For Pete’s Sake!
I’ve been playing folk music professionally for most of my adult life, and while I have many people to thank for that, there are few to whom I owe a greater debt than Pete Seeger. So I was very happy to be a part of a...
Read MoreUncategorized
Fewer Music Students
For local private music teachers, the recession came early: enrollment at the Ann Arbor School for the Performing Arts peaked in 2005, at 600 students. Then came the departure of Pfizer and its highly paid, highly cultured...
Read More“Hello Goodbye”
Alain Gaash is not Jewish enough. In Graham Guit’s 2009 romantic comedy Hello Goodbye, Gaash (Gerard Depardieu) is not Jewish enough for his colleagues, for his family (he married a gentile, and his mother won’t let...
Read MoreVersatile and Varied
I’ve always thought of Chicago as the Midwest Broadway outpost, so it comes as no surprise that Lou Conte, a Broadway tap and jazz dancer, started Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. I’ve seen the company several times and...
Read MoreSinger E.C. Scott
CONCERT CANCELED.Blues music has come a long way since 1902, when W.C. Handy heard a man in a Mississippi train station pick up a guitar and sing a song with a repeated line about “goin’ where the Southern cross the...
Read More
Dinner with the Coroner of Oz
About fifteen years ago I attended, in Chicago, a meeting of the International Wizard of Oz Club. Similar to Star Trek gatherings, these conferences attract devotees of both the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz and the series...
Read MoreThe Art Habit
A current exhibit at the U-M Museum of Art questions the importance of technical skill in art. Aptly titled An Economy of Means, it features seemingly naive art works acquired by modest collectors, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel....
Read MoreKing Sunny Ade
King Sunny Ade’s April 14 performance at the Ark is canceled, the Ark announced today.”Following a tragic car accident on March 26, 2010, which left two of his key band members dead, King Sunny Ade and the African...
Read MoreThe U-M Chamber Choir
Two things are immediately apparent the first time you hear the U-M School of Music Chamber Choir under Jerry Blackstone. First, that the Choir is a crackerjack group of thirty-four singers with a richly varied tone, a smoothly...
Read MorePianist Danilo Perez
It is difficult to be an iconoclast and a traditionalist at the same time, but pianist Danilo Perez has managed to do it. There are countless well-trained keyboard artists who can play any tune in any key, improvising with skill...
Read MoreCheap Seats
If you’re looking for high art at a low price, you could end up sitting high–very, very high–in Hill Auditorium. The University Musical Society sets aside 275 seats at its Hill concerts to sell for $10 apiece,...
Read MoreAnselm Berrigan
Early in Free Cell, Anselm Berrigan’s most recent book, he writes: “I didn’t come writing/out of the womb/you know.” If that sounds just a bit too insistent, consider the familial weight this poet...
Read More“Uncle Vanya” at Power Center
When my book group did the big Chehkov plays last year, I felt disappointed. I’d read somewhere that Chekhov was second only to Shakespeare as a dramatist, but these kvetching bourgeois seemed a far cry from the...
Read MoreHarpsichordist Ed Parmentier
Ed Parmentier has been here so long we sometimes take him for granted. But given his talent and stature, that is something we ought never to do. Since he joined the U-M School of Music faculty in 1976, the long, lean...
Read MoreFiltering the Film Festival
Donald Harrison wants “to get Ann Arbor where its reputation is” as a center of avant-garde culture. As director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, it’s Harrison’s job to figure out how to keep the flame...
Read MoreMarrakesh and Back
In more than six decades of public performance, pianist Randy Weston has followed his own singular path. Never one of the more popular entertainers, he has, nevertheless, created a very personal musical approach that transcends...
Read MoreGas for Less
So far, there are two Gas For Less songs that choke me up. I’m not alone. Someone posted on front man Ryan Racine’s Facebook profile, “FU for making me cry into my whiskey…Shut your guitar.”Racine,...
Read MoreWest Park Art
About a dozen people–glass artists, installation artists, muralists, interior and graphic designers–turned out at West Park on a cold, snowy February morning to hear city landscape architect Amy Kuras explain the...
Read MoreAndrew Kratzat Quartet
The band’s lineup is your first clue. When the Andrew Kratzat Quartet performs at the Kerrytown Concert House on Wednesday, March 10, they won’t be offering a night of conventional or traditional jazz. Aside from...
Read More