Culture

Spanish Harlem Orchestra

Note: Since going to press this event has been canceled.By the time the Spanish Harlem Orchestra lands in Ann Arbor on Friday June 20, a portion of the Power Center will have been temporarily modified to accommodate dancers in...

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Nerd Nite

A standing-room-only crowd of geeks, grad students, and geezers are enjoying libations and soft bar lights, but, unlike other nights at Live, the people are waiting to get their eureka on at Nerd Nite Ann Arbor. Three volunteer...

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Cecile McLorin Salvant

Catching a star on the rise is one of the joys of concert-going. Among the many stellar acts on the docket of the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, one show promises to be a lasting treat for fans of classic jazz, New Orleans blues,...

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Carolyn Wonderland

Carolyn Wonderland has been called the best-kept secret in Austin, a city with a lot of superb performers who rarely travel. She has appeared once before in Ann Arbor, at Top of the Park in 2008, but it will be good to see her...

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The Howlin’ Brothers

The revival of old-time music, a heartening thing to all but the most purist of old folkies, has divided into several strands, one of which has picked up the rowdy side of the tradition. The band Old Crow Medicine Show added...

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Blues in the City

If we take the 1914 publication of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” as a starting point, this year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the blues genre. The music has waxed and waned in popularity since then,...

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A Winter’s Journey

Calmly focused, Jesse Blumberg stands gazing into the audience, his eyes agleam with a warmly arresting intelligence. Songs composed in the 1820s have taken root within this man; he is dedicating part of his life to their...

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TechTwilight

My memories of the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum begin in the old museum’s preschool room, with my toddlers crawling on and around the big red fire truck, trying on different firefighter coats, and cooking up strange...

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Style Beyond Style

Modern jazz is a messy business. There are traditionalists who steadfastly reproduce the sounds of yesteryear, dedicated to preserving and strictly adhering to a narrowly perceived tradition. But there is another world of...

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Bruce Mills

In An Archaeology of Yearning, Kalamazoo College English professor Bruce Mills gives a completely loving but totally honest account of living with his autistic son, Jacob, now a young adult, and the ways Jacob’s needs and...

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Easy Virtue

The Michigan Theater’s Hitchcock Film Series began in February and runs through May, featuring thirty-three films in all. It’s quite an accomplishment. All the Hitchcock classics are included; April brings Notorious...

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A.M. Homes

Despite all the complaints we hear about shrinking attention spans and the trivialization of our culture, we live in an age of expansive, even sprawling novels. Those of us who like to disappear into a book, submerge for a week...

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Fuzz Fest

Ann Arbor may be a mecca for folk and indie rock music, but one often has to make a pilgrimage to Detroit for some old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll. Ann Arbor musician Chris Taylor is aiming to change that this spring...

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Sumkali

The word fusion, when applied to music, is sometimes used dismissively or pejoratively. It implies that two or more genres have been mish-mashed for no good purpose other than that they can be. The resulting hodgepodge is...

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Venus in Fur

Venus in Fur by David Ives made a big splash off Broadway and an even bigger one on Broadway when Nina Arianda won a Tony in 2012 for playing the role of Vanda in this two-hander based on a nineteenth-century erotic novella....

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