Squirming in lawn chairs beneath the afternoon sun and listening patiently to loudspeakers blaring Gloria Estefan’s greatest hits, jazz fans at Bayfront Park watched a stage crew move equipment and tweak microphones for 45 minutes. Sweaty and polite, the crowd represented just the multiethnic mix Music Fest Miami, an event…

Against the shadow of a day’s stubble, a half-inch of gravity-defying ash hangs from a wrinkled Marlboro at the corner of the DJ’s mouth. A look of intense concentration crosses the face of DJ Corrado Bay (Corrado Bailone) as he studies his turntables and threads a new beat into the…

Imagine singing in front of a packed house, lights shining brightly from above, jazz legend Stan Getz behind you, blowing breathy tones on his tenor sax, and your mother harmonizing by your side. Now imagine the stage is Carnegie Hall, and you, the singer, are all of nine years old…

Somewhere in the world tonight, the music of Philip Glass will be playing. Maybe it’s The Light, performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra this week in Hungary; or String Quartet no. 2 on Monday in Linz, Austria, by the Anton Bruckner String Quartet; or the String Quartet no. 3’s “Mishima,”…

You expect a smoky room for this music. Not the cigarette swirls that surround a sultry jazz singer. Not a dry-ice machine rolling out fog to electronic dance music. I’m thinking more burnt-toast smoke, anything that might explain the sustained high-pitch alarm-tone coming through the speakers just now and piercing…

Curd Duca looks out from behind his laptop at the crowd assembled in this warehouse loft-cum-living room/lounge somewhere in the shadows along the Miami River. Young artists, musicians, and hipsters are perched on couches against the wall, packed tightly near the bar and spilling out on to the terrace. A…

To make a tribute album to Sarah Vaughan is like paying court to the queen. Vaughan was beyond standard-bearer. With a voice that resonated with supreme nobility and magnitude throughout a career that spanned nearly 50 years until her death in 1990, she was her own genre. To compare Dianne…

Let’s get this straight. Rock and roll is dead. Killed off sometime in the mid-Fifties when Elvis first copped that hip swivel and lip thing from Wynonie Harris and Bill Haley mapped the course of every rock and roll clown prince to follow: meteoric rise, decadent climax, rapid descent into…

If Bob Marley had not left us for Zion on that May day back in 1981, he would have turned 56 years old this month. And as with Elvis, Jim Morrison, and my late hamster Lucky, I sometimes fantasize about what the world would look like if Bob Marley were…

So let’s say the missing piece to your perfect record collection is the essential Ska Boo-Da-Ba by the Skatalites, an original Top Deck issue. Or let’s say your triple-LP Grounation, by Count Ossie and his Mystic Revealers of Rastafari, met its end in that unfortunate bong incident. Or maybe the…