Old West Side Homes Tour
If you’re new to the community, and this time of year so many are–welcome!–the Old West Side Homes Tour is a good way to inhale the aroma of one of Ann Arbor’s most iconic neighborhoods. For a lot of...
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Chad Harbach
Editor’s note: This event has been canceled.I read The Art of Fielding because it was a new baseball novel. I found out it was about a lot more than baseball.In Chad Harbach’s debut novel, published in 2011, the...
Read MoreReal Music
Blues and jazz are built upon the give-and-take of improvisational interplay between musicians. The best way to capture that feeling is to bring players together, set up microphones, and record the piece just as they perform it....
Read MoreAn Evening of Beethoven
As if to inaugurate the autumn in burnished splendor, Arie Lipsky and the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra will open their new season with three popular works by Ludwig van Beethoven, a prolific composer who wrote only one...
Read MoreThe Many Flavors of the Jazz Guitar
September of this year has somehow turned into jazz guitar month at the Kerrytown Concert House. The first installment, on September 11, features a trio with the somewhat disconcerting name Thumbscrew, made up of three...
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The Crane Wives
The Crane Wives bill themselves as an indie folk group, even deriving their name from an album by one of that genre’s original stalwarts, the Decemberists. But despite the presence of a banjo, mostly acoustic...
Read MoreSarah Jarosz
Sarah Jarosz’s first recording was nominated for a Grammy before she even finished high school. Last year, soon after she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, her third album also received a Grammy...
Read MoreMandolin Orange
The Americana and folk scenes are full of married or partnered couples these days. Mandolin Orange, the North Carolina duo of Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz, follows in the footsteps of the couple that started this trend and so...
Read MoreDancing in the Streets
I had to learn to waltz for a musical when I was in high school. My partner had a habit of going one-three-two while I was going two-three-one, and the results were like Arthur Murray gone horribly, horribly wrong.I kind of...
Read MoreThat 1990s Spirit
In the 1980s and 1990s, women had more room to be tough on the radio. From Natalie Merchant in 10,000 Maniacs to Suzanne Vega to the Bangles to the Cowboy Junkies, female pop stars maintained the memorable hooks and lighter...
Read MoreLouise Penny
Louise Penny’s third appearance in Ann Arbor, this time to discuss and sign her latest Inspector Gamache mystery, will be at Washtenaw Community College’s Towsley Auditorium–the largest venue yet to host her...
Read MoreBarbara Morrison
Detroit and its surroundings have been the birthplace and learning ground of countless great jazz instrumentalists but have also given the world a number of majestic singers as well. The jazz bug can lay dormant and only grow...
Read MoreBill Morris
Most of us in this part of the world remember the John Lee Hooker song about the 1967 riots: “Oh, the Motor City’s burnin’ /It ain’t no thing in the world that I can do … My home town is...
Read MoreAerial Silks on the Diag
People walking through the Diag on a Wednesday evening may not have noticed, but Nate Juliar was suspended upside down twenty feet above the ground, his legs spread apart, blood draining to his head, grinning. He’d wrapped...
Read MoreAnna Lee’s Company
Anna Lee’s Company, a funk/bluegrass/folk-rock band with a name derived from a lyric in the Band’s iconic “The Weight,” formed early in 2013. The four core musicians all previously played in other popular...
Read MoreBilly Strings & Don Julin
“Billy Strings & Don Julin play traditional American string band music with energy levels usually associated with extreme sports,” says the website of this northern Michigan duo. The line sounds good for getting...
Read More“Week After Art Fair Song Fest”
In the summer, birds are said to sing, as are crickets and cicadas. Wolves and whales have songs to which we’ve never managed to learn the lyrics. For people, song is where words and melodies like to meet. The air fills...
Read MoreEverything I Never Told You
At one point in Celeste Ng’s new debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, a Chinese American father imagines saying to his white wife, “You’ve never been in a room where no one else looked like you....
Read MoreChanging Hands: Art Without Reservation 3
A Louis Vuitton quiver and a dream catcher bra.Translucent coyotes spun from packaging tape.And, coiled like a white snake, a MacBook Pro power cord beaded with a peyote stitch.Created by contemporary Native artists, these works...
Read MoreMan Meets Horn
For many the main defining aspect of jazz is improvisation. And yet many of the most creative artists who have been associated with this kind of music, however broadly defined, have explored the deeply running continuum between...
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