Ollabelle
The music of Ollabelle is at once lush and spare. The four men and two women who form this New York City-based group let their blending, bleeding voices rule, backed by restrained accompaniment — sometimes just drums,...
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The Paul Taylor Dance Company
Near the beginning of Dancemaker (1998), Matthew Diamond's Oscar-nominated documentary, Paul Taylor admits, "I get my energy, I think, from being afraid — being afraid to choreograph, being afraid to fail."...
Read MoreRashied Ali
Many of today's younger improvisers look back with awe to the 1960s and early 1970s, when political, social, and cultural upheavals in American life were accompanied by radical challenges to the jazz tradition. Most of the...
Read MoreRising Star Fife & Drum Band
Othar (or Otha) Turner died in February 2003 at ninety-five. He learned to make and play a bamboo cane fife as a youth, from an old man who told him that the drumming that accompanied the fife came from Africa. Turner worked a...
Read MoreShots of War: The Last Battle
A ragged black hole where an eye should be howls out of a photo of a sprawled dead GI. The other lifeless eye is fixed on the viewer of New York photographer Tony Vaccaro's exhibition of fifty-five riveting World War II...
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Blackie & the Rodeo Kings
Maybe if I ever do something really important, a trio of esteemed Canadian singer-songwriters will record an album in my honor. And that tribute album will be riotously successful and make me famous — and them too, of...
Read MoreThe Kerrytown BookFest
No, this isn't that big-budget spring event that celebrates publishing, literacy, and other profundities. The Kerrytown District Association BookFest is much homier than that. A neighborly get-together that features...
Read MoreThe Emerson String Quartet
When the Emerson String Quartet was in Ann Arbor early last December, it played Haydn, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. When it returns to town on Sunday, September 26, it will play Tower, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. From the...
Read MoreJack Wright
The semi-underground world of free improvisation has its own heroes, its own publications, and its own network of dedicated supporters and performance venues. But even in this small world there are hierarchies and conformities...
Read MoreRalph Stanley
I've seen and heard Ralph Stanley any number of times, once in a high school multipurpose room with the acoustics of a seashell. He's the greatest living exponent of bluegrass music, and just a few years ago, you'd...
Read MoreNancy Reisman
Award-winning short story writer Nancy Reisman, U-M visiting professor for the past several years, has written one of those novels that alter your perception of the world before you even realize they've done so. At the very...
Read MoreWiard’s Country Fair
Agreed, Wiard's is a wee bit hokey. But it's a mistake to get all snooty instead of enjoying what for me turned out to be a silly, interesting, and even mystic afternoon. After jolting down a washboard road and shelling...
Read MoreThe Forbes Brothers
Attention Ann Arbor academics, information technology professionals, environmental activists, vegans, proteomics researchers, silversmiths, and art historians: you don't have to pretend anymore. Your secret love of...
Read MoreOh Susanna
Although her new songs are written with a band in mind, Oh Susanna is a single individual, Suzie Ungerleider. Born in California and raised in Vancouver, she's now based in Toronto. Her music falls under the generously broad...
Read MoreDuck Hunter Shoots Angel
A sentence like "Duck hunter shoots angel" could signify only two things: a tabloid headline, or a meditation on the meaning of life by Mitch Albom. In the case of the current play at the Purple Rose Theater, it is...
Read MoreFlirtation
Seeing a show by Jo Serrapere and the Willie Dunns is like a languid Sunday drive through the country. Serrapere’s stage presence is so reassuring, so soothing, that before she even starts to sing I’ve snuggled under...
Read MoreKilling Ground
A tiny blotch of blood stains the wide green lawn backed by a distant line of trees and a speeding car’s rising dust cloud. The photograph shows the modern-day appearance of the Virginia Civil War battlefield where Ann...
Read MoreU.S. Army Field Band
China has more than 2 million soldiers in its army. North Korea has more than 1 million. Both Russia and the United States have fewer than half a million each. But no other army in the world — not the Chinese, the North Koreans,...
Read MoreElwood Reid
On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man later known as D. B. Cooper hijacked a plane in Seattle, collected a ransom of $200,000 in used twenties, and parachuted into the forest of Washington or Oregon. He was never heard...
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