There have been Collage Concerts in Ann Arbor as long as I can remember, and, as best I can remember, they’ve never had any repertoire in common except by accident. The Collage Concert is a study in reckless juxtaposition....
Read MoreThe Left Behind series of Christian Apocalypse novels opens with the Rapture, the supposedly promised day when all good people will be taken bodily to heaven before the world faces its last terrible tribulations. The books...
Read MoreJohn Latini prefaces each song with a story — who he wrote it with, where they were, etc. It's the same way American Indians introduce themselves, by identifying their clan. It keeps you connected, solidifies your...
Read MoreWorld dance, ethnic dance, classical dance — such cookie-cutter categories are often thrown around without careful thought. Isn't ballet an ethnic art form? Can't much of what we call "world dance" also...
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Here's a good old word for all you crossword puzzle fanatics: swither. My Oxford English Dictionary says it's a verb that means "to be or to become uncertain or undecided." In Scots, apparently, the...
Read MoreLast month, when my kids and I dropped in for Sciencepalooza — the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum's monthly smorgasbord of hands-on science activities — the first table we hit was Be a Nurse. My kids weren't...
Read MoreMy dad loved male choruses. One of my earliest memories as a small child in Cleveland is of him performing on television with his barbershop group. Years later I married into a family with serious singers on both sides....
Read MoreZoe Speaks is the duo of Mitch Barrett and Carla Gover, who are married and were inspired in naming their musical partnership by their older daughter’s first words. Both grew up in rural eastern Kentucky, left, and came...
Read MoreSometimes I think even my friends who've heard Billy Bragg's music are coming to him backwards. They picked up 1998's Mermaid Avenue, Bragg's collaboration with Wilco that set Woody Guthrie's unpublished...
Read MoreCounteracting the popular image of Alexander Calder as a whimsical wizard of elegant megamobiles, a nineteen-minute film of a Cirque Calder performance inadvertently portrays the artist as a doddery paterfamilias of a charming...
Read MoreEmily Dickinson told us that poets should tell the truth but tell it slant, in the belief that coming toward something from the side, unexpectedly, may reveal more of its reality. A variation on this might be that poets —...
Read More"Keep it vanilla," Hank Williams once said to band members who cut loose with jazzy licks. Country music, whose simultaneous glory and weakness is its orientation toward the common denominator, hasn't always been...
Read MoreIn my left hand I hold the first Peggy Seeger record I ever owned. It came out in 1957 — I was born sometime after that — and by the time I was a toddler, American Folk Songs Sung by the Seegers was in regular...
Read MoreIt’s tempting to see Guest Artist, written by Jeff Daniels and playing at the Purple Rose through Saturday, March 18, as something Daniels wrote on the set of The Squid and the Whale, in a method-actorish obsession with...
Read MoreLast summer, weeks before the release of the group's debut CD, Yes Nearby, I downloaded and fell in love with a catchy tune called "Tipi Baya" done by the Ypsilanti band the Ragbirds. Quirky and melodic, the track...
Read MoreSarah Dunant published more than half a dozen books before her first historical novel, The Birth of Venus, catapulted her to the top of the New York Times best-seller list in 2003. The book was set in Renaissance Florence in...
Read MoreS, Q, U, M, L, I, E. Tom looks despairingly at his rack and then out the window of the Firefly Club. The fading light of dusk seems to represent his hopes of winning. A table away, Amy plays a Z on a triple letter square to make...
Read MoreDepending on your point of view, part of the jazz world is either blessed or cursed by an obsession with tradition. Many of today's most popular jazz musicians have spent years trying to master a style that was developed...
Read MoreThe symphonies of Dmitry Shostakovich, the former Soviet Union’s most celebrated composer, are the best of the twentieth century. From his First Symphony in 1925 through the Fifteenth and final symphony of 1971,...
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