2003 March

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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"...

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...