For a telling sociological observation on last week’s Miami Beach gathering of nearly 5000 dance-music professionals at the Winter Music Conference (WMC), one didn’t need to dig deep. At the registration area inside the Radisson Deauville hotel, only a handful of people waited at the credit-card payment booth. Meanwhile to…
Depending on your perspective, Miami’s Winter Music Conference (WMC) is either the annual gathering of the electronic dance-music industry for a week of high-powered networking and taste-making, or it’s simply an excuse for hordes of pasty Europeans and pale Midwesterners to hit South Beach on the corporate tab and get…
Forget literary allusions to magical realism, psychoanalyses of Fidel Castro, or policy studies assembled from the comforts of a plush Coral Gables office. If you really want to understand the arts world in Cuba, simply consult the lyrics of The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s theme song: “It’s just a jump…
Curd Duca carefully swallows a forkful of his quiche lunch and begins speaking in his thickly Austrian-accented English. “I have never understood why being avant-garde equaled being tense and unhappy,” he says with obvious frustration, the distinctive timbre of his voice capturing the full attention of the diners sitting behind…
A taste of the Bronx hits Miami on Thursday, February 24, when Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band perform at the FIU Miami Film Festival’s jazz series at the Sheraton Biscayne Bay. The “Fort Apache” moniker is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the notorious 1981 film Fort Apache, the Bronx,…
The FIU Miami Film Festival unfolds this week at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts amid a novel dose of controversy. The subject of contention? Surprise, surprise — Cuban-exile politics. In a nutshell: Kids in Exile, a local filmmaking trio composed of Joe Cardona, Mario de Varona, and Michelle…
Like the best mid-Sixties work by Bob Dylan, the first three albums by the Clash redefined the rock and roll landscape into which they were unleashed. Between 1977 and 1979, the British punk foursome issued The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and London Calling, along with a brilliant string of…
A New York City journalist in town to do his own now-requisite take on the Chris Paciello story remained unfazed by the case’s lurid allegations of Mafia racketeering, armed robbery, drug dealing double-crosses, and murder. No, what really shocked this seasoned writer was discovering firsthand that Paciello’s famed Liquid and…
“Of all the bands to come from Miami and end up on a movie soundtrack, you wouldn’t promptly think of us,” scoffs Tom Smith. Placing tongue firmly in cheek, he adds, “But talent rises to the top, babe!” Indeed. Smith and his current outfit, To Live and Shave in L.A.,…
“Spider” John Koerner sits alone on the darkened stage inside Hollywood’s Temple Beth El, sound-checking for his show later in the evening. Spectacles perched low on the bridge of his nose, he leans into his harmonica rack and blows, then picks out a walking riff on his acoustic guitar. A…
Both on-site police and concertgoers agreed the strongest similarity between the original Woodstock and Phish’s 80,000-strong New Year’s Eve shindig was neither the music nor the mellow, retro-hippie visuals. It was the traffic. In an eerie replay of Woodstock’s opening scene of cars simply abandoned along the roadside, on Wednesday,…
Few groups have taken more critical abuse in recent years than Phish, if not in the form of outright animosity from hipsterdom-at-large, than in the guise of backhanded bemusement on the part of the mainstream media, ready to dismiss the band as nothing more than a curious replay of Sixties…
Forget boy bands, Woodstock violence, or the “Latin” craze. If you’re looking for an overarching theme throughout last year’s pop music, just one word comes to mind: bass. It was all about bass. Moment of clarity number one: Midsummer. Sitting in the back of a car with Miami’s flagship experimentalist…
A strange truth emerged as New Times polled both its own writers and prominent music figures across Miami’s aural spectrum, seeking their personal Top 10s from the past year and asking them to distill twelve months of pop culture into a clinical black-and-white list. What could it mean that the…
Don’t call Joe Claussell a DJ. “That’s not who I am, I just like to play music,” explains the New York City-based producer and, ah, player of music. Don’t call his spell behind the turntables a set, either. “I don’t put together sets,” Claussell adds, a note of frustration creeping…
Rock en español largely remains a promise, an unfulfilled aesthetic vision of Latin-American musicians merging their native grooves with rock and roll, fashioning something altogether new in the process. On paper — and in the breathless cheerleading of many local critics — it sounds great. The reality, however, is a…
An all-too-rare sound filled the intimately lit space inside Timba the Monday before last, as saxophonist David Liebman and percussionist Abbey Radar reached down deep inside themselves and pulled forth some truly beautiful moments. It wasn’t always easy listening, as Liebman’s body appeared to zig (often at an angle that…
David Byrne — singer, author, filmmaker, and record-label president — is celebrated for many things, not the least of which is his own music. From the earliest days of his group the Talking Heads, bobbing up and down onstage at CBGB in 1975, to his solo projects of more recent…
That cold snap blowing through Miami last week had less to do with Mother Nature than with the specter of José Garcia-Pedrosa returning to his old fiefdom as Miami Beach’s City Manager. Thankfully Beach law-enforcement figures (quietly aided by local arts advocates) were able to intercede and convince the Miami…
You can take your pick of the many neo-fin-de-siècle gigs vying for millennium-worthy status, from the dueling downtown saccharine fests of Puff Daddy and Gloria Estefan to the chirpy dance blowouts at the Ice Palace and Miami Beach’s Convention Center, each promising uniqueness, each featuring many of the same oh-so-tired…
The room is filled with screaming skulls, fiendishly grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons hanging from the ceiling, and several Puppet Master dolls, which, even standing at a mere six inches tall, manage to evoke that cult splatter flick’s sense of dread. “Cemeteries, the full moon: I’ve just always loved stuff that’s creepy,”…
“Imagine rock music as a beached whale’s carcass,” suggests pop critic Simon Reynolds. “What seems like intense activity is really necrotic vitality — a maggot horde of bands living off the rotting flesh of a moribund culture. In their teeming tediousness, rock books exist on an even lower plane, microbial…
