Tom Russell
Tom Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and now lives in El Paso. To use the words of one of his songs, he "took the long way around" to get there, passing through "the wide-open countries and the heart-attack...
Read MoreApr 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Tom Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and now lives in El Paso. To use the words of one of his songs, he "took the long way around" to get there, passing through "the wide-open countries and the heart-attack...
Read MoreApr 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Before the curtain even rises on a U-M Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) show at Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, you know this isn’t your ordinary student musical. The small but very capable orchestra brings you to your...
Read MoreApr 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The mention of a jazz clarinetist often leads to an obligatory lament over the decline of the fortunes of this instrument in modern jazz. It is true that clarinetists were prominent during the first few decades of the music and...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
A real string quartet performance isn't pretty. A real string quartet performance isn't four players off in a corner at a wedding reception, gracelessly scraping away at the Pachelbel Canon. A real string quartet...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The music of New Orleans is unlike that of any other place. Last winter, as I walked through Louis Armstrong Park, the site of the old Congo Square where pure African music reigned, a young African American woman shouted...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
There are moments of terrifying poignancy in this drama about Bosnian war refugees. Directed cleanly and simply by David Wolber, it's a story about the aftershocks of war from a woman's perspective, and in letting an...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It's avant-jazz night at the Firefly, so what is the klezmer band Into the Freylakh doing on stage? Isn't klezmer, with its roots in medieval Eastern Europe, the music my great-grandparents probably danced to at their...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Christine Hume, a fairly recent addition to the EMU creative writing faculty and an active member of the local writing community, is one of the leading younger American poets exploring the intersection of various kinds of...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Tenor saxophonists, perhaps more than any other instrumentalists, seem to get better with age. Something marvelous happens to their tone, which often deepens and acquires a burnished, soulful tinge. David "Fathead"...
Read MoreMar 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It brings me up short to realize that I have been listening to Odetta, and in awe of Odetta, for forty years. Like many other baby boomers, I grew up with an Odetta record or two in the house. My favorite was the oddly titled...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
It's not surprising that local artist Miriam Brysk's artwork is all about life. As a child she was one of an estimated 500 Jews who escaped the Nazis' Jewish ghetto in Lida, Byelorussia, about 200 miles northeast of...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
The first thing you notice at a Dangerville show is bassist Delilah DeWylde. Whether she’s in vintage minidresses or a French maid costume and fishnet stockings, her black Bettie Page hairdo and deep red lips warn you she...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Bassist Dave Holland is a musician who transcends all categories. Well trained in his native Britain, he came to this country in 1968 when he was hired by Miles Davis, with whom he recorded several classic fusion albums. In the...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Karlheinz Stockhausen: the name itself is enough to terrify even the most hardened lover of contemporary music. Stockhausen — the composer who gave the world a piece for four shortwave radios, another for string quartet and four...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Nicholson Baker has carved out a unique place for himself in American letters: he is our master of the obsessive detail. All of his novels spin out from a microscopic look at a small, often mundane action. It should come as no...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
A Call Girl Named Rosemarie (Rolf Thiele, 1958) is a bitter commentary on the evils of capitalism attendant on West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") that followed World War II. Thiele portrays the...
Read MoreFeb 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
In one of those curious period fads that crop up regularly, early-twentieth-century Viennese culture is all the rage in early-twenty-first-century America. New York's Neue Galerie — a gem of a museum devoted to...
Read MoreJan 15, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
So far as I could tell, the woman sitting next to me at the Ann Arbor Symphony’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth trembled, smiled, cried, and finally simply levitated out of her seat. I couldn’t really stare...
Read MoreJan 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
New U-M president (and former Iowan) Mary Sue Coleman should feel right at home when the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane dancers grace the Power Center stage Saturday and Sunday, January 11 and 12. Last seen here in 1998, Jones and...
Read MoreJan 1, 2003 | Event Reviews, Uncategorized |
Ann Arbor isn't plastered with big, blaring government posters showing leering caricatures of Saddam Hussein, works analogous to the World War II propaganda and patriotic art on display at EMU's Ford Gallery. Unlike the...
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