A week or so before the second annual Miami Latin Jazz Festival, held February 15 at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, organizer Arturo Campa told me the show was going to span the history of Afro-Cuban music. And the lineup for the event, a benefit for the Friends…
Credibility is a tricky thing in rock and roll — not because it’s so hard to attain, but because it means different things to different people. Aficionados of punk and rap seem more obsessed than others with the concept of credibility, but there’s a key difference that separates the two…
Christian rock. The very name suggests something sterile, lame, weak. There’s something not right about it. Like a middle-aged man crashing a rock and roll teen party, busting a dance-floor move in a hopeless attempt to show his kids that he’s still got a finger on the rock and roll…
It’s no mere coincidence that the lineup for this year’s Miami Latin Jazz Festival spans the gamut of Afro-Cuban music history. That’s exactly what organizer Arturo Campa had in mind for the second annual staging of the blowout, which is being held Saturday, February 15, at the Gusman Center for…
The Pharaohs Awakening (Luv N’ Haight/Ubiquity) The Pharaohs In the Basement (Luv N’ Haight/Ubiquity) Like James Brown on a psych-jazz bender or Charles Mingus dabbling in avant-garde funk, the Pharaohs cut a singular path up the center of R&B, making room to further explore the sonic innovations introduced in the…
Pioneering entrepreneur Mark Soyka knows it isn’t easy selling live jazz in South Beach, a place where the throbbing pulse and synthetic drone of DJ-spun techno is the preferred soundtrack, and where what little live music you can find is of the rock and roll variety. But through perseverance and…
thursday february 13 Anti-Film Festival: For those who’ve had their fill of premiere parties and Top 40 soundtracks, Alliance Film/ Video Co-op offers a little art from emerging and experimental filmmakers and video artists. The fourth annual low-budget-film celebration at the Alliance Cinema (927 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach) and the…
Last year about this time I wrote a fairly scathing diatribe for New Times about the sorry state of reggae, which ran to coincide with the third annual Bob Marley Festival. It generated some heated letters, as well as a few nasty phone calls, but after re-reading the piece the…
thursday february 6 Miami Film Festival: The fourteenth annual Miami Film Festival continues its dominion over the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts (174 E. Flagler St.) tonight at 7:00 p.m. with American director Greg Mottola’s The Daytrippers and at 9:30 p.m. with Argentine director Mario Benedetti’s Wake Up, Love…
Careerists are rare in punk rock, but not as rare as you might think. The Queers, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and Minor Threat/Fugazi auteur Ian MacKaye have all been entrenched in this fickle, youth-obsessed genre for well over a decade, and there are a few groups from the first wave…
If it seems like there’s a ska show coming to South Florida every week, maybe it’s because there is. For the last two years, ska bands from across the country — from Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, practically everywhere but the music’s homeland of Jamaica — have made Miami…
Lonnie Smith Trio Purple Haze: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix (MusicMasters Jazz) The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix, at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1967, he was just what his legend says he is: an exploding orgasm, pulling notes and sounds from places you could not see, leading…
Teddy Morgan is only 25 years old, but the blues-guitar hotshot brings to his playing an economy, precision, and taste that is rare among the young guns currently slugging it out on the modern blues circuit. One listen to Morgan’s fine second album Louisiana Rain (Antone’s/Discovery) proves he has little…
Bill Orcutt’s new debut solo album is both a reiteration of Harry Pussy’s complex noise experiments and a move away from his main band’s barely controlled sonic assaults. Issued last month on the mighty fine NYC indie label Audible Hiss, Orcutt’s untitled set (actually, the spine reads Bill Orcutt “Solo…
There were times back in the mid-Seventies when Wayne Cochran would wake up in the middle of the night, cold and clammy, soaked with sweat, terrified. He’d run to the bathroom and just lose it, his moist hands gripping the back of the toilet bowl, puking his insides out, thinking…
At the suggestion of a friend, this week’s column was going to be a breakdown of the ten best and worst locally produced albums/cassettes/compact discs of 1996. The best-of thing was easy to compile — Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa’s Music For Meditation, Relaxation and the Imminent Overthrow of All World Governments,…
I could have easily filled this space with my own review of the music year that was, not to mention reel off at least 40 albums that helped carry me along from day to day and month to month. But as this is a charitable time of year, I figured,…
thursday december 19 The Chocolate Nutcracker: A holiday classic gets a flavorful treatment as Buffalo Soldier Productions presents the East Coast premiere of LaVerne Reed’s Chocolate Nutcracker at the Dade County Auditorium (2901 W. Flagler St.). This version of Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece, featuring the music of Duke Ellington and starring Bianca…
I used to know a girl who swore that the most useful gauge of whether a relationship would work was how you travel: If you and your partner travel well, with only minimal bickering over this or that, your lovers’ fate was as good as sealed; fight like hell and…
1) Darlene Love, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” 2) Elvis Presley, “Santa Claus Is Back in Town” 3) The Drifters, “White Christmas” 4) Otis Redding, “Merry Christmas, Baby” 5) James Brown, “Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto” 6) Huey Piano Smith and the Clowns, “Silent Night” 7) The Moods,…
I don’t think of myself as an especially sentimental sort, and Lord knows I’m no Christian, but something about Christmas music makes me all mushy and dopey. Every year for the last decade or so, after the last batch of Thanksgiving chow gets burped into the Tupperware, I drag out…
Intrigue Acoustic Soul (Universal) Tony Toni Tone House of Music (Mercury) Think back to the abyss of early Eighties urban thump-thump music. New technology had yet to be mastered by artists like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, black pop music was in assembly-line mode, and it seemed that maybe real…
