For anyone who reads poetry, there are always poets who become important only after one learns how to read them. Rae Armantrout is one of those for me. When I started reading her almost thirty years ago, I associated her with a...
Read MoreIt is customary to write about a successful large jazz ensemble by asking the rhetorical question “Who says the big bands are dead?” But the sad truth is that the steadily touring big bands are indeed gone forever....
Read MoreLast June, a chartered van left Saginaw Valley State University and rolled 100 miles southeast to Detroit. The riders were my art students, and their mission was to compare and contrast the murals at the Detroit Institute of Art...
Read MoreI first saw Lewis Black at the Michigan Theater several years ago (he’s back there on February 19). He gave what seemed to be a rambling monologue that began with jokes about the Old Testament and the plight of Jews,...
Read More
The prime root of American roots music is ragtime. The love child of Sousa’s marches and African Americans’ syncopations, ragtime preceded jazz and was there at the birth of the blues. And though jazz and blues...
Read MoreAt the very essence of jazz there is a seismograph that responds to the changing social fabric of America. This was perhaps best encapsulated in the title of Sidney Finkelstein’s book Jazz, A People’s Music,...
Read MoreThe Kruger Brothers, Jens and Uwe, first heard American roots music when their father brought folk records home to Switzerland from his business trips. They struck out on their own as street musicians, Jens on banjo and Uwe on...
Read MoreNicholas Delbanco has been in Ann Arbor for almost thirty years now, first brought in as director during the early days of the U-M MFA program in creative writing, now universally recognized as one of the top three such programs...
Read MoreTwenty-some years ago, a group of Burns Park Elementary parents decided to put on a show to raise some money. Did no one tell them art is not what you do to raise money? Hello! Who put the non in nonprofit? The arts,...
Read MoreWhen professional actors based in New York City started coming to Dexter to perform musicals, some wondered: why? After eighteen months, the answer seems clear: the Encore Theatre is something like a cultural exchange program....
Read MoreAmerican artists of all kinds have attempted from time to time to take on the whole sprawl of the continent and our national history upon it. It is surprising that more have not tried to work with the Lewis and Clark Expedition,...
Read MoreOnce upon a time, Robert Plant was the living incarnation of great god Dionysus, and he and his fellow gods of the holy quartet Led Zeppelin delivered Bacchic revels and priapic ecstasies to their followers in the bleak epoch of...
Read More“It was a wee thing at the beginning,” says Patrick Little about planning for the very first Saline Celtic Festival back in 1996 to celebrate Saline’s relationship with its sister city, Brecon, Wales. Over the...
Read MoreDespite a national outcry over funding art while laying off firefighters, City Council voted 8-3 in November to proceed with a $742,000 sculpture fountain in front of the new police-courts building. But two additional interior...
Read MoreJim Dapogny is well known to music lovers all over the globe for his deep knowledge of early jazz, for his piano playing, and for his arranging skills. In addition to his many other projects, he has been co-leading Phil...
Read MoreDetroit’s rich musical heritage is often celebrated in print, in performance, and in film. The pleasures of Motown, the earlier jazz histories, as well as the rhythm and blues scene of the Motor City have been justly...
Read MoreLike a lot of other people, I often find contemporary installation art to be groan inducing. What is meant to be a profound comment on some aspect of global society or a critique of traditional aesthetics all too often fails to...
Read MoreI saw Lac La Belle in 2009 at the fabulous Dally in the Alley in Detroit, just a little while after the trio adopted that name. Before then, they were Jennie and the Sure Shots; that made you think they played cowgirl music,...
Read More