Venezuelan jazz troubadour Maria Rivas’s tribute to coffee, Café Negrito, could easily be a featured item at Starbucks — and not simply because java serves as the unifying lyrical theme for this collection of contemporary, classic, and traditional Latin songs. Even more to the point, this highly crafted world-beat fusion…
Ms. Badu is back with another soundtrack to live by. Full of sublime beauty and profound sorrow, Mama’s Gun seeps straight from your stereo into your soul. Forget about your silicone so-called divas; Badu’s blues prove the real thing is righteous (even if, as she sings on “Cleva,” her luv-yaself-sista…
When Duran Duran came to Detroit in 1984, the only girl I knew who got to go to the sold-out arena show was my best friend Linda’s cousin Anne, who scored tickets because she lived around the block from a record store. The rest of us had to be content…
The club in the photograph is filled with laughing Taiwanese, their eyes riveted on the Latina woman with the microphone dancing on the tiny stage, dressed in a gold minidress with black boots. Jessi James Campo is on tour in Taipei, teaching an eager audience how to dance merengue. The…
A dizzying blitz of corporate-generated hits blasts the ears of today’s songsmiths, plaguing them with a sense that if their music does not sell, it does not matter. That sense is especially sharp in Miami. The boom of the Latin-music industry brings to our beaches the platinum pop idols of…
All the funky new performance spaces in Little Havana dressed in tatters on Friday, December 15, to honor Saint Lazaro, otherwise known as Babalu Aye, the Afro-Cuban orisha of plague and healing. At El Hueco, the makeshift theater inside Ozone Video on SW Seventeenth Avenue, two empty chairs sat ominously…
Topping 110 degrees in the summertime, Maracaibo has the highest average temperature in the hemisphere. Indoors, however, the oil-rich industrial city in northwestern Venezuela is one of the coldest places on Earth. Matrons draped in furs overcompensate for the heat with air-conditioner settings that would chill a polar bear. This…
The day we moved into our new house in Little Haiti, a thin white woman with sallow skin walked along the sidewalk past our gate, head bowed and shoulders hunched, coughing as she passed. A white man in an expensive car had dropped her off and then driven out of…
Few people have invested more in the business of salsa than Ralph Mercado. The 59-year-old CEO of RMM Records was in the game before the genre even had a name, representing originators in the early Seventies such as Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto. In the universe of Fania Records, whose…
The novelist Ngugi wa Thiongõ once complained that it is impossible to write satire about Kenya; the dictatorship that rules his native land is already too absurd. No writer could possibly invent anything more ridiculous. The same could be said about the contemporary-music industry, which might as well be called…
The CIA-backed exile invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs failed in 1961. The Beatles were more successful, taking the beaches in the years that followed via portable radios perched precariously on Havana’s sea wall and secretly tuned to Miami’s WQAM (560-AM). Sixty-one-year-old Alexander Dominguez remembers listening to “La…
Renowned Brazilian director Carlos Diegues has attempted to make a movie worthy of the music that has provided his nation with a soundtrack for the past century. But Diegues’s samba-inspired Orfeu doesn’t prove a very good dance partner. Like the floor charts sold to North Americans eager to learn the…
In Spanish girar means both to go on tour and to spin around. Currently on the road with the show Girados, Ana Torroja and Miguel Bosé have put a new spin on the comeback tour. Long the golden boy of Spanish pop, 47-year-old Bosé has released seventeen solo albums since…
British-born Richard Blair takes his world music literally. He got his start in the recording studio engineering reggae and bhangra in Birmingham and then manned the controls at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio, producing acts ranging from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Geoffrey Oryema to Toto la Momposina. Momposina, the…
Until recently, two constants have defined Elvis Crespo’s career: a chin-length bob and choruses built on the same three-note melody. That’s all over now. The waifish merengue megastar has traded in the familiar hairdo for a sophisticated layered cut and exchanged producer Roberto Cora, who oversaw Crespo’s first two blockbuster…
Drums line two walls at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s exhibition “Ritmos de Identidad: Fernando Ortiz’s Legacy and the Howard Family Collection of Percussion Instruments.” Drums fill the cases that sit in the middle of the room and cluster about the door. The sound of batá drums, the sacred…
Charo Oquet wants you to know there is more to Dominican music than the beeper dance, no matter how much fun the rump-shaking rhythm of merengue might be. For five years now, Oquet has organized the annual Dominican Youth Arts Festival to make Miamians aware of the cultural wealth of…
I can’t tell anecdotes,” says Julieta Venegas, between bites of a take-out sandwich in an empty hallway at the Latin Alternative Music Conference (LAMC) in New York City this past August. “I’m no good at it,” she continues. “I have to paint situations.” On her celebrated sophomore release, Bueninvento (Goodinvention),…
When Fito Paez arrived in the United States for the first time in 1989, the police at the airport gave him a thorough workover. “I didn’t have the right look to get in,” remembers the gangly, long-haired singer currently in Miami to record a new disc. Laughing, he adds, “I…
Launching the first annual Latin Grammys at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on September 13, the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (LARAS) took no risks. Instead the first-ever predominantly Spanish-language broadcast on a major U.S. television network tailored Latin sounds to prevailing U.S. pop tastes. Nothing ventured;…
After Caridad Brenes died, her granddaughter Margarita Cepeda felt her grandmother’s spirit dancing inside her. Mami Cari had raised Margarita from the time she was a baby and, most important, had taught her as a little girl how to dance bomba. Holding her wide skirt high and swishing it in…
Luis Enrique, one of the most important figures in the late-Eighties romantic salsa movement, is a familiar face on the Miami club scene. The Nicaraguan native, who emigrated to California in the midst of the 1978 Sandinista revolution, has been playing all over town since first following the rhythms of…
