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She-Bop and the Riff Raff

You could accuse She-Bop and the Riff Raff of being just another cover band, or a mere Sixties-style girl group throwback, but the group is considerably savvier and more stylistically adept than that. With vocalists Robin...

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Local Voices

Ann Arbor is well represented in season 10 of The Voice, NBC’s popular singing contest, with competitors Laith Al-Saadi, Daniel Passino, and Jonathan Bach all currently calling the city home.”It’s pretty...

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Midwest Literary Walk

The audience sits blindfolded as novelist and songwriter Josh Malerman performs a scene, with live musical accompaniment, from his horror-thriller Bird Box. As one of several unconventional readings at the 2015 Midwest Literary...

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Robbie Fulks

The son of a bluegrass-loving academic, Robbie Fulks paid his dues at the famed folk clubs of New York City and Chicago. “I think the folk thing is so much a part of my hard drive that I’m always going to be...

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The Last Mentsch

The almost inconceivable magnitude of the Holocaust makes it a very daunting subject for a movie. Filmmakers have necessarily tended to focus on stories of individuals; think Schindler’s List, or the recent Son of Saul....

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The Jerusalem Quartet

Time stops just before the music begins. A string quartet is preparing itself for takeoff. Four individuals sit perfectly still, bows pressed against strings. Their eyes glitter as glances are exchanged. Silence is the flint...

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Ingrid Racine

Many who have lived in Ann Arbor for a while still miss the downtown jazz clubs, the Bird of Paradise and the Firefly, as well as the Sunday afternoon sessions at the Del Rio. But recently there has been a small revival of jazz...

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Films by the Dozen

Perhaps the biggest surprise of Brett Story’s film The Prison in Twelve Landscapes–and certainly its biggest stroke of genius–is that a prison is never seen. In the documentary, which will have its world...

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Pointless Improv

When you think of improv comedy and beer, you think of fun and lighthearted times. And while Jason and Tori Tomalia’s Pointless Brewery & Theatre grew out of a very dark period in the Tomalias’ lives–in...

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Ross Gay

More than 150 years ago Walt Whitman, who might indeed have been blindly optimistic, wrote, “O to have life henceforth a poem of new joys!” American literature since Whitman has had a few celebratory moments, but we...

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Chris Buhalis

Few musicians carry on the true spirit of American roots music the way Chris Buhalis does. Younger players working in what’s been branded alt-country or indie folk look back on American musical tradition with a sense of...

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The Odd Couple

Felix and Oscar, the odd couple of Purple Rose’s current production, began their life on Broadway in 1965 and continued their friendship on TV for five years in the 1970s, gradually acquiring cultural baggage that was not...

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Mozart and Schubert

According to soprano Martha Guth and pianist Penelope Crawford, the best acoustics for chamber music in North America are to be found in churches. This is especially true for art songs, which in the Germanic tradition are called...

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Mid-West Furniture Zoku

Honestly, I stopped by the Ann Arbor Art Center to rule out the current exhibit, Mid-West Furniture Zoku, as a review subject. Furniture? As art? I left two hours later, tripped out, my art heart pierced. I’d taken 109...

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The Everyone Orchestra

The Everyone Orchestra is, to paraphrase James Thurber, something very much like nothing anyone has ever seen before. The project offers improvisation with a conductor. There are just a few prior examples of this in the whole...

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Mipso

The members of the bluegrass quartet Mipso met as students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chose the name because they wanted something unique–even now, they say, when you Google Mipso you find only...

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