2005 February

"Las Vegas trilobite" comes to mind while one examines John Garrett's wild silvery swirl of woven metal strips dripping in jet and gold beads. This glittery work nutshells the recent rise and flowering of the craft...

Novelist Craig Holden continues to resist categories. After a first couple of novels that could be classified as mysteries or crime fiction, his books have become increasingly complex, following darker paths through the soul to...

This past fall, poet and teacher Thomas Sayers Ellis offered "Literary Arts and the New Black Aesthetic," a class he designed "for black writers interested in destroying the false boundaries between prose and...

The Juggernaut Jug Band — Roscoe Goose, the Amazing Mr. Fish, Big Daddy T, and Smiley Habanero — come from Louisville, where jug band music began. If you're not familiar with jug band music, it's the closest...

A good many years ago when I was visiting Toronto, I made my way in the evening to the Café des Copains, a well-known jazz club that specialized in presenting pianists. On the bill that night was Junior Mance, and quite...

If pluralism is the enlightened catchword in this post-9/11 era of cultural and geopolitical conflict, concert dance may be the ideal art form to do it justice. In Facing Mekka Rennie Harris has mapped a profound and profoundly...

There's nothing wrong with pretty music. I've certainly heard enough ugly music to feel grateful for a local band that is easy on the ears and eager to please. Sparklemotion, with its collage of 1970s jazz-inflected rock...

At one time Béla Bartók was the epitome of musical modernism. During his compositional career, Bartók wrote hard-edged, sharp-cornered, and utterly unsentimental music in every genre, but his strongly argued and powerfully...