Like a bracelet around the Crisler Arena floor are ten sets of concentric circles: a circular drum, a circle of men playing it in unison with sticks and singing, and a group that gathers around them to listen. Sometimes, says a...
Read MoreThe eleven songs on Tift Merritt's brand-new record Another Country were waiting for her in a series of rented flats in Paris. She just had to go there and get them. The liner notes tell the story: exhausted from relentless...
Read MoreImagine a sculpture of a naked reclining woman, her lips painted full and red, her eyes flirting playfully with the viewer. Now add a sagging belly and breasts and drooping wrinkled skin. Finally, put a sheep’s head on her...
Read MoreYou know the old fable of the blind men who use their sense of touch to try to describe an elephant. One man feels the elephant’s leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree.” Another grasps the trunk and...
Read MoreOf the uncountable thousands of rock 'n' roll bands on the planet, very few have the gender composition of the Blue Rubys: three women and one man. The combination gives the band a kind of collective sexiness that's...
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It is sometimes difficult, at a time when a jazz album receives a Grammy for best musical performance, to remember the long struggle that the music has had for legitimacy in the country of its birth or to imagine that there was...
Read MoreFor more than half a century now — certainly since the famous reading in San Francisco in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first unveiled his Howl, Gary Snyder read from his Riprap poems, and the Beat movement entered the popular...
Read MoreWhen Shakespeare wrote that "all the world's a stage," he was, of course, not referring to the Blackbird Theatre. Yet it's an apt description of Ann Arbor's newest theater. At the Blackbird the playhouse...
Read MoreThe EMU Convocation Center is crawling with teenagers. They’re smart teenagers — high school students who design, build, and operate robots. They’ve traveled here, with their robots, from fifty-nine Midwest high...
Read More"Fare thee well, I'm bound to roam. . . ." With these old-fashioned, courtly words in "Tennessee Blues" — the opening cut to his Grammy-winning new album Washington Square Serenade — Steve...
Read MoreThe premise makes it sound more gimmicky than it is. Two staid suburban couples, on a dare, drink some sort of hallucinogenic truth-inducing "wine" made from Peruvian tree frogs. Vino Veritas, which continues its world...
Read MoreCharles Baxter’s novels and short stories have often questioned the nature of their composition: Is this a story? And if so, where is the boundary between the story and the life it may or may not reflect? Where is the...
Read MoreJazz critics, like pollsters and pundits, are often wrong. When in 1958 a relatively unknown twenty-eight-year-old pianist named Ahmad Jamal had a hit tune named "Poinciana" that stayed on the top-ten charts for weeks...
Read MoreWhen was the last time you heard a recital of four-hand piano music? At one time it was all the rage. Long before there was an iPod in every ear, there was a piano in every living room. And people played them, sometimes alone...
Read MoreForty years ago David Holt visited the Appalachian Mountains for the first time and began immersing himself in the music and stories he heard there. Since then, he has studied with many people and taught many more. Today, all...
Read MoreDuring World War II, sixteen-year-old Polish Jew Sala Garncarz was sent to a Nazi slave labor camp. She brought along a leather satchel. In between inspections and camp work, she gave the satchel to fellow prisoners, buried it,...
Read MoreLike so many other classical music fans, violinist Aaron Berofsky says he grew up listening to Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And like so many other classical music fans, the full-time...
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