2005 March

It starts with a song — a simple one, like something heard around a thousand campfires on a summer night: eight young people on a bare stage, standing in a circle, snapping fingers, throwing in more and more gestures and...

When I realized that Dan Zanes's show at Rackham Auditorium on Saturday, March 5, may be sold out, I felt like crying. Then I thought — I should throw my own house party. After all, that's this former rock...

When Karl Leister joined the Berlin Philharmonic as principal clarinetist in 1959, the orchestra had been under the autocratic directorship of Herbert von Karajan for five years. Leister served for more than thirty years, at the...

A collection of prehistoric tidbits, desperately scraped in 1928 from an archaeological site undergoing looting, washed up at the Kelsey Museum some sixty years later. Now on exhibit at the Kelsey, This Fertile Land offers a...

When I saw the young bluegrass band King Wilkie at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival in January, they weren't quite what I'd expected. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, they've been hailed as the next big thing in...

As the oldest (and bossiest) of three sisters, I went into the premiere of Jeff Daniels's new comedy, Norma and Wanda, with a fair amount of arrogance. I consider myself an expert in sibling argument and allegiance,...

Last April, Penelope Crawford was scheduled to perform a recital of harpsichord music at the Kerrytown Concert House. Everything was all set — the repertoire had been picked and learned, and the hall had been booked...

Right or wrong, we expect something from Chicago writers. The prose will be hard edged, the stories realistic and tough. With Greek American authors, however, we have a different stereotype, perhaps of a certain kind of...

For the past seven years, the Phoenix Ensemble, perhaps Ann Arbor's most versatile musical group, has performed a wide variety of programs, from folk to jazz to classical. Although the personnel of the ensemble change from...

I went to high school outside of Toledo, our blue-collar neighbor city that Ann Arborites like to joke and feel culturally superior about. It's industrial, it's dark, and it has one foot in the 1950s, when America was...

In the early 1960s in Poland, jazz was no longer illegal, but records were scarce, so young fans and budding musicians sat late into the night trying to catch Willis Conover’s shortwave radio program on the Voice of...