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On May 22 at the Michigan Theater, the Washtenaw Community Concert Band will stage a tribute to America’s first superstar bandleader, John Philip Sousa. Guest conductor Marcus Neiman will portray the man whose name is...

Detroit has long been a bebop jazz town. During the 1950s, the high schools, street academies, and jazz clubs nurtured musicians such as pianists Barry Harris and Tommy Flanagan, trombonist Curtis Fuller, bassists Doug Watkins...

I heard a duo formation of the Corn Potato String Band, “the ears and eyes of America,” one Friday in February over happy hour at PJ’s Lager House in Detroit. I had been waiting for years, decades even, for...

Stark and soft. Huge yet intimate. Victim, villain. Dry facts, bloody horror. These contrasts make seeing Xu Weixin: Monumental Portraits at the University of Michigan Museum of Art a skin-crawling, soul-deepening experience. It...

The human voice is arguably the most versatile of all musical instruments. It is perhaps the only one capable, whether coupled with words or not, of both expressing and eliciting all emotions–ones for which we have names...

A few decades ago I spent a couple of hours in the Antelope Valley, up in the northern part of Los Angeles County. Those California counties seem as big as medium-sized European countries, and once you’re in the Antelope...

Lucette, whose real name is Lauren Gills, comes from Edmonton, Alberta. She made a splash a couple of years ago, at the age of twenty-two, with her debut album, Black Is the Color, and went out on the road with the fast-rising...