PhoenixPhest!
Led by the remarkable duo of violinist Gabe Bolkosky and cellist Derek Snyder, Ann Arbor's Phoenix Ensemble is an ever changing cadre of exceptional musicians who have performed in chamber groups and as soloists with...
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Hope for Corky
Brian Blessing, the central character in Hope for Corky, is a Milford radio celebrity with a fame disproportionate to his salary. He specializes in heartwarming human-interest stories in his hometown. When the play opens, he has...
Read MoreScott Morgan’s Powertrane
After interviewing Scott Morgan in the Blind Pig dressing room, I follow him downstairs and through the crowd as he makes his way toward the stage. People put their hands on him as he lifts his guitar and wades by. Some shout...
Read MoreSusan Botti
The great press notices from the New York Times ("one of the fresher and more imaginative voices on the New York new-music scene") and Opera News ("striking emotional music") are imposing. The great...
Read MoreDave Chappelle
Known mostly as the “lead stoner” in the 1998 film Half-Baked, funnyman Dave Chappelle, in his efforts to establish a new brand of comedy, has in fact established a new brand of comedy, one where uncertain discomfort...
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Dar Williams
I was at Dar Williams’s first performance at the Ark, in April 1994. She opened for Ani DiFranco, and I’ve never seen an opening act stun and charm a crowd the way hers did. After five songs and one encore, it seemed...
Read MoreDiane Glancy
Diane Glancy's new novel, Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea, comes just in time for the 200th-anniversary celebrations of the journey of Lewis and Clark. Partly of Cherokee heritage, Glancy has written extensively, in poems...
Read MoreJonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer's wildly successful first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, is told in two voices. The first is that of a young American named Jonathan Safran Foer, "our hero," a secular and assimilated Jew,...
Read MoreIntelligent beauty
“They try desperately to sound pretty despite the difficulty of beauty in a bar.” This is my husband’s take on the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love. They do seem like good-natured people who like their...
Read MoreRussian photography at Dave’s
A show of Russian photography that would have been banned in pre-glasnost days is on display at Dave's Photo Emporium. Irakly Shanidze's intense nudes, Eugeny Safian's dreamlike streetscapes, and Katarina...
Read MoreShamanic Journeys
Reporting for the Observer has brought out the best in me. In fact, I consider myself a sort of sleep-deprived, female Indiana Jones, always a few steps ahead of catastrophe. I've been nearly run over by the entire Michigan...
Read MoreTom Russell
Tom Russell was born in Los Angeles in 1950 and now lives in El Paso. To use the words of one of his songs, he "took the long way around" to get there, passing through "the wide-open countries and the heart-attack...
Read MoreU-M Gilbert and Sullivan
Before the curtain even rises on a U-M Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) show at Lydia Mendelssohn Theater, you know this isn’t your ordinary student musical. The small but very capable orchestra brings you to your...
Read MoreReturn of the clarinetist
The mention of a jazz clarinetist often leads to an obligatory lament over the decline of the fortunes of this instrument in modern jazz. It is true that clarinetists were prominent during the first few decades of the music and...
Read MoreThe Alban Berg Quartet
A real string quartet performance isn't pretty. A real string quartet performance isn't four players off in a corner at a wedding reception, gracelessly scraping away at the Pachelbel Canon. A real string quartet...
Read MoreThe Dixie Power Trio
The music of New Orleans is unlike that of any other place. Last winter, as I walked through Louis Armstrong Park, the site of the old Congo Square where pure African music reigned, a young African American woman shouted...
Read MoreNecessary Targets
There are moments of terrifying poignancy in this drama about Bosnian war refugees. Directed cleanly and simply by David Wolber, it's a story about the aftershocks of war from a woman's perspective, and in letting an...
Read MoreInto the Freylakh
It's avant-jazz night at the Firefly, so what is the klezmer band Into the Freylakh doing on stage? Isn't klezmer, with its roots in medieval Eastern Europe, the music my great-grandparents probably danced to at their...
Read MoreChristine Hume
Christine Hume, a fairly recent addition to the EMU creative writing faculty and an active member of the local writing community, is one of the leading younger American poets exploring the intersection of various kinds of...
Read MoreDavid “Fathead” Newman
Tenor saxophonists, perhaps more than any other instrumentalists, seem to get better with age. Something marvelous happens to their tone, which often deepens and acquires a burnished, soulful tinge. David "Fathead"...
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