Mountain Heart
Mountain Heart came on the scene with its unique bluegrass sound in the late 1990s, and that sound has endured intact through a series of personnel changes. Despite the band’s considerable success, nobody else has been...
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Ellen Rowe
Jazz is now ubiquitous in universities, but it has not always been. For the first half of its history, jazz and academia were divided by race, lifestyle, and conceptual frameworks. The acceptance of improvised music in music...
Read MoreThe Wheeler Brothers
Quite a few bands have tried to be inspired by the chart-topping Avett Brothers and have found it’s a lot trickier than it seems: that band’s mix of artless country sentiment and alternative rock energy is simple and...
Read MoreGinastera’s Piano Concertos
There are many things a school of music ought to do, high among them preparing performers, producing concerts, training scholars, holding discussions, and disseminating information.But if you ask me, the top thing a school of...
Read MoreLizzie Hutton
For the past fifteen years or more, New Issues Press, associated with Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, has been doing the essential work of finding new poets, making sure their work gets into print, and getting the...
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Classical Revolution
The players of Classical Revolution are not your mom and dad’s classical musicians. Instead of a bunch of old folks in formal wear in rapt communion with the infinite, it’s a bunch of young folks in street clothes...
Read MoreAn Evening of Sacred Song
When the lights turn low, audience members scurry to find their seats, but I am surprised that the room continues to stay dark. A single voice pierces the darkness, a soulful alto, soon answered by harmonies from around the...
Read MoreAin’t Misbehavin’
Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a sizzling, lively tribute to Fats Waller and Harlem between the world wars, where music, dance, art, and literature bloomed in a brief and beautiful kind of Camelot. A lot of the luminaries who...
Read MoreOn the Edge
Each of Stanley Kubrick’s films is distinctive in theme and style. Their only commonality is that this great director completely understands each genre he is working in and holds back nothing. His films are consistently...
Read MoreJosh Major Tackles Falstaff
Josh Major is flabbergasted that anybody finds his opera productions for the U-M School of Music controversial. “They do? I didn’t know people even talked about it!”I assure him they do, that some loved his...
Read MoreThe Civil Wars
The Civil Wars, the duo of Joy Williams and John Paul White, met in Nashville a couple of years ago. They tried writing songs together, and things happened very fast. Their song “Poison & Wine” ended up on a...
Read MoreChris Bathgate
“You know I don’t get by on a happy tune …” That’s a line from “Borders,” a song on Chris Bathgate’s most recent CD, Salt Year. He could, and might well be, singing about himself and...
Read MoreJaimy Gordon
When Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award for fiction last year, the prize seemed to startle no one more than the author. Gordon, after all, has been working quietly away for a long time over in...
Read MoreStephen Rush
As a descriptor for Stephen Rush and his music, even the word “eclectic” is much too confining. Rush, a professor at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance for nearly twenty-five years, has composed operas,...
Read MoreGoran Bregovic
It’s hard to think of good things that have come out of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but one happy result of those brutal conflicts has been the growing international recognition of the music of Goran Bregovic. The...
Read MoreJohn Holk and Carrie Shepard
John Holk (aka Community High grad John Holkeboer) took the stage at Woodruff’s in a sequined suit that would’ve made Gram Parsons proud. The thin, comfortably fitted white suit had tassels along the back with black...
Read MorePianist Yuja Wang at Hill
Virtuosity is relatively easy. With a degree of talent and a willingness to spend years practicing six to ten hours a day, most players do eventually become virtuosos. Think Eric Clapton, Charlie Parker, Itzhak Perlman, or...
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