SAT 11/1 Are dub-tango experiments like Gotan Project and Bajofondo your kind of thing? Then the sounds Argentine bassist Federico Aubele spins will be music to your ears. His chilled-out combination of downtempo hooks and classic tango pieces like “Malena” can be heard tonight at 9:00 at the Marlin (1200…
Mexican duo Plastilina Mosh have had it easier than most Latin alternative rock acts. Instead of throwing Latin folk music elements into a rock melting pot — as many of their colleagues did only to fail to build an Anglo audience because of their Spanish lyrics — PM slipped into…
Mercedes Sosa is like a fairy godmother for most popular musicians in Argentina. Powered by her strong voice, her songs make their way around the world, pit-stopping in countries like Chile and Turkey. For recording artists who lend her tunes, international fame and royalties are usually instant rewards. Most songwriters…
SUN 9/21 Yeah, baby! She began as an icon in swinging ’60s London; had a nude scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s controversial film Blowup; lived in Paris with her incomparably hip husband, musician Serge Gainsbourg; and was immortalized as the breathy vocalist in the scandalously sexy song “Je T’aime Moi Non…
Argentineans weren’t always as active in Miami’s music scene as they are now. But bands like Tereso www.tereso.com, Prole and the Gardis have been playing around for a while now, getting themselves mixed up in jams with visiting Argentine rock celebrities like Los Piojos or simply trying to make a…
Saturday August 23 With his stovepipe hat and raspy delivery, singer Bob Malone models himself after piano legends Dr. John and Professor Longhair. Though his look may be familiar, his songwriting and singing style is closer to Billy Joel than the nitty-gritty New Orleans legends. Still, the New Jersey homeboy’s…
After being certified gold in Argentina and — even more important for the collective of Argentine and Uruguayan producers known as Bajofondo — already a winner for Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 2002 Gardel Awards (the Argie equivalent of the Grammy Awards, appropriately named after the late tango singer), the…
“It was difficult to get people’s attention,” says Robin Hofmann, age 26, from his home base in Stuttgart. The German producer is discussing how he and his Dublex, Inc. colleagues — Rino Spadavecchia, 32; Florian Pflüger, 28; and Felix Stecher, 23 — managed to score a major dance hit in…
“Like many immigrants, I’m constantly traveling and telling stories about what I see, and that ends up creating liaisons everywhere I go — it can be Bogota, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, or Santiago,” says busy Argentine rocker Fito Páez, explaining how comfortable he feels about his fifth visit to…
To the wide U.S. audience who may not recognize the rockers in the new video from Chilean band La Ley, it should be said that indeed the group was not like this back in 1989. When they released their first album in Chile, they emphasized their good looks, plus a…
Argentineans are as fascinated by Paris as the French are infatuated with tango, a mutual affection that, over the last three years, has even reached the European charts in the form of the Gotan Project. This Paris-based team includes French producer Philippe Cohen Solal, his Swiss partner Christoph H. Muller,…
One of the songs that the funky Fort Lauderdale trio Hashbrown is recording for its untitled forthcoming album is called “All Familiar.” In fact the band can be viewed as an “all familiar” staple of the Broward scene, considering how it has played on the local circuit for the past…
Argentine rock pioneer Nito Mestre felt somehow vindicated last Wednesday when Colombian star Juanes invited him to share one of his encores in front of the enthusiastic audience that packed the Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts. “I wanted to meet him and give him my album,” says Mestre…
“It was a blessing in the sky,” says Felix Sama, co-host and DJ for Mun2’s hot property, the daily live TV show The Roof. He’s carrying bags full of records he just mixed live out of the Telemundo studios in Hialeah. The Roof’s audience probably missed all the albums that…
Luis Alberto Spinetta is more than an Argentine artist. Fellow countrymen like to see him as a legend because his music is considered the soundtrack to their lives. For the last 30 years, Spinetta has mutated as many times as you can imagine for a man who has fronted bands…
It was an event that ended on a high note, with a third of Soho Lounge’s capacity crowd inspired to break dance on mats in the center of the club. At the end of the concert, legendary Bronx DJ Afrika Bambaataa, who was headlining that night, said it best: “That’s…
Never mind more than 50 years of economic domination. Nor the role played in the Seventies by the U.S. government supporting the last military dictatorship (blamed for the disappearance of more than 30,000 people in Argentina). Never mind U.S. cooperation with the British military operation in the Falkland/Malvinas War of…
Bluesman/roots-rocker Jon Paris laughs aloud when asked about the Senate decision to declare 2003 as “The Year of Blues.” Facing the possibility of war, he finds the honor ironic, even though he believes that “it’s always going to be great [to have] a general audience recognizing the music, and the…
“We play in Miami all the time, we’ve even toured Europe, but we’ve never played in Fort Lauderdale,” says Juan Rozas, 28, singer and guitarist for the Argentine-born, long-time Miami-based alt-rock outfit Tereso, a name with a history of its own. Maybe as a reflection of the members’ attitude toward…
Have you ever looked at a photo of Everything But the Girl and assumed that the band’s name has everything to do with the way singer Tracey Thorn looks? Well, truth is the sophisticated pop-dance British duo didn’t adopt that name after listening to repeated rejections from record labels. Actually,…
Riding atop a crafty indie dream, Babasonicos finally had its own Miami experience — with the usual elements, good, bad, and ugly — on December 16 at Lola. The Argentine experimental alt-rock group performed an almost unannounced gig dominated by the sense of general relief that comes with the last…
There are many ways to understand why Mexican alt-rock band Café Tacuba decided to end a long recording hiatus with another set of covers instead of original songs. Exactly why depends on who’s talking. Bassist Quique Rangel jokingly concedes that even when the band doesn’t consider the strategy of coming…
