2003 September

Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto found a massive audience, but it did so in a very interesting way. Patchett had been publishing regularly for more than a decade and was critically respected for the quiet craft of her...

Some people know the Scottish band Capercaillie mostly by the voice of its lead vocalist, Karen Matheson, who sang a stark Gaelic lament in the film Rob Roy. Matheson's singing is impossibly beautiful — Sean Connery...

The trash — I mean, artifacts — excavated from the Kempf House's backyard gives an evocative look at nineteenth-century life in Ann Arbor. For some time, excavators hoped they were digging where the Kempf...

"Love doesn't always have to go wrong, but it's a lot easier to write about it when it does." This little bit of songwriter's truth was shared on-stage by Khalid Hanifi somewhere between "The Bloom Is...

"We call this set of jigs 'The Jigs,' " quips Tyler Duncan of Millish, before launching into yet another cluster of impossibly rich and complex tunes. This blend of the matter-of-fact and the pyrotechnic...

The modern jazz piano tradition has a number of strands. Most common is the lineage of Bud Powell, who so spectacularly adopted the fleet language of bebop to the keyboard. Others, such as Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols,...

There's a picture of a wolf on the back panel of Steppin' in It's second CD, Last Winter in the Copper Country, a wolf walking silently through a winter landscape. And it's an apt image. Since stepping into...

Stone Reader is a compelling documentary of filmmaker Mark Moskowitz's passionate search for Dow Mossman, an author who effectively disappeared for thirty years after publishing his only novel, The Stones of Summer, in 1972....