For the past seven years, the Phoenix Ensemble, perhaps Ann Arbor's most versatile musical group, has performed a wide variety of programs, from folk to jazz to classical. Although the personnel of the ensemble change from...
Read MoreIn the early 1960s in Poland, jazz was no longer illegal, but records were scarce, so young fans and budding musicians sat late into the night trying to catch Willis Conover’s shortwave radio program on the Voice of...
Read More"Las Vegas trilobite" comes to mind while one examines John Garrett's wild silvery swirl of woven metal strips dripping in jet and gold beads. This glittery work nutshells the recent rise and flowering of the craft...
Read MoreNovelist Craig Holden continues to resist categories. After a first couple of novels that could be classified as mysteries or crime fiction, his books have become increasingly complex, following darker paths through the soul to...
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This past fall, poet and teacher Thomas Sayers Ellis offered "Literary Arts and the New Black Aesthetic," a class he designed "for black writers interested in destroying the false boundaries between prose and...
Read MoreThe Juggernaut Jug Band — Roscoe Goose, the Amazing Mr. Fish, Big Daddy T, and Smiley Habanero — come from Louisville, where jug band music began. If you're not familiar with jug band music, it's the closest...
Read MoreA good many years ago when I was visiting Toronto, I made my way in the evening to the Café des Copains, a well-known jazz club that specialized in presenting pianists. On the bill that night was Junior Mance, and quite...
Read MoreIf pluralism is the enlightened catchword in this post-9/11 era of cultural and geopolitical conflict, concert dance may be the ideal art form to do it justice. In Facing Mekka Rennie Harris has mapped a profound and profoundly...
Read MoreThere's nothing wrong with pretty music. I've certainly heard enough ugly music to feel grateful for a local band that is easy on the ears and eager to please. Sparklemotion, with its collage of 1970s jazz-inflected rock...
Read MoreAt one time Béla Bartók was the epitome of musical modernism. During his compositional career, Bartók wrote hard-edged, sharp-cornered, and utterly unsentimental music in every genre, but his strongly argued and powerfully...
Read MoreA man and a woman emerge from isolated cocoons of light and meet center stage. After a brief confrontational "monologue," the woman folds to the floor in supplication, vulnerable on her back, legs bent skyward, arms...
Read MoreSmall presses still have a function. In a time of creeping homogeneity, perhaps they have even a greater function than ever before. They look farther and deeper into our culture to find new writers doing interesting things that...
Read MoreThese days, the best conductors are not German, not French, not Russian, and not even English. These days, the best conductors are Finnish. It's true. Think of Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles, creating an orchestra equally...
Read MoreA weird political kitchen colander, an elaborate silver tea set from the late Ann Arbor philanthropist Philip Bach (right), and an elegant wooden mini-sleigh resembling a baby carriage on runners, once used to whiz local...
Read MoreThe parking lot at Leslie Science Center has overflowed, and cars are lining the driveway. My boy Gabriel, age three, runs immediately to a scarecrow planted firmly in the Project Grow garden. "Who's that?" he...
Read MoreIt's only in the last twenty-five years that klezmer music has moved into concert halls. Before that it was always dance music, played at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and parties. Occasionally it was the vehicle of Jewish comedy....
Read MoreWhen I listen to younger jazz pianists, I sometimes wonder if the instrument does not have too many keys. Most of them have prodigious technique developed by many years of classical training, and many of them take their cues...
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