Odetta
It brings me up short to realize that I have been listening to Odetta, and in awe of Odetta, for forty years. Like many other baby boomers, I grew up with an Odetta record or two in the house. My favorite was the oddly titled...
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Dangerville
The first thing you notice at a Dangerville show is bassist Delilah DeWylde. Whether she’s in vintage minidresses or a French maid costume and fishnet stockings, her black Bettie Page hairdo and deep red lips warn you she...
Read MoreDave Holland 2003
Bassist Dave Holland is a musician who transcends all categories. Well trained in his native Britain, he came to this country in 1968 when he was hired by Miles Davis, with whom he recorded several classic fusion albums. In the...
Read MoreAndrew & Gail Jennings
Karlheinz Stockhausen: the name itself is enough to terrify even the most hardened lover of contemporary music. Stockhausen — the composer who gave the world a piece for four shortwave radios, another for string quartet and four...
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Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker has carved out a unique place for himself in American letters: he is our master of the obsessive detail. All of his novels spin out from a microscopic look at a small, often mundane action. It should come as no...
Read MoreA Call Girl Named Rosemarie
A Call Girl Named Rosemarie (Rolf Thiele, 1958) is a bitter commentary on the evils of capitalism attendant on West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder ("economic miracle") that followed World War II. Thiele portrays the...
Read MoreVienna: Lusthaus (revisited)
In one of those curious period fads that crop up regularly, early-twentieth-century Viennese culture is all the rage in early-twenty-first-century America. New York's Neue Galerie — a gem of a museum devoted to...
Read MoreAnn Arbor Symphony Orchestra .
So far as I could tell, the woman sitting next to me at the Ann Arbor Symphony’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth trembled, smiled, cried, and finally simply levitated out of her seat. I couldn’t really stare...
Read MoreBill T. Jones
New U-M president (and former Iowan) Mary Sue Coleman should feel right at home when the Bill T. Jones / Arnie Zane dancers grace the Power Center stage Saturday and Sunday, January 11 and 12. Last seen here in 1998, Jones and...
Read MoreGraphic Combat at EMU
Ann Arbor isn't plastered with big, blaring government posters showing leering caricatures of Saddam Hussein, works analogous to the World War II propaganda and patriotic art on display at EMU's Ford Gallery. Unlike the...
Read MoreLorrie Moore
Although she has written a couple of novels, Lorrie Moore is best known as a writer of short stories populated with the middle-aged and the middle-class, with lawyers and businessmen and college professors — along with the...
Read MoreSmokestack
"You can go your own way, but you can't be gone too long." That lyric from the first track on Smokestack's 2001 CD It's Coming Down is a fitting description of this jam band's approach. Serving up...
Read MoreTimmy P’s comedy nights
Timmy P (Parkkila) is serious about comedy. The Chelsea-grown WMU grad with a background in radio, real estate, and "lots and lots of restaurant work" started promoting comedy two years with hopes of creating a...
Read MoreD. D. Jackson
Well-educated jazz pianists tend to play like well-educated pianists — all chops and no gravy. Canadian-born Brooklynite D. D. Jackson proves that this does not have to be the case. His classical and jazz training, which...
Read MoreThe Huron Valley Harmonizers
The last annual concert mounted by the Huron Valley Chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America and its performing arm, the all-male Huron Valley Harmonizers, lived up...
Read MoreThe Choral Union
The audience for the University Choral Union's annual performances of Handel's Messiah seems to consist solely of those folks for whom attending is a traditional part of their families' seasonal celebrations....
Read MoreDick Siegel
According to his new album, A Little Pain Never Hurt, local singer-songwriter Dick Siegel wants to be remembered as a "real Renaissance man." He also wants "to be six thick strips of Canadian bacon." How...
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