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The Goldbergs transcribed

Like 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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Dean and Bolina

For the last few decades the U-M has had a graduate program in creative writing, but the town very seldom gets a sense of the students who pass through it. They are busy, after all, and here only for a couple of years. They form...

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Carolina Chocolate Drops

The Carolina Chocolate Drops, young African American musicians from North Carolina, renew a fairly arcane tradition, the old-time black stringband music of the Carolina Piedmont that they learned from its handful of surviving...

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Morath and Miller

Mao Zedong’s lumpily stuffed white horse in Yanan’s Revolutionary Museum, Zhou Enlai’s black crank telephone, and a woman worker’s spartan concrete apartment-cell next to a socialist “Workshop for...

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Powertrane

I'm too young to remember the Detroit rock scene of the 1960s — and I'm not that young. In fact I had to take a nap in the afternoon to stay up for the headliner of a recent three-band Blind Pig show. So when Scott...

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Rory Block

There's only a modest audience today for the white performers of the 1960s who made pilgrimages to learn the southern black acoustic guitar music known as the country blues. But several of them are still around, and, as with...

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D-E-A-R S-A-N-T-A

I love Christmas music — the carols, the classics, even many of the novelty tunes; perhaps a surprising admission from a Jewish boy who as a child never sang them, or even heard them much. Okay, you're waiting for the...

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Todd Deatherage

Don't let the name fool you (even though that last syllable is pronounced with a long A). Todd Deatherage is not goth or heavy metal or punk. This young singer, songwriter, and electric guitarist, recently transplanted to...

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The Huron Gun Collectors

A handmade sign is taped to the front door at the monthly Huron Gun Collectors meeting at the Washtenaw County Farm Council Grounds. It says, "Cameras, video equipment, tape recorders, and concealed weapons strictly...

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Over the Rhine

Over the Rhine, which takes its name from a tough but increasingly creative area near downtown Cincinnati, essentially consists of vocalist Karin Bergquist and pianist and guitarist Linford Detweiler. They write almost all their...

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The Concert for Peace

Once a year Michigan Peaceworks throws a fund-raising party at the Ark. When I arrived last year, I found a gaggle of local singer-songwriters and musicians lining the back halls, waiting to play their one song each. Engineers...

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Robert Hass

Robert Hass, former poet laureate of the United States, won the National Book Award a couple of weeks ago for his most recent collection, Time and Materials. Hass has never shied away from ambitious titles — a couple of...

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Cellist Sarah Cleveland

Some kids want to grow up to be president. Not Sarah Cleveland. “I always knew I wanted to be an orchestral player,” says the principal cellist of the Ann Arbor Symphony. Cleveland grew up in Livonia in the 1960s....

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Madeleine Peyroux at Hill

Jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux has climbed the Ann Arbor musical ladder all the way to the top: she’s appeared at the Ark, the Michigan Theater, and now — on Thursday, November 8 — at Hill Auditorium. Among the singers...

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Drummunity!

It's the third Tuesday night of the month. If you're browsing downstairs in the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore on Main Street you'll hear the sound of drumming from above, maybe even feel it. Climb the stairs, turn left,...

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Eric Boeren

The Dutch jazz scene is as varied as it is quirky. Often celebrated for their humor, improvisers from the Netherlands are actually quite serious when it comes to musicianship and music history. Unlike many of their American...

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The Green Show

Dainty $3 bills, a busty wood nymph, toy soldiers making a PB&J, and about sixty other works exploring the theme of "green" fill Work Gallery, and they're made of everything from sewn leaves, Coleman fuel,...

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Mary Gauthier

Plenty has already been written about Mary Gauthier's famously interesting life: her rough-and-tumble beginnings in Louisiana, her eighteenth birthday in prison, her studies in philosophy and the culinary arts, her years as...

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