With their weekly Saturday-night party, Relic, Travis Rogers and his partner Fiin wanted to fill a void they saw in Miami: an electronic music party specializing in local talent. “We want to organically grow a night that was about the music,” Fiin tells New Times. “People want to come to…
“There’s so many similarities to making it in football and making it in music,” T-RO, a onetime wide receiver and tight end at Southern California’s Mt. San Antonio College, tells New Times. “Football made my music career easier because I didn’t need to install discipline. I was coachable when I came into the rap game…
It all started with a scheduling conflict. “The band Steve Jr. from New York were touring their new album. They hit me up about playing in Miami,” Ricardo Guerrero, who produces a series of shows called Death to the Sun, tells New Times. “I reached out to Churchill’s, and they told me that Gordo [Emmanuel Nanni, who promotes Hardcore for Punx] already had the date reserved for a punk show…”
As cofounder of III Points, the wildly popular music festival held in Wynwood since its inception in 2013, David Sinopoli is keyed into Miami’s music scene. His level of expertise becomes apparent when he begins talking numbers: “With the Ground, Space, and Floyd, and before that Bardot, for the last eight years I’ve been programming 300 shows a year in Miami,”…
“My father played trumpet, so we always listened to jazz. I don’t think there was any choice in the matter,” says Dee Dee Bridgewater, the Grammy- and Tony-winning jazz singer. Taking a break from entertaining her family and watching Martha Stewart on TV the morning of Christmas Eve, Bridgewater speaks with New Times…
“Tancred started out as a side project. My big three influences were the Cure, Portishead, and Letters to Cleo. I’d been listening to them since I was 11, and they always get me to want to write music,” explains Jess Abbott, the onetime guitarist for the indie-rock band Now Now. “I named [Tancred] after a character in a children’s book series…
With the federal government shut down and Donald Trump tweeting angrily at anyone who dares defy him, it’s safe to say 2018 was a shit year. We hope 2019 will be better, but let’s be honest: It will probably be worse. But one thing that certainly wasn’t shit this year…
“I like to say hip-hop was born when I was in my mother’s womb,” Black Thought says by phone right before he and his band the Roots take the stage as house band for The Tonight Show. “I was born in October 1971. It was documented that August 1971 was when Kool Herc created the culture of hip-hop.”
Are you a 1-percenter looking for more creative ways to spend your money than lighting your cigars with hundred-dollar bills? Miami has a worldwide reputation as a place where ballers can blow their hard-earned cash (or inheritances) on partying. If you’re not of the retirement-plan philosophy and still use “YOLO” as a mantra, peruse this selection of New Year’s Eve parties with the most outrageous price tags.
“I have a love-hate relationship with Miami,” Rick Moon says. His new video, “Cracker Jack,” set to debut with a party at Gramps Saturday, December 15, exemplifies his mixed feelings about his adopted hometown. In the video for “Cracker Jack,” a psychedelic, Flaming Lips-esque song that will be the opening track on his forthcoming album, Moon is clad in an absurd mask while about to enter a surprise party. Instead of reveling in a good time, he finds himself arrested and on trial before taking the stage to jam.
Why would anyone pay to see a show of Christmas songs when every Walgreens speaker has been blasting the same carols since Halloween? The best answer is because it’s Brian Wilson singing The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album in its entirety. Though the 1964 record doesn’t have the cachet of Pet Sounds…
For those eagerly anticipating the 2019 edition of Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival, there’s some bad news: It’s not happening. Thursday afternoon, the festival announced on its Facebook and Instagram pages what many had suspected because of the delay in announcing a lineup: There will be no…
If you hear St. Paul & the Broken Bones sight unseen, the Alabama neo-soul band conjures images of Al Green sweating while crooning. Singer Paul Janeway chuckles when asked about listeners’ preconceptions about his appearance before they see his band live. “When we started, there were assumptions I wouldn’t look the way I do,” he says. “It’s fun to surprise people.”
It wasn’t always guaranteed that the guitar would be the instrument associated with rock ‘n’ roll. At the birth of the rock era, piano men such as Little Richard and Ray Charles made hips shake and hearts ache by hollering while tickling ivories instead of plucking strings. Elvis even had a piano-playing rival…
Nobody thinks of Utah as a hotbed for beats, but Late Night Alumni’s John Hancock says that preconception is dead wrong. “Utah has a lot of music,” he says from his Salt Lake City home. “A lot of DJs come through on the way to California. It has a great indie-rock scene too, with Neon Trees and Imagine Dragons getting their start here.” His Late Night Alumni, which straddles electronic and indie rock, is a good ambassador for the state of Utah music.
Many of us like to read while listening to music. The organizers of the Miami Book Fair have run with that concept via the Porch, a stage presenting live music throughout fair week, November 11 through 18. “It’s an outdoor pop-up venue, a community gathering space, and a town center smack-dab right in the middle of the book fair,” the Porch programmer Melissa Messulam explains.
It was more than two decades ago that Steven Toth was coined “Mr. Entertainment.” “I used to juggle and do handstands for a band called One-Eyed Kings,” the Hollywood native tells New Times. After short stints with the band Lee County Oswald, Toth found himself with a surplus of songs he’d written, and thus Mr. Entertainment and the Pookiesmackers were born.
Miamians somehow tend to find one another wherever they are in the world. Singers and guitarists Josh Starkman and George Elizondo were born in South Florida and found different paths toward studying music at the University of New Orleans. Elizondo’s parents met in an English-language class in Miami…
Celebrities hanging out together have become quite the artistic muse. A photograph of Richard Nixon and Elvis shaking hands inspired a movie. The urban legend of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando driving out of New York City after the World Trade Center towers fell was made into a British TV show and short story.
What were the odds that one of the most distinctive voices in rock history had a twin who was her musical equal? When Kim Deal, the bassist of the Pixies and lead singer of one of the band’s most beloved songs, “Gigantic,” came out with her own project, the Breeders,…
Tommi Waring is obsessed with the ’80s. Even though the singer and music producer was born in 1995, he lets the bygone decade permeate every ounce of his music. “I didn’t want to sound like everyone else out there right now,” he tells New Times from his North Miami home. Waring says he’s influenced by artists from 30 years ago…
Joey Maya’s new memoir, The Drummer of Miami Beach: The Story of Joey Wrecked, has plenty of sex and drugs, but where the book really shines is in its depiction of rock ‘n’ roll. There are a thousand autobiographies by famous rockers such as Keith Richards and David Lee Roth that depict…
