Bassist Dave Holland began his musical life in his native England, but when he was just in his early twenties, Miles Davis asked him to join his quintet. He played with Davis on some of the pioneering recordings of the movement...
Read MoreIris DeMent sings and plays the piano, often in the style someone once called church-house ragtime. For the most part she’s drawn to styles that predate country, rock and roll, and even Broadway pop; old white gospel is...
Read MoreWhat do the rich and powerful have to say?As a recent incident proved, one way to learn what the elite talk about is to stash a video camera behind a votive candle and a vase of flowers at a $50,000-a-plate political fundraiser....
Read MoreBy the time this issue of the Observer is out, we will have begun to see the reaction to the new movie made from David Mitchell’s wonderfully odd novel, Cloud Atlas. The movie has been getting some early attention because...
Read MoreFlaming arrows fly. Jumping, twisting, hurling, whirling bodies brandish swords. Warriors die in many inventive ways: impaled through a wooden door, decapitated by sword, caught by the sudden thrust of a thrown dagger....
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It’s not unusual for modern opera directors to take liberties with an opera’s story, changing the locale or period to a place or time the composer and librettist never dreamed of. Some controversial productions that...
Read MoreJazz is an American art form, but in the 1960s and ’70s jazz-related music for the first time became an international phenomenon. Inspired by the more radical players from the homeland, European musicians began to explore...
Read MoreWEMU courts younger listeners with less Coltrane, more Trombone Shorty.The best of times for WEMU, then and now the jazz and local news public radio station of Eastern Michigan University, was during the 1991 Persian Gulf War,...
Read MoreI grew up in suburban Detroit, and there was an odd sort of stagnancy to my childhood. Growing up in a place where people bragged they hadn’t been to downtown Detroit in decades made me feel the defining feature of the...
Read MoreA few years ago Bich Nguyen had a remarkable debut as a writer. Her memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner–which was, among other things, her story about growing up as a Vietnamese immigrant in Grand Rapids–won some...
Read MoreBefore you even walk into the gallery housing the African Art and the Shape of Time exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, you hear the driving drumbeat and techno music and sounds of the street. That drumbeat...
Read MoreLike most kids raised in Michigan, siblings Amy and Will Bennett of the indie-pop band The White Ravens submerged their summers in local lakes and rivers. These memories, mingled with lyricist-vocalist-bassist Amy’s...
Read MoreThe children and I had kites on the brain last year (from the U-M Center for Chinese Studies’ fiftieth anniversary kite festival), so the first thing we noticed as we walked up to the Nam Center for Korean Studies’...
Read MoreI’m almost ashamed to admit that I came to Tracy Smith’s Life on Mars only after she won the Pulitzer Prize for it. I had seen the title, and I immediately remembered the wonderful David Bowie song, and I felt just a...
Read MoreThe roaring twenties and thirties of the last century were a golden age of popular dance and dance bands. The new record industry was working overtime, but canned music did not permeate all public spaces as it does today, and...
Read MoreI’ve heard the Ann Arbor Symphony play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony twice, and both times I was blown away.The first was in September 1988, under music director Carl St. Clair, and it was truly hair-raising. This was...
Read MoreEvery fall during college, after all our books were purchased and fees paid, the last thing on the shopping list was always posters or art. With whatever money we had left, my girlfriends and I would scour the poster bins for...
Read MoreThe Queen of Versailles is a documentary about David Siegel, a seventy-four-year-old time-share tycoon, and his forty-three-year-old wife, Jackie, who set out to build America’s biggest home, in Orlando, Florida. Named for...
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