Anyone familiar with Kenny Scharf’s work won’t be surprised to learn that the Pop Surrealist, painter of Jetsons and Flintstones characters, psychedelic space adventures and cool mutant creatures, has created an animated cartoon. Scharf’s half-hour The Groovenians premieres November 10 on the Cartoon Network and will be previewed at a…
Some people are contortionists. Hugo and Ines — who make their fists, fingers, feet, and legs into saxophone players, magicians, ballerinas, and sad old men — could be considered body-part puppeteers. Their poignant and funny Short Stories, which they’ll perform this weekend courtesy of Miami-Dade Community College’s Cultura del Lobo…
Ruben Blades has always made music that is a record of his time. In representing the soul of a marginal Latin American culture that has since moved into the mainstream, his great albums of the Seventies and Eighties were catalysts for both the global popularization of salsa and for contemporary…
“People don’t expect such sophisticated expression from an underdeveloped country,” observed Cuban graphic designer Félix Beltrán during the recent opening of “¡Propaganda! Cuban Political and Film Posters 1960-1990” at the New World School of the Arts Gallery. Showcasing rare works that symbolized the island’s revolutionary ethos, promoted social programs and…
Singer Mayra Caridad Valdés is familiar to international jazz and Cuban music followers from her appearances with Irakere, her famous piano-playing brother Chucho Valdés’s band. With La Diosa del Mar, Mayra Valdés should now cease to be known as “sister of Chucho” and be recognized as a prominent artist in…
Described by its producers as “a music-based time capsule of planet Earth now,” 1 Giant Leap crosses cultures and genres with powerful music that bridges authenticity and innovation. The twelve tracks comprise a seamless mix of indigenous rhythms, electronica, pop, jazz, socially committed rap, spoken-word, and traditional chanting and vocal…
In mid-August, Miami label Ciocan Music’s press rep triumphantly announced that the stellar Cuban a cappella group Vocal Sampling would perform on the upcoming Latin Grammy Awards broadcast in Los Angeles. The vocal sextet’s album Cambio de Tiempo is up for three awards, the highest number of nods yet for…
In this town it seems like every time two Latin musicians get together in the same room someone calls it a descarga. For the dizzying thrill of the real thing, head to Café Nostalgia this Friday night, when a group of powerful multigenerational instrumentalists will scare up the very soul…
What are those random clicks and scrapes doing accompanying a recording of “The Girl From Ipanema” at Gil’s Café? Maybe those clips from the movie That’s Entertainment projected on a screen above the stage are a clue. About half of the people eating or drinking at the tables wear tap…
“I think people honestly, genuinely love my salsa music; that’s the end of the discussion right there,” says Luis Enrique, wearing the kind of enlightened smile you might see on a salmon who’s decided to stop swimming upstream. Hugging his guitar, the “prince of salsa” leans back in a booth…
“They say he went to Europe and when he got there — incredible disillusion,” begins the title track of Orishas’ Emigrante, an intense mix of fierce grooves, melodic breaks, and highly expressive lyrics born of both rap’s urban political consciousness and the running social commentary characteristic of Cuban son. On…
Orlando “Maraca” Valle segued easily from his years as a prodigious flute player with Cuban jazz heavyweights Bobby Carcasses, Emiliano Salvador, and Irakere to leading his own band, Otra Vision, purveyors of well-crafted good-time music. Performing a brand of popular Cuban music with wide appeal, Maraca and Otra Vision have,…
Issac Delgado’s Miami concert at Rancho Gaspar last month was advertised only through radio bemba, the Cuban grapevine, and by a vague sign at the entrance to the nightclub-cum-ranch that read “Live Music Today” in Spanish. But by dusk on a hot Sunday afternoon, more than 3000 people had come…
“Andan Diciendo por Ahi” (“They Go Around Saying”), a guaguancó written by Albita Rodriguez, denounces gossips and affirms the Cuban singer/songwriter’s resilience despite speculation by busybodies about her professional and personal life. Funny and menacing, the rowdy rumba chastises liars with the threat “I’ll cut your tongue off” and warns…
This very expansive Miami Latin Film Festival was once two: the French Hispanic and the Miami Hispanic film festivals, which this year morphed into one, headed by Jaime Angulo. Running from March 22 to 31 at the Regal South Beach cinema, the festival’s 38 films seem to cover the spectrum…
On a rainy January morning in a bar open to the sidewalk in Sevilla’s riverside neighborhood Triana, a construction worker stomps a freshly laid ceramic-tile floor in boots stained with orange-colored clay. He is clapping, marking the rhythm of a flamenco song with palmas. Cigarette clamped between his teeth, he…
David Poland is huddled with his cell phone, cinching the deal on one more film. The new director of the FIU Miami Film Festival thought he’d lost Chicken Rice War, a version of Romeo and Juliet set among Singapore food stands. The quirky romantic comedy won the audience award at…
The phenomenal success of Buena Vista Social Club did much to reawaken interest in Cuban music around the globe, but more remarkable was the effect the album had on the lives of its featured artists. As he approaches his 100th birthday, Compay Segundo probably is the most internationally recognizable of…
Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the Havana-based producer behind the Afro-Cuban All Stars and the A&R man and conceptual artist of the now-legendary Buena Vista Social Club, is on the road behind his latest CD, Baila Mi Son, featuring yet another unsung Cuban singer, sonero Felix Baloy. After touring the world…
Artist/director Julian Schnabel may not be immortalized with a monument in Havana à la John Lennon, or even recognized with an Oscar, but Before Night Falls will endure as a requisite portrait of the agony and the ecstasy of the intelligentsia in revolutionary Cuba. Schnabel took poetic license with the…
For U2’s Elevation Tour 2001, kicked off last month with two shows at the National Car Rental Center, Willie Williams designed the most exquisite set in the history of arena rock. So artfully spare that there were no obstructed views from any of the seats surrounding the stage, the production…
Audiences have known local fixture Raul Midon as soulman, singer/songwriter, and Latin balladeer. Some, in a reverential sense, even say he is “a monster.” Absent from the live scene of late, Midon is back with a different tone. He would prefer to be called, simply, a jazz singer. “I love…
