For the last few decades the U-M has had a graduate program in creative writing, but the town very seldom gets a sense of the students who pass through it. They are busy, after all, and here only for a couple of years. They form...
Read MoreThe Carolina Chocolate Drops, young African American musicians from North Carolina, renew a fairly arcane tradition, the old-time black stringband music of the Carolina Piedmont that they learned from its handful of surviving...
Read MoreMao Zedong’s lumpily stuffed white horse in Yanan’s Revolutionary Museum, Zhou Enlai’s black crank telephone, and a woman worker’s spartan concrete apartment-cell next to a socialist “Workshop for...
Read MoreI'm too young to remember the Detroit rock scene of the 1960s — and I'm not that young. In fact I had to take a nap in the afternoon to stay up for the headliner of a recent three-band Blind Pig show. So when Scott...
Read MoreThere's only a modest audience today for the white performers of the 1960s who made pilgrimages to learn the southern black acoustic guitar music known as the country blues. But several of them are still around, and, as with...
Read More
Local music lovers know soprano Whitnie Crown Wolverton primarily from her work with Vox. Founded in 2000 in Ann Arbor and relocated to Chicago in 2006, Vox was a twelve-voice a cappella ensemble dedicated to medieval and...
Read MoreI love Christmas music — the carols, the classics, even many of the novelty tunes; perhaps a surprising admission from a Jewish boy who as a child never sang them, or even heard them much. Okay, you're waiting for the...
Read MoreDon't let the name fool you (even though that last syllable is pronounced with a long A). Todd Deatherage is not goth or heavy metal or punk. This young singer, songwriter, and electric guitarist, recently transplanted to...
Read MoreA handmade sign is taped to the front door at the monthly Huron Gun Collectors meeting at the Washtenaw County Farm Council Grounds. It says, "Cameras, video equipment, tape recorders, and concealed weapons strictly...
Read MoreOver the Rhine, which takes its name from a tough but increasingly creative area near downtown Cincinnati, essentially consists of vocalist Karin Bergquist and pianist and guitarist Linford Detweiler. They write almost all their...
Read MoreOnce a year Michigan Peaceworks throws a fund-raising party at the Ark. When I arrived last year, I found a gaggle of local singer-songwriters and musicians lining the back halls, waiting to play their one song each. Engineers...
Read MoreRobert Hass, former poet laureate of the United States, won the National Book Award a couple of weeks ago for his most recent collection, Time and Materials. Hass has never shied away from ambitious titles — a couple of...
Read MoreSome kids want to grow up to be president. Not Sarah Cleveland. “I always knew I wanted to be an orchestral player,” says the principal cellist of the Ann Arbor Symphony. Cleveland grew up in Livonia in the 1960s....
Read MoreWhenever I stop in at the downtown Sweetwaters, I see nearly as many laptops as coffee mugs. Sure, most of those laptop tappers are probably rapping out term papers, checking emails, or instant-messaging friends, but I’m...
Read MoreJazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux has climbed the Ann Arbor musical ladder all the way to the top: she’s appeared at the Ark, the Michigan Theater, and now — on Thursday, November 8 — at Hill Auditorium. Among the singers...
Read MoreIt's the third Tuesday night of the month. If you're browsing downstairs in the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore on Main Street you'll hear the sound of drumming from above, maybe even feel it. Climb the stairs, turn left,...
Read MoreThe Dutch jazz scene is as varied as it is quirky. Often celebrated for their humor, improvisers from the Netherlands are actually quite serious when it comes to musicianship and music history. Unlike many of their American...
Read MoreDainty $3 bills, a busty wood nymph, toy soldiers making a PB&J, and about sixty other works exploring the theme of "green" fill Work Gallery, and they're made of everything from sewn leaves, Coleman fuel,...
Read MorePlenty has already been written about Mary Gauthier's famously interesting life: her rough-and-tumble beginnings in Louisiana, her eighteenth birthday in prison, her studies in philosophy and the culinary arts, her years as...
Read MoreOrpheum Bell bills its music as "country and eastern," and indeed some of it has old-time country or Gypsy flavors. But that doesn't quite give you the right idea. This band's songs are rarely zippy, even when...
Read More