If you've never heard the legendary Blind Boys of Alabama, by all means take the opportunity when they come to the Ark on Monday, November 17. Formed as the Five Blind Boys of Alabama in the 1940s, they cultivated a sound...
Read MoreCharles Lloyd is one of the great originals in jazz. He grew up in Memphis, where he learned jazz from players such as George Coleman and Phineas Newborn but also apprenticed with bluesmen like B.B. King. He moved to Los...
Read MoreA couple of decades before anyone ever talked about performance poetry, long before the spread of poetry slams and their imitators, Jayne Cortez was creating a reputation for herself as a performer of her own poetry. Associated...
Read MoreThe violin has never been considered a typical jazz instrument, but in recent years, in the eclectic atmosphere of improvised music, nontraditional instruments have been more welcome. A number of violinists have risen to...
Read MoreLet’s not debate the merits of movie music. That argument was settled long ago by the only people whose opinion matters: the composers. Stravinsky wrote music for Orson Welles’s Jane Eyre (although Twentieth Century...
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Last April, on the first Friday night when spring seemed truly possible, Odessa Harris sang blues, jazz, and R&B chestnuts and made them appropriately frisky and lustful. The buzz-cut, fluffed crowd at Goodnite Gracie...
Read MoreA few years ago Charles Baxter wrote a love story set in Ann Arbor, The Feast of Love, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world. Last year I met a couple of Scandinavian writers in Greece who had a vague...
Read MoreIn August 1913, nine-year old Georgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze became a boarding student at the Imperial Theater Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia. A week later, he ran away. Not exactly an auspicious beginning for the...
Read MorePeople trying to make good music in Nashville more or less follow Darrell Scott's every move. He came on the scene with his Aloha from Nashville album six years ago, and it was an absolute gold mine of top- quality country...
Read MoreFor years, we had to coax our preschooler into going to “the dinosaur museum” by downplaying the inherently scary aspects of dead creatures on display, some of them enormous. He wasn’t frightened, just...
Read MoreIn nearly five years of poking around local galleries, there have been only three occasions when I stared slack-jawed at a work of art, rapidly calculated my bank balance, and thought, "It's gonna be macaroni and cheese...
Read MoreWhat would life be like if we spoke our thoughts out loud? Jimmy Pardo knows. Onstage, he frequently undergoes a bizarre shift from an arrogant moron to an acutely self-conscious, self-doubting boy gone crazy with the...
Read MoreCould a film as pointedly satirical about our government and its appetite for war as Dr. Strangelove be made today? It's not as if we don't have the material, but which director could skewer the times as thoroughly as...
Read MoreIn the wake of the liberating free jazz movements of the 1950s and 1960s, musicians all over the world reexamined their attitude toward jazz tradition. Perhaps the most radical new trends took place in England, where a small...
Read MoreSo if Hugo Wolf is the greatest song composer in the history of the German language, how come he wasn't famous? Because he had syphilis and died insane? Schubert had syphilis, and Schumann died insane, and no one held it...
Read MoreAnn Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto found a massive audience, but it did so in a very interesting way. Patchett had been publishing regularly for more than a decade and was critically respected for the quiet craft of her...
Read MoreSome people know the Scottish band Capercaillie mostly by the voice of its lead vocalist, Karen Matheson, who sang a stark Gaelic lament in the film Rob Roy. Matheson's singing is impossibly beautiful — Sean Connery...
Read MoreThe trash — I mean, artifacts — excavated from the Kempf House's backyard gives an evocative look at nineteenth-century life in Ann Arbor. For some time, excavators hoped they were digging where the Kempf...
Read More"Love doesn't always have to go wrong, but it's a lot easier to write about it when it does." This little bit of songwriter's truth was shared on-stage by Khalid Hanifi somewhere between "The Bloom Is...
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