2008 January

Like so many other classical music fans, violinist Aaron Berofsky says he grew up listening to Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. And like so many other classical music fans, the full-time...

For the last few decades the U-M has had a graduate program in creative writing, but the town very seldom gets a sense of the students who pass through it. They are busy, after all, and here only for a couple of years. They form...

The Carolina Chocolate Drops, young African American musicians from North Carolina, renew a fairly arcane tradition, the old-time black stringband music of the Carolina Piedmont that they learned from its handful of surviving...

Mao Zedong’s lumpily stuffed white horse in Yanan’s Revolutionary Museum, Zhou Enlai’s black crank telephone, and a woman worker’s spartan concrete apartment-cell next to a socialist “Workshop for...

I'm too young to remember the Detroit rock scene of the 1960s — and I'm not that young. In fact I had to take a nap in the afternoon to stay up for the headliner of a recent three-band Blind Pig show. So when Scott...

There's only a modest audience today for the white performers of the 1960s who made pilgrimages to learn the southern black acoustic guitar music known as the country blues. But several of them are still around, and, as with...