OMG, he’s back! Poet/musician Rod McKuen, heartthrob of my vanished sixteen-year-old self, will be performing at First United Methodist Church on April 3 as part of its Green Wood Coffee House Series. And though he’s...
Read MoreWhen a guitarist hopped onstage at the Elbow Room carrying a hot-pink translucent electric guitar, I knew Child Bite was going to put on a show. My intuition wasn’t wrong, but I had no idea that show would stamp such a...
Read MoreMovies provide great escapes. One reason I don’t watch TV is that it’s hard to get lost in the small screen. It’s the same reason I sit up close at movie theaters. Like vivid dreams, movies have the power to...
Read MoreUnless you are part of a select group with some specialized knowledge, you might find it hard to believe that Ann Arbor was once known for making cameras. But, yes, the Argus Camera Company made cameras here. The Argus Buildings...
Read MoreIt’s been a month now since the Ann Arbor Folk Festival, but I still can’t get it out of my head. That’s nothing new. As a graduate student at Michigan in the 90s, the festival made for a wonderful seminar in...
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Detroit is celebrated as a place of origin for some of the finest musicians in jazz, but it is also a crossroads that has attracted and nurtured fine players from other towns and other lands be-fore sending them back out into...
Read MoreGuilt. Its a dish often served by Important movies that are Edifying for you. Waltz with Bashir serves up heaping helpings and makes you feel ashamed of being part of a human race that can do unspeakable things to other human...
Read MoreYou can sit back and appreciate Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire as a bluesy, boozy 1940s love song to New Orleans if you want. And no one will blame you if that’s all you want to do with this...
Read MoreNow that the Oscars are over, the Michigan Theater is finally going to show one of the most-talked-about Oscar-nominated films,
Read MoreNo one there will ever forget it—the moment the massed forces of the University Symphony Orchestra and Choirs launched into Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony with a tutti the size of a tsunami: “Behold: the...
Read MoreA typical performance from Lady Sunshine and the X Band begins with just the band, laying down a groove that hypes up the crowd. And, man, do they know how to do it. Trading wild sax and trumpet solos over a resonant walking...
Read MoreCharlie Louvin was one half of the Louvin Brothers, almost the last in classic country music’s sequence of great brother duets. They came on the scene in the late 1940s with a truculent brand of gospel harmony singing...
Read MoreAt 6:30, the scheduled starting time for the AXIS Coffeehouse, the only people in the multipurpose room of the Malletts Creek Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library are teen services librarian Sharon Iverson and intern Cherie...
Read MoreIt’s August 1994 and I’m waiting for Johnny Cash to go on stage at Detroit’s State Theater when the opening act’s high-flying harmonies catch my ear. The Jayhawks, one of the great bands of the...
Read MoreI like to think that I am more comfortable in Detroit than most Ann Arborites. I know my way around the city and make a point of visiting often. Although I exercise caution occasionally, I haven’t felt much fear in the...
Read MoreThe first question you have to ask about Chanticleer—the twelve-voice, all-male choir from San Francisco coming to St. Francis of Assisi Church on Thursday, January 29—is “What do they actually sound...
Read MoreThere’s a new fusion genre emerging in folk music, so far without a name. You could call it chamber folk, by analogy with chamber pop, a streak of quiet indie rock that uses orchestral instruments. Some of it turned up on...
Read MoreA young, hip Japanese couple arrives in Memphis on a pilgrimage to Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley recorded his first hit. An Italian woman, stranded in Memphis while her husband’s corpse is processed through customs, sees...
Read MoreAs I walk with my four kids into the U-M Center for Japanese Studies, we are heartened by the thump thump thump of the kine hitting the rice in the usu. It reminds us of the burly farmhands with whom we used to celebrate...
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