2004 December

With seventeen members, NoMo may be the biggest band in town outside of the Ann Arbor Symphony. It's got a whole crowd of horns and winds, backed up by multiple keyboards, guitars, and a large percussion section with African...

When I listen to younger jazz pianists, I sometimes wonder if the instrument does not have too many keys. Most of them have prodigious technique developed by many years of classical training, and many of them take their cues...

If you're a music lover who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, you probably have a story about how a record saved your life, or at least got you through some dark days. If I had a dollar for every time people have told me that...

Leopard's-tooth jewelry, elegant plumes of elephant hair, and a scaly hat made of the skin of a pangolin — an animal suggesting a cross between a giant tadpole and a pineapple — draw the eye of a visitor to the...

At the start of every show that Phil Ogilvie's Rhythm Kings play, a small glass piggy bank hangs from pianist and music director James Dapogny's mike stand. Many jazz bands of the 1920s and 1930s displayed a similar pig....

Europe in the decade before World War II, under the looming specter of fascism, has supplied some of our best plotlines for musicals. In Berlin we have Sally Bowles consorting with Nazis and the demimonde. In Salzburg the von...

Okay, I'll admit it right up front. A decade or more ago, Matthew Thorburn was a student in a U-M poetry workshop I was teaching. I'd like to say he was "my student," but that wouldn't be quite right. Matt...

Only in later iconography are angels depicted with harps. Earlier, they are shown singing before the throne of God. While some might reasonably doubt the literal veracity of the earlier representations, the implication that a...