Ain’t Misbehavin’
Ain’t Misbehavin’ is a sizzling, lively tribute to Fats Waller and Harlem between the world wars, where music, dance, art, and literature bloomed in a brief and beautiful kind of Camelot. A lot of the luminaries who...
Read MoreUncategorized
Blackbird’s Intermission
In August, tragedy struck Shakespeare West, the Blackbird Theatre’s summer season in West Park. A car crash took the life of seventeen-year-old performer Danny Friedland, who was appearing in the performance of Twelfth...
Read MorePlaying for Haiti 2011
Ann Arbor piano teacher Renee Robbins was deeply touched when she heard Romel Joseph’s story on NPR last year. Blind from birth, Joseph became a violinist and educator, only to lose both his music school and his pregnant...
Read More
On the Edge
Each of Stanley Kubrick’s films is distinctive in theme and style. Their only commonality is that this great director completely understands each genre he is working in and holds back nothing. His films are consistently...
Read MoreJosh Major Tackles Falstaff
Josh Major is flabbergasted that anybody finds his opera productions for the U-M School of Music controversial. “They do? I didn’t know people even talked about it!”I assure him they do, that some loved his...
Read MoreThe Civil Wars
The Civil Wars, the duo of Joy Williams and John Paul White, met in Nashville a couple of years ago. They tried writing songs together, and things happened very fast. Their song “Poison & Wine” ended up on a...
Read MoreChris Bathgate
“You know I don’t get by on a happy tune …” That’s a line from “Borders,” a song on Chris Bathgate’s most recent CD, Salt Year. He could, and might well be, singing about himself and...
Read MoreJaimy Gordon
When Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award for fiction last year, the prize seemed to startle no one more than the author. Gordon, after all, has been working quietly away for a long time over in...
Read MoreStephen Rush
As a descriptor for Stephen Rush and his music, even the word “eclectic” is much too confining. Rush, a professor at the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance for nearly twenty-five years, has composed operas,...
Read MoreGoran Bregovic
It’s hard to think of good things that have come out of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but one happy result of those brutal conflicts has been the growing international recognition of the music of Goran Bregovic. The...
Read MoreJohn Holk and Carrie Shepard
John Holk (aka Community High grad John Holkeboer) took the stage at Woodruff’s in a sequined suit that would’ve made Gram Parsons proud. The thin, comfortably fitted white suit had tassels along the back with black...
Read MorePool portraits
After Labor Day, most of Fuller Pool’s staff–lifeguards, desk clerks, swim instructors–moved indoors, to the Mack School pool. But they left behind a virtual presence: eight oil portraits donated by aspiring...
Read MorePianist Yuja Wang at Hill
Virtuosity is relatively easy. With a degree of talent and a willingness to spend years practicing six to ten hours a day, most players do eventually become virtuosos. Think Eric Clapton, Charlie Parker, Itzhak Perlman, or...
Read MoreFloyd’s Rusty Cage
“I just thought it was funny to see wildflowers caged inside a little prison,” says Ben Thomas.Lower Town residents, business owners, and drivers passing by the corner of Maiden Lane and Broadway were treated this...
Read MoreJorma Kaukonen
Pete Townshend famously wrote, at age twenty, that he hoped he’d die before he got old (he has gotten encroaching deafness instead), and indeed, few musicians from rock’s classic era have carried vital careers into...
Read MoreJerry Dennis
In 2010 Jerry Dennis’s The Living Great Lakes was the selection for Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads. When Dennis came to town to do his presentation, more than 500 people came to Washtenaw Community College to celebrate the...
Read MoreMultiple Impressions
If you took “Chinese” out of the subtitle of the current exhibit at UMMA, you might not recognize the exhibit as such. Yes, all the artists in Multiple Impressions: Contemporary Chinese Woodblock Prints are from...
Read More