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The tension between spontaneity and established routine creates challenges for any musical group, but it is all the more problematical in jazz, where improvisation plays a critical role. Successful combos often lose their spark,...

Anne Carson defies categories. She has been called “the most interesting poet writing in English” by more than one peer, yet her books are usually a mixture of things that look like poems, that look like essays...

You may think you know Gerald Brennan, but you probably don't. You may know him as an innovative classical disc jockey on WUOM back when WUOM was an all-classical station. You may know him as a classical music critic for the...

I won’t pretend this concept isn’t foreign — bizarre, even — to many of you. I also approached this assignment with a fair amount of skepticism. I’d been eyeballing this Observer calendar listing for years....

Ann Arborite Davy Rothbart does something nobody else has thought to do: he collects interesting lost notes and lists and other kinds of communication that he finds on the street, and publishes them in his on-line and print...

Stand-up comic and song parodist Heywood Banks is a study in contrasts. He wears a plum sports coat, safety glasses, and a crazed mop of graying hair with matching goatee. If he himself is aware of how silly he looks, he...

The African musicians who have become well known in the West are mostly those working modern popular traditions: Miriam Makeba and all who followed her in South Africa, the kinetic juju bands of Nigeria, Angelique Kidjo from...

Matt Watroba likes tradition. He likes songs that somehow seem traditional, even if you know who wrote them. He likes knowing that every Saturday afternoon, as host of the Folks like Us radio show on WEMU, he gets to talk about...

Stumbling out the back door of the Ark after seeing the Subdudes in May 2004, I paused in the alley to get my bearings. A man walked out behind me and, speaking to his companion, summed up the evening: "That was gorgeous....

Don't be afraid of the witchy pentacles for sale, the stacks of tarot cards, or the music stand that looks like macaroni. And don't let the mismatched chairs — either stuffed and stained, hard and metal, or the...

When you get off the elevator on the seventh floor of the U-M Hatcher Graduate Library this month, you may be surprised to hear the insistent strains of "Solidarity Forever" floating from the exhibit room. This space,...