2005 was dubbed the year of Africa. New commitments to fight AIDS, poverty, and instability were made at the G8 Summit, at Live 8 concerts, and in millions of homes around the world. Generalizations are frowned upon for good...
Read MoreAimee Mann named her new album The Forgotten Arm after a boxing move a friend taught her. Punch your opponent with one fist over and over, get him on the ropes, sagging, and a blow from your other, forgotten arm can finish him...
Read MoreThe Dutch post-postmodernist heir to the Dadaist tradition of Old Europe, Louis Andriessen composes music that melds anything to everything to nothing while fusing high culture with low culture and no culture in a high-concept...
Read MoreBits of flamenco have seeped out into the stream of free-floating artifacts that runs through our landscape of cultural consumption, showing up in a television commercial here, a dance mix there. But the individual atoms...
Read MoreIn her new collection of poems, White Sea, Cleopatra Mathis writes, "I have lost my killer instinct / for beauty, for embellishing and relishing / the art of it." She has come to this place — the one where she...
Read More
Aggressive kimonoed Japanese waitresses grab passing travelers to yank them into their teahouses, scholars lounge in rural Chinese retreats, Angkor Wat broods in mist, and minimalistic seascapes glisten. Four exhibits of...
Read MoreJazz pianists are often judged by the company they keep. Some eventually become soloists and front their own groups, but most have to make their living as accompanists and collaborators, venturing out sporadically for solo or...
Read MoreIt's said that when Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is." Clearly, that was not Lee Knight's motivation when he chose to make his life's work the...
Read MoreLet’s face it, classical music faces tough competition when vying for the attention, and affection, of kids. No, I’m not about to head off on a tirade about the respective worths of classical and popular music....
Read MoreA late starter, Leif Ove Andsnes entered the Bergen Conservatory when he was a comparatively old sixteen. Andsnes made up for it by making his American and British debuts and his first recording — a coruscating Prokofiev Third...
Read MoreThe controversial forty-six-year-old Polish pop artist Zbigniew Libera alters and mimics commercial products ranging from toys to exercise equipment in ways that raise caustic questions about social norms and conditioning and...
Read MorePeople struggle to describe Lyle Lovett's music. He started out as a country singer, and plenty of fiddles and steel guitars still propel many of his albums. But Nashville doesn't know what to make of him any more than...
Read MoreF. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives." Possibly that's true for some lives, but fortunately not for all. Ann Arbor's Khalid Hanifi recently opened — more accurately,...
Read MoreDo you have any idea how lucky we are that Bettye LaVette is playing the Ark on Wednesday, December 7? Do you? I didn't think so. All fall, this extraordinary, criminally unknown soul singer has been on tour in support of...
Read MoreI have enough respect for the word genius not to toss it out casually when talking about local bands. Ray Charles was a genius, and so was John Lennon, and maybe Phil Spector was during the golden age of 1960s three-minute pop...
Read MoreIn 1986 “Rocky,” then manager of the Blind Pig, was going to ditch its Friday afternoon happy hour. “Pontiac” Pete Ferguson told him, “Give us fifty bucks and let us pass the pitcher a couple of...
Read MoreI'll tell you right up front: a little poem of mine appears in this new anthology, In Drought Time: Scenes from Rural and Small Town Life, edited by Douglas Smith, Melody Vassoff, and Karen Woollams. My Observer editor tells...
Read MoreThe Waterloo Area Farm Museum's "Christmas on the Farm" offers a mesmerizing blend of historical hogwash, patinated beauty, and just enough ghosts under the eaves — like a wooden wheelchair in the attic that...
Read More