones in His Pockets, a play by Marie Jones, was joltingly original, too.In the intervening years, either by cultural...
Read MoreKirstin Valdez Quade has recently joined the faculty of U-M’s creative writing program as a Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor. This new position brings emerging writers to the U for a few years as they work to solidify...
Read MoreAs more and more mainstream films make it their mission to deliver as much eye-popping spectacle per second as humanly possible, it’s refreshing to see a movie that actually asks its audience to wait. That’s a common...
Read MoreThis year’s vernal equinox will roll in with a spring tide of Russian classics performed by the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra at the Michigan Theater March 21. The concert will open with the Polovtsian Dances from Alexander...
Read MoreMy book of Scott Beal’s poems, Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems, has more pleats than a Catholic schoolgirl’s skirt–from my habit of turning down a page with something I like, twice if I like two...
Read MoreIt may or may not be correct to call Martin Espada “the Latino poet of his generation,” but it is certainly right to understand him as one of a handful of writers of the generation now around age sixtywho broke open...
Read MoreCold Tone Harvest lets its music come to you, creeping subtly and hypnotically with a sparse, campfire-reminiscent sound. The band, featuring singer-songwriter Andrew Sigworth on acoustic guitar, Ozzie Andrews on stand-up bass,...
Read MoreFor ancient Egyptians, death marked the start of a harrowing journey through the underworld, past fiery lakes and through gates and caverns guarded by strange and dangerous creatures. There was a monster with a knife for a head...
Read MoreLast fall the newly resurrected Performance Network led with Driving Miss Daisy, most familiar as a 1980s sentimental Hollywood crowd-pleaser about the South. And now Purple Rose weighs in with Steel Magnolias, ditto: originally...
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