Red Tail Ring
Think of any stringed instrument, and I guarantee that Michael Beauchamp and Laurel Premo can play it–and thoroughly impressively. The two form the folk revivalist band Red Tail Ring and sound like something you’d...
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Alison Swan
A few years ago MSU Press published a lovely anthology edited by Alison Swan titled Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes. It was a useful combination of obsessions: fine writing and a passion to protect the lakes. And...
Read MoreRoman Stolyar
Jazz has had a long and complicated history in Russia and the Soviet Union. Beloved in the ’20s, practically banned in the ’40s, it continued to go in and out of official favor until the end of Soviet power. Stalin...
Read MoreBackstage at the Museum
I confess I did not expect the fish tour to be very exciting, but I was amazed when we were led down steep cement stairs deep into the basement and found ourselves surrounded by one of the largest fish collections in the...
Read MoreObservatory Lodge
January’s I Spy showed Observatory Lodge, at the corner of Observatory and Washington Heights. Louisa Griffes explained our clue: “Built in 1930,” she writes, it “was the last of eight … multistory...
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Denis Matsuev
There’s a thin line between staggering virtuosity and stunning brutality, and Russian pianists tend to lean toward the latter.Even the greatest Russians (Sviatoslav Richter and Vladimir Horowitz spring to mind) are...
Read MoreVerve Pipe
Many of us fondly remember the musicians who recorded the songs we listened to and sang along with when we were kids. The senior set may recall Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger; others might think of Peter Paul and Mary...
Read MoreEnergetic Ingenue
After director Luna Alexander’s production of Fugue for The New Theatre Project (TNTP) at the Mix Studio Theatre in Ypsilanti closed in December, Sarah Lucas’s production of A Body of Water prepared to open in the...
Read MoreEileen Pollack
Eileen Pollack, former director of the U-M creative writing MFA program, has never been afraid of taking on big themes and big subjects. Among her former students–including several who have gone on to enjoy large...
Read MoreReturn of an icon
No one has yet written a comprehensive history of jazz in Ann Arbor, but when someone does, a major chapter will have to be dedicated to the Ron Brooks Trio. The bassist leader has for decades played a central role in the music...
Read MoreMountain Heart
Mountain Heart came on the scene with its unique bluegrass sound in the late 1990s, and that sound has endured intact through a series of personnel changes. Despite the band’s considerable success, nobody else has been...
Read MoreKesselman on the beach
Last year, a friend who appeared in the 1992 New York production of Einstein on the Beach asked local soprano Lindsay Kesselman if she would consider leaving home for long stretches to do an international tour with the Robert...
Read MoreEllen Rowe
Jazz is now ubiquitous in universities, but it has not always been. For the first half of its history, jazz and academia were divided by race, lifestyle, and conceptual frameworks. The acceptance of improvised music in music...
Read MoreSpace available
At the end of October, a “Space Available” sign went up in the front window of the U-M WORK Gallery on State. Rumors spread that the gallery was closing, and “one woman came in and actually started...
Read MoreWhose Tutu?
The lights dim, the oboe plays an A to tune the orchestra, and the conductor lifts her baton to signal the commencement of the overture to The Nutcracker ballet. Again. This year will be my eighteenth season of playing in the...
Read MoreThe Wheeler Brothers
Quite a few bands have tried to be inspired by the chart-topping Avett Brothers and have found it’s a lot trickier than it seems: that band’s mix of artless country sentiment and alternative rock energy is simple and...
Read MoreGinastera’s Piano Concertos
There are many things a school of music ought to do, high among them preparing performers, producing concerts, training scholars, holding discussions, and disseminating information.But if you ask me, the top thing a school of...
Read MoreLizzie Hutton
For the past fifteen years or more, New Issues Press, associated with Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, has been doing the essential work of finding new poets, making sure their work gets into print, and getting the...
Read MoreClassical Revolution
The players of Classical Revolution are not your mom and dad’s classical musicians. Instead of a bunch of old folks in formal wear in rapt communion with the infinite, it’s a bunch of young folks in street clothes...
Read MoreAn Evening of Sacred Song
When the lights turn low, audience members scurry to find their seats, but I am surprised that the room continues to stay dark. A single voice pierces the darkness, a soulful alto, soon answered by harmonies from around the...
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