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The Hot Club of Cowtown first came to Ann Arbor from their home base of Austin in 1998. As the name suggests, the trio (fiddle, guitar, and bass) combined gypsy jazz with the 1930s Texas country-jazz fusion now known as Western...

I was listening to a fairly random selection of classical CDs when suddenly I heard a disc that was anything but random–a collection of trios for clarinet, viola and piano by Mozart, Beethoven, and Bruch. Every performance...

Jazz has always been popular in Europe, but for decades all that the best Europeans musicians could do was to imitate, with only partial success, their heroes from across the ocean. Today, jazz is an international style, played...

Akira Kurosawa once said, “A truly good movie is interesting and easy to understand.” His 1948 film Drunken Angel fits that description. Its plot is easy to understand: An old gangster gets out of jail and takes over...

In a recent interview, Dean Young said something to the effect that the only way to get past irony is to go through it. This quip certainly highlights Young’s ironic sense and the emotional distance he often creates by his...

I am a little apprehensive when asked to show ID before being allowed in the door, but that hyper-paranoid-minority-mom response melts instantly once I walk inside the Jewish Community Center for its annual Apples and Honey...

The U-M Museum of Art’s glass-walled Project Gallery could pass these days for a trendy women’s clothing boutique. An array of flared-skirt sweater sets hang on headless human forms from fishing line hooked to the...