For the next two weeks, several free or mostly pay-what-you-can music fests will dominate the schedules of adventurous Washtenaw County listeners.

In addition to the A2 Jazz Fest (September 27-28) and Refugia music fest (September 28, all day) in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti will host two events that lean into experimental sounds and indie/punk rock: Totally Awesome Festival (September 25-28) and Freak Fest (October 3-5). And if an one-evening-only fest is more your speed, there's the Fred Thomas-curated "Three Mirrors: Excursions in Collaborations" in association with UMS on September 27 at the Ypsi Freighthouse. (Plus, there's the pre-Zach Bryan festival Down on Main Street in Ann Arbor on September 26.)

Totally Awesome—celebrating its 20th birthday—and Freak Fest—now in its third year—have sprawling artist lineups (and more) in various venues; below you can see the full schedule with links to as many artists as we could find so you can plan your visits. (You can check out Pulp articles on A2 Jazz Fest here and Refugia here.)

Additionally, on September 24, WCBN's Local Music Show did a spotlight on this year's artists at Totally Awesome, Three Mirrors, Refugia, and Freak Fest.

Burnout Society Film Club (BSFC) members are advocates of the B-flick, the cult classic, the lost gem, and they show their love at a free monthly screening event called 8 Ball Movie Night.

What started as an indoor gathering at The Blind Pig's basement bar, The 8 Ball Saloon, morphed into an outdoor event during the warmer months of COVID. But BSFC didn't return to a strictly indoor schedule for its movie night after vaccinations opened up the world again, and the group continues to show VHS-era and old-timey flicks outside when the weather allows.

The last outdoor event of 2025—now on the patio outside The Blind Pig rather than on the roof—is scheduled for Tuesday, September 30, at 8:30 pm. Dubbed as "A Future Cop Double Feature," this edition of the 8 Ball Movie Night features films by two '80s and '90s action megastars: Sylvester Stallone and Rutger Hauer.

Here's the info listed on the FB event page:

Octaves by Tyler Dunston moves through a world where “As always / uncertainty is ours.” 

These poems bring in earthly realities like death and the dullness of the noon hour while also reaching more broadly to the skies in which “the moon and stars wilted / through layers of floor-to-ceiling glass.” The realms collide or overlap. A tangible structure interacts with the sun when “I looked outside / at a slab of brick buttered with light.”

The poet’s perspective is clear in the appearances of the first person “I” across the poems, as the poem called “On W.G. Sebald’s natural history of the herring” declares that “I always thought death was ashen gray.” First person plural expands the outlook to involve the reader through meditating “On emptiness” with the lines, “We understand the weight of ladled things, / time maybe most of all, easy to waste / and hard to throw away.”

In Dunston’s poems, his visual art background shows through because the poet is never only fixed on his own experience but rather takes in the full scene and notices the details. The whole time, “I’m feeling my way / in the dark toward you, the sea in my ear.”

Dunston is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. He previously earned his MFA in poetry from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University. Octaves was also a finalist for the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest, and as the title suggests, many of the poems contain eight lines. 

Fellow poet Jason Barry joins Dunston in conversation to celebrate the release of Octaves at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, September 23, at 6:30 pm.

Dunston and I spoke about Octaves, visual art, his PhD studies, what he's reading, and what he's working on next.

This story originally ran on December 5, 2024. "The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry" continues documenting Michigan poets, and on Monday, September 22, there's a live poetry reading at the Downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library showcasing four poets from the project: Owólabi Aboyade, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Bryan Thao Worra, and Rebecca Biber.

Chien-an Yuan is an evangelist.

Not the type who's selling you hope in exchange for a monthly tithe but the kind who just wants you to believe—in art and its healing powers; in music and its succor; in poetry and life-giving energy.

The Ann Arbor musician-photographer-curator works not just in words but in deeds—and sometimes, the deeds are words, carefully arranged and expertly recited as is the case with The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry.

The project is a collaboration between Yuan's 1473 record label, Michigan poets, and Fifth Avenue Studios, the recordings division of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). 

Named after two high school teachers who inspired Yuan, The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is a collection of recited poems, documented at Fifth Avenue Studios, with covers created by local artists for each chapter in the series. (Shannon Rae Daniels' watercolors will adorn the first 10 sessions.) All the recordings can be listened to and downloaded free of charge whether or not you have a library card.

The anthology's construction is ongoing—you can listen to Ann Arbor poets Kyunghee Kim and Zilka Joseph so far—but there's an official launch for the project on Monday, December 9, at 6 pm at AADL's Downtown location. Kim will be joined by upcoming Coolidge-Wagner writers Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe, Chace Morris, and Emily Nick Howard, along with Yuan introducing the poets and talking about the project. (Joseph will be at a future Coolidge-Wagner event.)

I sent Yuan some queries about The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry, and his answers were so passionate, revealing, and thorough that they stand alone without my framing questions.

Below is Yuan's testament to the power of art and a brief history of The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry:

The A2 Jazz Fest began as a one-day event in 2016 and highlighted the area's deep talent pool. It ran for four years, took a break from 2020 to 2022, and resumed in 2023 with the longtime touring trio of Larry Goldings, Peter Bernstein, and Bill Stewart as headliners. The fest expanded again in 2024 with superstars Joshua Redman, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Bill Charlap headlining the four-day event.

For the 2025 edition, the A2 Jazz Fest is going back to its foundations. It's two days, free, and focuses on Michigan-residing artists, with a special set from international trumpet star Theo Croker, who also performed at the fest in 2019. His influences run from modern-day hip-hop and R&B, 1970s fusion, 1960s experimental, 1950s hard bop, and even the Dixieland swing of his influential grandfather, trumpeter Doc Cheatham.

The 2025 edition of the A2 Jazz Fest runs Saturday and Sunday, September 27-28, at two downtown Ann Arbor locations: First Congregational Church on East William Street and The Ravens Club on Main Street.

Another key aspect this year is education, which is a passion for bassist, Blue LLama Jazz Club artistic director, and A2 Jazz Fest originator Dave Sharp.

"Dave wanted to blow out the educational programming, so that was very attractive to me," said Dr. Anna C. Gersh, who has worked extensively in education and joined her husband in organizing this year's festival as the administrative director, along with drummer-educator Sean Dobbins and Jennifer Pollard, a jazz vocalist and creator of the Lifting Up A2 Jazz page on Facebook.

"Professional musicians are running the educational workshops on both days of the festival," Sharp said, "so Anna's experience. fits really well with those elements of the festival. And you know, in jazz, in general ... is very mentorship heavy." (Students can sign up here to participate.)

Below is the full lineup of the 2025 A2 Jazz Fest, as well as music from some of the featured musicians:

Press Release:

Downtown Ann Arbor will come alive this fall with the launch of the Down on Main Street Music Festival, a brand-new celebration of Americana, country, and rock music. The festival will take over Main Street on Friday, September 26 from 4 pm to 10 pm, transforming the downtown corridor into a vibrant, walkable stage for an unforgettable evening of music, food, and community.

At the heart of the festival is Matthew Altruda, a beloved Ann Arbor music curator and radio personality known for championing local and national talent. With Altruda’s expertise, the lineup features a carefully selected group of artists that embody the spirit of Americana and rock: The Michigan Rattlers (headliner), Louie Lee, Audrey Ray, and The Minor Pieces.

Alexis C. Lamb created Refugia Festival in 2024 out of a sense of frustration. 

She saw a disconnect between environmentally conscious arts programming, which is usually presented indoors, and the natural place for eco-art: outdoors.

The second edition of the all-day music and arts Refugia Festival, which is at the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor on September 28, provides a way to celebrate sound and become more aware of the needs and issues related to the climate while harmonizing with it. How does the music we produce resonate with nature? What do animals think of the music we blare through speakers whenever we want? And what can music do to explore and inform humanity’s relationship with the climate?

"[Refugia] came out of my doctoral dissertation work, which was in the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the U of M," Lamb said, "which was focused on exploring whether a sonic relationship between our human-made music and the sounds of the natural world was possible, without being threatening to that particular ecosystem.”

Magdalena J. Zaborowska makes connections across the experiences of and influences on James Baldwin in her wide-ranging book James Baldwin: The Life Album. Unlike her earlier two monographs on Baldwin, this unique and deeply researched biography is written for a general audience.

However, Zaborowska did not write James Baldwin: The Life Album as a standard biography but rather modeled it after a double vinyl record with four sides (i.e., sections), each with its own tracks (i.e., chapters). The table of contents serves as a track list. Zaborowska elaborates on this creative approach in her book’s introduction:

His critics’ desire that Baldwin straighten out is among the reasons why in James Baldwin I tell his life story in a deliberately unstraightforward, even queer, manner. To honor who he was, and how he viewed and wrote about himself, I revisit his life both chronologically and achronologically, and at times by mixing the two approaches. A brilliant stylist of the English language, Baldwin leaned on repetition and revolution, even re-evolution, of themes, phrases, and points of view, some of which were inspired by Black English and music. Exploding traditional syntax, style, and genre expectations, his long sentences remixed ideas, characters, events, and locations, embracing what he called “the beat.” Fascinated with how experience and emotion drove embodied imagination, will, and speech, he channeled their restless dance into his works, syncopating dates, locations, and personae, repeating riffs and refrains like a virtuoso improviser.

The biography’s structure as an album lends itself well to telling Baldwin’s life story and reflects the very way Baldwin himself approached his work.

Ypsilanti’s true believers The Velvet Snakes slithered into view in 2021, storming the dives of mid-Michigan in a blur of hair and paisley. As they pursued a path of ecstatic rock 'n’ roll raunch with frequent left turns into psychedelia, the band quickly found a home amongst connoisseurs of the Dee-troit/Ann Arbor/Ypsi underground rock axis.

After a handful of lineup changes, today The Velvet Snakes are Logan Belz and Gage Rettinger on guitar and vocals, while Tyler Love handles bass and Noah Wright holds down the tubs. The band recently completed their debut album, a collection called FIRST STRIKE, and The Velvet Snakes are making it official this Thursday, July 31, with a record release event at Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti. (The band also headlines night three of Fuzz Fest 2025 at The Blind Pig on Saturday, August 23.)

The title of their song “Gorilla on the Beach” makes the best description of the Snakes’ sound, a flailing, fuzzy garage-rock stomp warped by the otherworldly bend and twang of surf guitar and soaked in a bath of Blue Cheer. With their broken blues riffs and acidic fretboard freak-outs, the Snakes produce the kind of budget-label psych-noise that should excite fans of bands like The Stooges and The Seeds (or any of their myriad progeny).

During the Civil War, the United States was “a nation that was still younger than its oldest citizens,” writes University of Michigan professor Scott Ellsworth in his new book, Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America. This young country was figuring out what it was just as much as it was figuring out what it wasn’t. This dilemma, as history shows, was divisive.

Midnight on the Potomac supplies a plot-driven, nonfiction account of the people involved in the Civil War, both famous and not, and how their actions influenced the trajectory of the war. Ellsworth examines the leadership during the war, as well as the conspiracies, attacks, weapons, and battles.

Most centrally, the book focuses on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln through profiles of both John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln. Ellsworth juxtaposes Booth’s acting career with his support of the Confederacy. Ellsworth also discusses Lincoln’s habits and moods. For example, a description of Lincoln notes his features: