2004 April

"We are here," proclaims the title to the debut CD from Whit Hill and the Postcards. They have every right to call your attention to the fact. This musical communiqué is everything you'd hope for from a band...

Before the Terminator, Hannibal Lecter, and Norman Bates, there was Cesare, the somnambulist of one of the deepest psychological films of all time, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Filmed in Berlin in 1919, Caligari blew a strong...

The jazz life is as unpredictable as good improvisation. Ellery Eskelin began his musical career in a relatively standard manner: his mother was a musician, and he studied the saxophone as a youngster, eventually playing in a...

The cello has never been a major jazz instrument. In the 1950s and 1960s a number of important bass players used it on occasion, even if they sometimes cheated, tuning it like its bigger cousin. Chico Hamilton used the cello to...

Karita Mattila, the forty-three-year-old Finnish soprano, just sang the title role in Salome at the Met. By the end of Salome's "Dance of the Seven Veils," in the words of the New York Times, Mattila stood...

Arguably Ann Arbor’s most unsung fine-art gallery, Washtenaw Community College’s GalleryOne outdoes certain downtown galleries on several points: scads of free parking; a refreshing absence of self-important hype; an...

John McCutcheon seems never to have met an instrument he didn't like. He is highly skilled on Autoharp, banjo, fiddle, guitar, piano, and mountain dulcimer, plus a handful of other folk instruments. He is an acknowledged...

"I am a hopeless romantic / And I'm full of pretty lines," Melissa Ferrick sings on her 2001 album Valentine Heartache. That tells you a lot about Ferrick as a performer, but not the best news: though her albums...

Shannon Lawson has a blazing tenor voice, a truly compelling instrument that climbs with startling ease into its upper register. In country music, that makes him an anomaly. The country tradition prizes the idea of Everyman and...

First of all, trousers really are involved, and they are orange. But whether their shade is particularly tangerine or more of a bright burnt sienna is a question that can be answered only while drinking in the juicy, complex...

A couple of decades ago Gemini, the popular local acoustic duo, set several poems by William Stafford to music. Stafford's poems are quiet and plainspoken and at first glance might not seem to be likely candidates for...