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The narrator of Nicholas Delbanco’s big new historical novel, The Count of Concord, tells us near the end of it “that Franklin Roosevelt said the three most interesting men, the three most impressive minds in our...

Two years ago, German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter told Musical America she planned to stop performing “when I reach my forty-fifth birthday,” that is, in June 2008. Shortly afterward, however, she told the...

There are currently two disparate trends in the practice of jazz and improvised music in our country. One is firmly committed to maintaining a strictly defined tradition and therefore requires long apprenticeship, now mainly...

The Bellamy Brothers first came on the scene in 1975 with a pleasant if absolutely white-bread country-pop hit called “Let Your Love Flow.” The kind of music they made was soon redefined as country, and for most of...

Back in the 1980s, Amy Hempel became famous for one extraordinary short story, “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried.” In it the narrator visits a friend who is in the last stages of cancer, and the two women...

There are singers, and there are people with beautiful voices. The two are by no means mutually exclusive, but neither do they always coexist. Of course, there are also plenty of successful so-called singers—who aren’t—and...

Rodney Crowell got his start in the 1970s as a member of Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band, a key point of departure for the artistically ambitious side of contemporary country music. In Nashville he was best known for a while as...

I’m confused about Counter Cosby. Are they musical geniuses or are they impaired in some way? It’s hard to tell.When I saw them perform last winter at TC’s Speakeasy, they actually were impaired. They played...

Visitors to the Ypsilanti Historical Museum on North Huron Street enter a lovely furnished 1860s Italianate home with gracious high-ceilinged rooms. I never go there without wishing I could move in (or at least throw a party...