Mozart Birthday Bash
In October 1902, after attending a performance of Mozart’s singspiel Zaide, aspiring composer Anton Webern confided to his diary that what he’d heard sounded “lovely and tender, so clear and simple, like a...
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Folk the Police
Most of the year, hip-hop is sorely underrepresented on the local music scene. But at the annual Folk the Police showcase, the genre takes center stage in the most Ann Arbor way possible: wrapped in folk’s...
Read MoreDobet Gnahore
The Ivory Coast singer Dobet Gnahore is the daughter of a master drummer in Abidjan. She fled civil war in her native country in 1999 and landed in Marseille, where she acquired a French guitarist husband and musical partner,...
Read MoreRagtime Extravaganza
The dictionary defines ragtime as “a kind of American dance music, characterized by highly syncopated rhythm,” and extravaganza as “a lavish, spectacular theatrical production.” You won’t find the...
Read MoreEarly Jazz for Moderns
As musical forms go, jazz is not that old. In just a few years we will be celebrating the hundred-year anniversary of what is generally considered to be the first official jazz recording, made in New York on February 26, 1917,...
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Suspended Moments
There’s nothing like children to make us wish that life had a pause button. With their tendency to disappear in crowds or climb worryingly high trees or simply grow up, kids embody both the chaos we’d like to...
Read MoreLaith Al-Saadi
“Have Venue, Will Play” should be Laith Al-Saadi’s motto. If it’s a night of the week, he’s probably playing somewhere. I recently caught an Al-Saadi show at the Arena sports bar, where he plays a...
Read MoreDie Meistersinger von Nurnberg
If I say “Wagner,” some of you will say “very long operas with supersized sopranos sporting Viking helmets.” Plus, you’ll probably add “the world’s second-loudest anti-Semite, behind...
Read MoreAnn Arbor Community Messiah Sing
After braving the first big snowstorm of the season and slipping slowly across town to reach the Ann Arbor Community Messiah Sing, the children and I finally enter St. Clare of Assisi Episcopal Church (at Genesis of Ann Arbor)...
Read MoreLorna Goodison
We’ve been lucky to have Lorna Goodison among us for most of the last twenty years, teaching in the U-M creative writing program or in the Afroamerican and African Studies department. She has often traveled, returning to...
Read MoreRossini’s William Tell
Attention opera lovers: on December 9, the orchestra, soloists, and chorus of the Royal Theatre of Turin will deliver a concert performance of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell, a seldom-staged work of epic proportions....
Read MoreWarner Bros. Cartoons
I don’t have Thanksgiving plans, but I know exactly what I’m doing the day after. I’m bundling up my three-year-old and taking her to the Michigan Theater to watch their annual screening of Warner Bros....
Read MoreThe Ben Daniels Band
Three things that need immediate attention concerning the Ben Daniels Band: 1. Yes, Ben’s father is in fact Jeff Daniels. Now that’s out of the way, 2. The band is really good, and 3. Daniels clearly understands the...
Read MoreGrave of the Fireflies
Studio Ghibli is to Japan what Disney is to the U.S.: a box-office powerhouse beloved for its children’s cartoons. Where Disney has Cinderella and Frozen, Ghibli has My Neighbor Totoro, in which two little girls befriend...
Read MoreDady Mehta
The Well-Tempered Clavier is J.S. Bach’s two-part compendium of forty-eight preludes and fugues based in each of the major and minor keys. On November 2, in observance of the centennial of EMU’s Pease Auditorium,...
Read MoreLeslie Stainton
I drove through Lancaster, Pennsylvania, once, but I didn’t stop at the theater named for that city’s most famous son, Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, the submarine, and the naval torpedo. Nonetheless,...
Read MoreAnn Arbor Stamp Show
I’m at the 2013 Ann Arbor Stamp Show, and the show’s chair, Mike Homel, is giving me a tour of the bourse, where more than two dozen dealers perch behind tables crowded with tubs of stamps, postcards, and other...
Read MoreSusan Werner
Susan Werner’s fan base likely does not include many right-wing Republicans. She makes her own politics clear in a song about Barack Obama’s election titled, “The Night We Won the War.” It’s also...
Read MoreManshin: Ten Thousand Spirits
Editor’s note: This film is now no longer part of the Ann Arbor Korean Film Festival. For updated schedule, see http://www.ii.umich.edu/ncks/eventsprograms/filmscreenings. An interviewee in the documentary Manshin: Ten...
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