Ann Arbor

Out Loud Chorus

When I enter WCC's intimate but regal Towsley Auditorium, the Out Loud Chorus is singing "The Way You Look Tonight." This mixed chorus (meaning both men and women) is based in the gay-bisexual-transgender...

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Shutta Crum

Shutta Crum knew exactly what kind of books young children liked when she began writing her own in 1997. By then she'd been a youth librarian at the Ann Arbor District Library for eighteen years and had had plenty of...

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Travis Holland

Soviet writer Isaac Babel published a couple of volumes of short stories in the 1920s. They were brilliantly observed and filled with irony about the human condition, often funny, yet also very bleak. He was immediately...

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Rob Utterback’s return

Although he says not to call it a comeback, Rob Utterback’s recital at the Kerrytown Concert House on Friday, June 1, is, in fact, a comeback. Way back in the halcyon 1990s, the local classical cognoscenti eagerly...

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Pianist Anton Nel

It's not easy having a dual career as a player and a teacher. On the one hand, you have the repertoire to learn, the practicing to do, and the performances to give. On the other, there are the students to teach, the meetings...

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Iris DeMent 2007

Her bio states that Iris DeMent started singing when she was three years old, but I bet she started earlier than that. I bet she sang the day, the minute she was born. And I bet she sang a gospel song. In the liner notes for her...

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Jewish Film Festival

When the annual Jewish Film Festival returns to the Michigan Theater Sunday through Thursday, May 6-10, it will bring movies from more than half a dozen countries. The range of subjects in the nineteen films featured is even...

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Joan Blos

In 1980 Ann Arborite Joan Blos won the prestigious Newbery Medal for her young adult novel A Gathering of Days. That story was told in the form of the journal of a thirteen-year-old farm girl from the early 1830s. The journal...

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Mississippi Heat

More than most genres, the blues is replete with remarkable life stories, and that of Mississippi Heat frontman Pierre Lacocque is especially fascinating. The son of a Belgian Protestant minister and often penniless Old...

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Nick Strange Trio

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Dan Orcutt has been making music in this town for about fifteen years. Like his other bands, the Nick Strange Trio is professional and tight, and Orcutt's vocals are still rich. But in the few...

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Norah Jones

The layers of Norah Jones's voice shine softly in the illumination cast by a tune. The voice seems too ordinary to have fascinated listeners as it has, but its grain is unique. Born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar in 1979, she...

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By Land, Sea, and Air

One highlight of the U-M Graduate Library’s absorbing transportation exhibition is a slender, pocket-size 1913 directory that lists all of the few owned cars in Michigan — “a combination social register and...

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Measha Brueggergosman

The African Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman is a sensation in every sense of the word. Start with the name: she grew up Measha (MEE-sha) Gosman in New Brunswick; married a Swiss, Markus Bruegger; and fused their surnames....

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Candida

George Bernard Shaw has a theater festival in Ontario dedicated to him, but that aside, he doesn't seem to have a large or enduring fan base anymore. Many people know him only obliquely through My Fair Lady, the musical...

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Cheryl Wheeler

Last fall I got a call to play an opening slot at a really nice music series in Royal Oak. I jumped at the chance for the usual reasons. But one reason outshone them all: I could maybe, just maybe, meet the featured act, folk...

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U-M Chopin Project

The U-M Chopin Project has no need of boosterism. Though the first recital was on a cold and snowy Tuesday night, and though the program consisted solely of works written when the composer was between seven and eighteen years...

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Cool Moose Orchestra

Let's start by acknowledging the elephant — excuse me, the moose — in the room: the Cool Moose Orchestra is composed entirely of local high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors; they're mostly Community...

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Eliza Gilkyson

Eliza Gilkyson sings her songs in a wise alto that I like very much. I love that she's such a literate and subtle writer. I love that she's passionate without being didactic or moralizing. I love the sly sexiness of her...

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Food as history

Your mother’s sauerbraten recipe on an index card. Nostalgia for nasi goring, a spicy Indonesian dish from an unspicy country with a colonialist past. A hankering for double-salt licorice. Given the cornerstone role of...

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