The Blue Rubys
Of 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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Donny McCaslin
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 MoreGary Snyder
For 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 MoreMuch Ado about Nothing
When 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 MoreGreat Lakes Robot Competition
The 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...
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Steve Earle
"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 MoreWho’s Afraid of Vino Veritas?
The 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 return
Charles 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 MoreAhmad Jamal
Jazz 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 MoreChamber Music Lincoln Center
When 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 MoreDavid Holt
Forty 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 MoreLetters to Sala
During 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 MoreThe 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...
Read MoreDean 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...
Read MoreCarolina 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...
Read MoreMorath 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...
Read MorePowertrane
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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