Culture

Chad Harbach

Editor’s note: This event has been canceled.I read The Art of Fielding because it was a new baseball novel. I found out it was about a lot more than baseball.In Chad Harbach’s debut novel, published in 2011, the...

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An Evening of Beethoven

As if to inaugurate the autumn in burnished splendor, Arie Lipsky and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra will open their new season with three popular works by Ludwig van Beethoven, a prolific composer who wrote only one...

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The Crane Wives

The Crane Wives bill themselves as an indie folk group, even deriving their name from an album by one of that genre’s original stalwarts, the Decemberists. But despite the presence of a banjo, mostly acoustic...

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Sarah Jarosz

Sarah Jarosz’s first recording was nominated for a Grammy before she even finished high school. Last year, soon after she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, her third album also received a Grammy...

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Mandolin Orange

The Americana and folk scenes are full of married or partnered couples these days. Mandolin Orange, the North Carolina duo of Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, follows in the footsteps of the couple that started this trend and so...

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Dancing in the Streets

I had to learn to waltz for a musical when I was in high school. My partner had a habit of going one-three-two while I was going two-three-one, and the results were like Arthur Murray gone horribly, horribly wrong.I kind of...

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That 1990s Spirit

In the 1980s and 1990s, women had more room to be tough on the radio. From Natalie Merchant in 10,000 Maniacs to Suzanne Vega to the Bangles to the Cowboy Junkies, female pop stars maintained the memorable hooks and lighter...

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Louise Penny

Louise Penny’s third appearance in Ann Arbor, this time to discuss and sign her latest Inspector Gamache mystery, will be at Washtenaw Community College’s Towsley Auditorium–the largest venue yet to host her...

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Barbara Morrison

Detroit and its surroundings have been the birthplace and learning ground of countless great jazz instrumentalists but have also given the world a number of majestic singers as well. The jazz bug can lay dormant and only grow...

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Bill Morris

Most of us in this part of the world remember the John Lee Hooker song about the 1967 riots: “Oh, the Motor City’s burnin’ /It ain’t no thing in the world that I can do … My home town is...

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Anna Lee’s Company

Anna Lee’s Company, a funk/bluegrass/folk-rock band with a name derived from a lyric in the Band’s iconic “The Weight,” formed early in 2013. The four core musicians all previously played in other popular...

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Billy Strings & Don Julin

“Billy Strings & Don Julin play traditional American string band music with energy levels usually associated with extreme sports,” says the website of this northern Michigan duo. The line sounds good for getting...

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Man Meets Horn

For many the main defining aspect of jazz is improvisation. And yet many of the most creative artists who have been associated with this kind of music, however broadly defined, have explored the deeply running continuum between...

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The Artist

Retro is all the rage these days. Quite a few bands now play some sort of Americana and use old-timey instruments. Even literary efforts harken back to old days. Instead of reading an e-book on an e-reader this summer, I’m...

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Shaun Manning

Nostalgia, as one of the characters in Shaun Manning’s new graphic novel, Interesting Drug, points out, can be addictive. But the “what if” of this science fiction book takes that idea further. What if there...

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May Erlewine

When May Erlewine returns to the Ark on June 20, she’ll be bringing along her two latest, and arguably finest, creations. However she may showcase only one of them on stage. For sure she’ll be featuring songs from...

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