BEST JAZZ NIGHT 2002 | Three Fingers LoungeFriday Nights | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Miami | Miami New Times
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BEST JAZZ NIGHT

Three Fingers Lounge

Friday Nights

If it's Friday, it's Cotton Club night at this dive. The joint starts jumping around midnight. A little while later, depending on the number of shouts and stomps, the cozy club is leaping and rolling with the sounds of some of Miami's most accomplished jazz players. Jesse Jones, Jr. -- Liberty City's maestro of bop -- and his combo are the usual anchors, with occasional sets from featured singers. On the barstools old men dance funk to the heated jam sessions. At the tables local musicians and artists swing to the rhythms. If you are aching to taste what jazz might have been like during the Harlem Renaissance, this funky little speakeasy will cook it up. The club is testament to aficionados that bebop and blues are not confined to chrome interiors where the well-heeled listen motionless to the sermon of jazz. The Cotton Club serves its music with homey grit, friendly faces, and a free buffet.

BEST FOLK VENUE

Main Street Café

Far removed from the rest of the nation, South Florida has always had difficulty attracting major musical acts in every genre, but these days the folks who play folk seem to flock here. At Homestead's Main Street Café, each Thursday is folk night. For the past year the eatery's Up-Close and Personal Concert Series has presented a relaxed evening of new or traditional music featuring folkies from in and around the area, as well as national artists traveling on the circuit. For a reasonable cover charge ranging from $10 to $15 (really big acts command $25), you can take in the congenial setting and enjoy the likes of Melanie, Jack Williams, Janis Ian, Annie Wenz, Roger Sprung, and Hal Wylie. Who would have guessed a short journey south could pack such ear-pleasing benefits.

BEST SPORTS BAR

Tom's NFL Club Sports Bar & Grill

Tom's is a low-key, friendly place to watch the game. Just about any game is usually playing on one of the bar's several well-placed televisions, although they favor the all-American triumvirate: football, basketball, and baseball. But if you are a golf or soccer nut and a good tipper, the bartender can usually be talked into switching to whatever obscure match you're interested in. Plus there are three pool tables, space for darts, bar tables, and several cushy booths for those who want to partake of the food. The clientele is a mix of regulars and travelers passing through to the airport, visible across the street. Tom's is open 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. every day.

BEST HAITIAN CLUB

Spirit Lounge

Although Spirit doesn't host Haitian parties every evening, this little nightclub on the west side of the airport sizzles and sweats most Friday and Saturday nights to the sounds of compas. The club is so well-known among Haitian promoters that it regularly books traveling acts like T-Vice, Sweet Micky, and Kreyol Kompas. Sometimes, around 5:00 a.m., as young Miami Haitians dance and sing and animatedly pump their arms, it seems as if the party will never end.

BEST PLACE TO HEAR TANGO

Zuperpollo

Saturday nights, when his cozy parrillada is just about full, Jorge "Papa Gallo" Sanchez, the Uruguayan owner of Zuperpollo, wedges his burly frame from behind the cash register and onto the restaurant's tiny stage. A big man with a giant personality, Sanchez easily dominates the room when he takes the mike and treats his guests to dramatic interpretations of tangos and folk songs from the pampas and the Rio de la Plata basin. His hearty vibrato easily overtakes the busy flow of waiters and loud conversations beneath the chintzy trellis. The songs are complex enough, with Sanchez hitting all the emotional nuances of the melancholy tunes, that one is glad to let go of dinner conversation to listen. But if you must talk, get there early -- otherwise you will be seated at a table in the middle of the room, and you'll have no choice but to participate in the best place to hear tango.

BEST LATIN CLUB

Café Nostalgia

¡Coño! Two weeks before press time the damn club closes. Maybe we should have given it this award last year. Here's what we were going to say about Nostalgia: We've been holding out, waiting for the floor to get a little scruffy, the walls to get smoky, the barkeeps worn down, but Little Havana this will never be. Pepe Horta's club packs as much glamorama as it did when it first opened more than two years ago in its swanky, next-to-the-Forge digs. But we can't deny it any longer: This is the best place to find the best in Latin music and, best of all, to find it live. Once upon a time the house band Grupo Nostalgia alone was enough to justify a visit. Lately though the place has taken to hosting such a wide variety of acts that the only thing the artists crossing Nostalgia's stage have in common is quality and swing. Brand-new talent like the band Yenyere has found a home here, as have weary wanderers like Manolín. Peruvian crooner Gian Marco kicked off his U.S. career here and Cuban troubadour Amaury Gutierrez is a frequent visitor. Latin rock has its place, whether it's skanking hard like Argentina's La Mosca or waxing lyrical like Miami's own Bacilos. And we have to admit, the setting could not be more fitting for breathtaking performances by such monsters of jazz as Paquito D'Rivera or for the elegant retro turn of Federico Britos's recently formed Danzon by Six. To say nothing of giving shelter to the Songwriters-in-the-Round monthly showcase. We might just have to get used to all the glitz.

BEST CLUB DJ

Edgar V.

For years Edgar V. has played the gracious host and properly set the turntables for many guest DJs claiming to be superstars. He's done it so well, in fact, that certifiable star Paul Van Dyk doesn't want anyone else opening for him. But now Edgar is proving he's ready to deliver the main course. He's patented a wax recipe for melting together the soaring anthems of Europe with the break beats of the States to form an edgy but smooth high-energy vibe that always shakes Miami's club floors. His two Trancemissions compilations effectively condense his stylishly acclaimed sets into bite-size dance gems. But to truly appreciate this rising DJ's dish, you have to experience him live. After great gigs at Space and Billboardlive, Edgar now spins at Liquid as the prestigious Saturday-night resident.

BEST PLACE TO PLAY POOL

Churchill's

Alexander Oliva
If you're a certain age it does your heart good to snarl, "Nine ball off the five in the side pocket!" and then crack the stick while young loons like the Laundry Room Squelchers or Dolly Rocket are ululating in the background, and the Youth Attitude crowd is teetering around the room in their six-inch, winkle-picker-heeled boots. Even when these kids shoot straight pool they drape themselves over the table languorously, style über alles, and invariably scratch, or make slacker shots, giggling like Rhesus monkeys. Being good at something -- singing, playing guitar, tending bar, shooting pool -- is retro and out. It registers as rehash from the wrong side of the hill. So it's fun to run the table and then ask the bartendress if you can have some quarters to play "Under My Thumb." Makes you feel like Brian Jones again.

BEST BAR TO MODEL-WATCH

Pearl Restaurant and Champagne Lounge

Since the dawn of time, models have been in love with fur-covered chairs. Especially orange-red fur. That's one reason they flock to Pearl, located in deep-south South Beach. Designer Stephane Dupoux, a native of France, must have known about this mysterious phenomenon, for he placed such shaggy furniture around the purple-and-red neon aura of the second-floor bar of what was once Penrod's. Dupoux was also not clueless about the fact that models migrate toward retro-futuristic lounges that are luminescent orange and have curvaceous bars and extra-large white leather sofas. Who can explain this curiously magnetic attraction? Probably no one, but what matters is that it really exists. Proprietor Jack Penrod -- who reportedly shelled out $1.2 million for the makeover of his faded old cheeseburger and piña colada joint -- can vouch for it. But you, Monsieur Voyeur, only have to pay one one-hundred-thousandth of that ($12) for a dose of the bubbly. Go ahead, try your best to buy one of these exotic creatures a glass. (Or try tempting them with a bottle, which range in price from $100 to $3000.) But first you must penetrate the compound, which also houses the voyeur-friendly, open-air Nikki Beach Club. Tip for males who are not models and who are not tight with Mr. Penrod's promotional partners, Tommy Pooch and Eric Omores: Dress distinctively, think creatively, and you might pass muster at the velvet rope. Otherwise you'll have to settle for the scanned snapshots accessible online at www.vbcstudios.com/clients/ pearl.shtml.

BEST JUKEBOX

Churchill's

Alexander Oliva
The meager buck you have to kill between bands won't buy a beer. Pinball and Ms. Pac-Man wreak havoc with your sore shoulder. No patience for the pool table; you've already poked one too many a sloshed patron with your cue tonight. What's left? A couple of songs on the jukebox. The Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Al Green, Nirvana, the Who, even Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sinatra are all there. But it's discs by active and retired local musicians -- who graced Churchill's stage many a time -- that offer a much-needed education to those unschooled in the Miami scene of yore. An eponymous pre-major-label album by this city's onetime country girl, Mary Karlzen, waits to be taken for a spin. The now-dissolved Goods' mock-rock opera Five Steps to Being Signed continues to thumb its nose at the music industry. The best sampler of past glory, though, can be heard on the 1993 compilations Music Generated by Geographical Seclusion and Beer and Sun Brewed Action Music. Recorded in this very club, they offer a showcase for old-timers such as Charlie Pickett, Kreamy 'Lectric Santa, I Don't Know, Quit, Holy Terrors, and the Chant. Sure a dollar doesn't go very far anymore, but for a few good songs from the good old days? That's a sound investment.

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