Tim O’Brien
A singer, songwriter, and player of almost anything with strings, Tim O’Brien started out in the late 1970s as cofounder of a bluegrass band called Hot Rize that contained its own western alter ego, Red Knuckles & the...
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Michigan Chamber Players
A school of music! The very idea would have seemed preposterous 200 years ago. Of course, there were music teachers and music students then, but teaching music was almost always one-on-one, and usually it was done in the family....
Read MoreAnd the Winner Is
Mitch Albom’s play And the Winner Is, now in an extended run at the Purple Rose through Saturday, September 24, opens as the protagonist enters purgatory. He’s a hunky actor who became a movie star / action hero and...
Read MoreMichigan Atlatl Championship
Atlatl and dart in hand, the loincloth-clad hunter quietly crept through the dense ferns, inching ever closer to a lone mastodon lagging behind the rest of its herd. His sinewy muscles tensed as he firmly nocked the end of the...
Read MoreEmphasis on Digital
Affable local artist Alvey Jones is an alert magpie. His works in the Washington Street Gallery's current show of digital art include cloth from Jo-Ann Fabrics, wood preservative from Stadium Hardware, a wood mat from...
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Mark Morris Dance Group
For some time now, concert dance has been losing its footing with audiences. Back in the golden era of Balanchine and the Bolshoi, when Broadway and PBS productions enthusiastically embraced it, dance was a growth industry. Kids...
Read MorePatrick O’Keeffe
Although Patrick O'Keeffe has lived in America for a couple of decades now — a good deal of that time in Ann Arbor — it is clear that his imagination remains firmly rooted in the Ireland he left when he was in...
Read MoreChuck Suchy
Chuck Suchy ("SOO-key") farms land near Mandan, North Dakota. In 1982 someone gave him a copy of "Field behind the Plow," the folk classic by Canadian songwriter Stan Rogers ("Watch the field behind the...
Read MoreGerman Park Picnic
Weaving among the older folks, families, hippies, and leather-clad Harley bikers are gaggles of barely-twenty-one-looking kids carrying buckets of beer. They don't look German. They look like partyers. I approach a...
Read MoreThe Greencards
Australia is one of just a few foreign lands where American country music has truly flourished. Maybe to execute country music really well it's necessary to wholeheartedly embrace certain uniquely American forms of poor...
Read MoreManuel Valera
From its earliest days, American jazz has been influenced by its southern neighbors, from Mexico, Argentina, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Jazz rhythm and phrasing reflects the clave beat of much Afro-Cuban music, but the connections...
Read MoreManchester Riverfolk Festival
The Manchester Riverfolk Festival, held this year on Saturday, August 6, is truly a one-stop folk festival. It offers more than most festivals and also, fortunately, less: more of what you want in a festival, and less of what,...
Read MoreYpsilanti Garden Tour
The Ypsilanti Garden Club's 2004 Garden Tour exemplified every gardening principle found in modern landscape books — laying out gardens like rooms, creating added interest with garden art, installing water features,...
Read MoreBeth Patterson
If there were ever an artist who won on points for ambition, Beth Patterson's the one. She sings lead vocals and, on her recordings, backup too. She plays an arm's-length list of instruments. She writes her own songs,...
Read MoreThe Jaycees’ Carnival
It's hot, all right, and although I'd rather be home hanging out in the backyard, my boys have noticed the carnival and been promised a ride on the bumper cars. They don't forget. The parking lot is full of teenagers...
Read MoreDaisy May & Seth Bernard
When all those American Idol contestants take a simple note and add all those extra frou-frou decorations, they somehow turn music into sport — a yawner contest to see who can add the most frou. When Daisy May does it, it...
Read MoreChef Chris & the Nairobi Trio
You can call yourself a roadhouse, but that doesn't make you one. On the other hand, the Northfield Roadhouse could call itself the Automat, but it would still be a roadhouse. For decades, the unassuming cinder-block...
Read MoreBebe Neuwirth
She's so much more. Bebe can dance. She made her debut in A Chorus Line as a dancer, appeared in two Bob Fosse dance reviews, and won her first Tony in his revival of Sweet Charity. Bebe can sing. She won her second and...
Read MoreSara Paretsky
I don't read enough detective fiction to get passionate about the nuances that distinguish different writers. I read it for fun, and I'm comfortable with my stereotypes. I think of British detective fiction as being...
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