The King with a conscience
El Vez, a riotous and principled Elvis impersonator….
Lament for Mal
Another jazz great gone….
D-Town ink spilled; Ryan Adams pooh-poohs Jack White.
Much 313 fizz spurt forth in last week’s LA Weekly in (yet another) feature about the “Detroit Sound.” The somewhat limp piece (laweekly.com/ink/03/03/ reverb-pike.php) takes its coverage cue, as many of these new Motown things often do, from the 2-year-old Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit comp. And if you’re not already sure how much to canonize…
He diddit
Mal Waldron The Quest Prestige-New Jazz Of the more than 170 titles in the Mal Waldron discography, roughly half of which were released under his own name, The Quest ranks among the crème de la crème. Recorded on June 27, 1961, the session features seven great Waldron compositions played by an all-star sextet: with the…
Dec. 11-17, 2002
11 WED • MUSIC/COMMUNITY Larry Nozero — Donating his musical services to the Food Bank of Oakland County, alto saxophonist and flutist Larry Nozero has joined the fight to eliminate hunger. Transforming their Pontiac warehouse into a jazz club for this special event, proceeds from the evening will benefit FBOC’s Kids Café program. Tickets for…
The Singles
Catchy mod melodies from The Singles…
Meet a real American
Ismael Ahmed is about as American a guy of his generation as you can find. Born in Brooklyn in 1947, he came to Detroit when he was 6 and stayed here with his mom after his parents split up. After high school, he did a hitch in Vietnam and Korea. He came back, worked on…
From me to you
In the otherwise forgettable Analyze This, there’s a lovely moment when the milquetoast shrink, played by Billy Crystal, daydreams about telling off a patient who is particularly whiny and self-indulgent. The outburst is clearly not for the benefit of the patient. If Robert De Niro’s mobster has forced himself into the doctor’s personal life, at…
Perchance to dream
Detroit Rep discovers comic genius in the Great Plains….
A Classic Rock Christmas
This is an 11-song collection of well-intentioned but dubiously executed holiday tunes. (A portion of proceeds go to the Port Authority World Trade Disaster Survivors Fund and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Education Fund.) Good news first: Mark Farner submits a new composition entitled “Mary (The Return From Calgary)”; its minor-chord piano motif,…
Real to allegory
There are nine paintings by Bo Bartlett currently at the David Klein Gallery, of which half are troubling and the other half left in question by the first. These are eye-opening, masterfully painted works that nevertheless leave one puzzled by the artistic strategies of their author. The most worrisome is the painting called The Teacher,…
Christmas With the Rat Pack
It’s a ring-a-ding-ding Christmas with Ol’ Blue Eyes, Dino and Sammy. And much of this material is super-rare; included are a number of tunes originally found on promotional-only releases and out-of-print holiday LPs, not to mention a pair of cuts featuring duets by Ol’ Blue Eyes and Dino from two of Dean’s annual (1967 and…
Bigger & bladder
As he sits at the Music Menu in Greektown, I can’t help but look for the signs of illness. They don’t appear. He doesn’t look sick. He is the kind of man who makes women swoon. And while his bright eyes and tiny scars read like a map of his life as a musician, I…
Slanted & Enchanted: (Luxe & Reduxe)
Pavement? Slanted & Enchanted? Doesn’t it all seem like a pleasantly skewed figment of our musical imagination? Was an indie band ever that important? That defining? That cocky and yet that blasé? Turns out Pavement was. It was 10 years ago that songwriters/guitarists SM (Stephen Malkmus) and Spiral Stairs (Scott Kannenberg) cobbled together a bunch…
Faith fulfilled
Pop high priestess Marianne Faithfull is Kissin’ Time….
OX4: The Best of Ride
Of all the mop-topped UK shoegazer bands of a decade ago, Ride was arguably the most rock and roll — for better or for worse. Lush and My Bloody Valentine relied on guitar pyrotechnics and forward-thinking producers, and frankly made catchier tunes and ground-breaking albums. (MBV’s Loveless is its ilk’s Pet Sounds/Sgt. Peppers.) But Ride…
Away in an RV
It is noon on a frigid December Sunday. The sun is nearly blinding and the wind blows fiercely across the parking lot at Northwood Shopping Center in Royal Oak. In the corner of that parking lot at 13 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue stand two 55-foot semi-trailers and a single recreational vehicle. The pungent smell…
Paris Blues
This is a previously unreleased concert by the classic Horace Silver quintet — Silver, piano; Junior Cook, tenor sax; Blue Mitchell, trumpet; Gene Taylor, bass; and Detroit legend Roy Brooks on drums — recorded in October 1962 at the Olympia Theater in Paris. Without pretending that it’s as stupendous as any of the Blue Note…
Abandoned Shelter of the Week
The beautiful 1920s bungalow at 2508 Stair St. is the only abandoned building in an otherwise well-maintained neighborhood on Detroit’s southwest side. The house shows evidence of a fire, and, oddly enough, a seemingly undamaged satellite dish clings to the green shingles on the side of the home. The Abandoned Structure Squad learned from an…
Prometheus’ punishment
In the old days, before Cedar Point and professional wrestling and crack cocaine, we had our gods. We had our Greek gods and our Roman gods and our Scandinavian gods. They animated lustful tales of murder and revenge and trickery. They were tales of forewarning, tales of instruction. They told us where water came from,…
Let’s get stoned
Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication Stuart Walton Harmony Books, 366 pages, $24 Drugs fuel our culture. Billions of dollars of legal and illicit substances infiltrate the mainstream and our bloodstreams to keep us alert, alive, aroused, asleep, or just addicted. Drugs alter our perceptions, both personally and politically, reflecting the world through…
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Your forays to the frontiers have been pretty successful. You’ve shown how courageous you can be when you don’t torture yourself with self-doubt. You’ve proved to yourself how crucial it is to face your fears over and over again. Soon it’ll be time to come back into the heart of the…
Dying to kill the living wage
If Andrew Richner has his way, most unskilled workers will earn no more than the federal minimum wage: $5.15 an hour, a pay rate unchanged since 1997. The Republican state representative from Grosse Pointe Park is sponsoring a bill that, if enacted, would prohibit Michigan municipalities from passing living-wage ordinances. It would also prevent cities…
Miles and miles of Miles
When we already have a two-volume autobiography, eight biographies, and assorted books of commentary, recollections, and photographs, do we need yet another biography of Miles Davis? John Szwed’s entry in the sweepstakes doesn’t wholly answer the question, but it does demonstrate pretty conclusively that in the 11 years since his death the prince of darkness…
Island winters
Learning to love the cold and the beauty was easier a century ago….
Letters to the Editor
Asking good questions It is great to see Metro Times step into the Detroit development scene with Casey Coston’s twice-monthly column devoted to Detroit’s development community ("Sunrise Boulevard," Metro Times, Dec. 4-10). Maybe a journalist will ask a challenging question of the alphabet soup of agencies (DDA, DEGC) charged with directing the city’s development effort.…
‘I want my beast!’
In 1946, poet and director Jean Cocteau breathed a beloved fairy tale onto the silver screen, turning the surreal into the convincing and striking an uncomplicated chord within us, directly connected to the wondrous nightmares of childhood.
Misguided melody
Christmas records that’ll get you a stiff punch in the arm — even standing ’neath the mistletoe….
Due process overdue
This Saturday marks the one-year anniversary of Rabih Haddad’s arrest at his Ann Arbor home. He’s been jailed since. The same day feds nabbed the native of Lebanon for overstaying his visa, the Islamic charity he co-founded, Global Relief Foundation, was shut down and its assets frozen. The U.S. Treasury Department officially designated the charity…
Personal Velocity
Three women (Kyra Sedgewick, Parker Posey and Fariuza Balk) are connected by strange turns, accidental epiphanies and the craft of fiction in writer-director Rebecca Miller’s film. An all-knowing narration peels off the women’s immediate personas to reveal their hidden desires and dirty secrets — but takes it to a place that stretches just beyond the…
Payback?
Thomas Hawkins claims he was fired because he forced his employer to comply with Detroit’s Living Wage Ordinance….
Freezing families
As temperatures nose-dive, record numbers of poor people in the Detroit area are at risk of losing gas and electric service, advocates for the poor say. “Right now we’re in an emergency situation,” says Kathleen Walgren, executive director of The Heat And Warmth Fund (THAW), which assists people dealing with utility shutoffs. “Already, we’ve helped…
Wendigo
The title of this moody suspense film with supernatural elements refers to an Indian spirit who’s half-man, half-deer (and seemingly part tree), an all-devouring entity who comes to represent a boy’s growing awareness of the world’s more chaotic, uncontrollable elements.
Early warning systems
[Savage is on vacation this week. Here is “Classic Savage Love,” a column that originally ran in June of 1957, the year he won his first Pulitzer Prize — Eds.] Q: I’m a man in my mid-30s, and I just started dating after the end of a five-year relationship. The last three dates I’ve had…
Lafayette lowdown
“This center will remain open open open,” shouts the sign, 20-odd feet long, in the window of the Lafayette Park Market in the embattled downtown Detroit shopping center of the same name. But four months after mall tenants, neighbors and a couple politicos rallied at the mall to fight the imminent evictions of the shops…
Tully
Anson Mount gets the chance to carry a movie of his own in which he plays the sun-baked title character. Unfortunately it’s a wasted opportunity. Tully plays as innocuous and ploddingly predictable as any Family Channel production, all earnest farm parable and small-town soap opera.
Pukey toons
One day after a game of street football, my high school buds and I sat around talking shit, as two neighborhood mutts of the male variety — Blackie and Chester — wandered over sniffing out what they could sniff. Before you knew it, Blackie was schtupping Chester right there in front of us. Well, that,…
Bungalow bill
The beautiful 1920s bungalow at 2508 Stair St. is the only abandoned building in an otherwise well-maintained neighborhood on Detroit’s southwest side. The house shows evidence of a fire, and, oddly enough, a seemingly undamaged satellite dish clings to the green shingles on the side of the home. The Abandoned Structure Squad learned from an…
Empire
A gangster flick with authentic Latin flavor and a twist that fingers high finance could figure as a kind of Hollywood risk that might pay off big. But Empire doesn’t successfully deliver its cash-driven and bullet-ridden modern tragedy, most of which has been done better before — with John Leguizamo.
