Throughout Cirque du Soleil’s spectacular Dralion, a stunning team of Chinese gymnasts flip through hoops, balance stacks of rice bowls on their limbs, and tumble atop large wooden balls — often incredible acts based on ancient Asian acrobatics and dance. The accompanying music, a tapestry of vaguely ethnic sounds interwoven…
Read Part 1, Festival of Might Featuring a cast of outstanding young actors and a pack of symbol-laden dogs, first-time director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu’s urban portrait captures the daily desperation and persistent hopes of an ensemble of characters in millennial Mexico City. Economic class and personal histories clash when parallel…
Listening to tracks featured in Amores Perros — the viscera-twisting Mexican film up for an Academy Award — is like surfing border radio. The punkish props of the Mexican hip-hop group Control Machete, the shopworn spice of a recent Celia Cruz hit, standard cumbia, and the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman”…
The four friends at the center of the smart 1998 Venezuelan social satire Little Thieves, Big Thieves (Cien Años de Perdon) recall the motley group of male strippers in the British sleeper The Full Monty (1997). Like the underdogs of that film, the foursome in Thieves is composed of desperate…
The most adventurous production out of Cuba of late is a revisionist take on the venerable rumba. At the MIDEM conference in Cannes last month, producer Cary Diez of the Havana label BIS Music previewed La Rumba Soy Yo, a fifteen-track musical thrill. With fresh and often far-reaching arrangements that…
Over the electronic din on Washington Avenue after midnight, amid barking club promoters and sprinting valets with lips kissing walkie-talkies, the incongruous sound of live music escapes through heavy curtains hung from an open door. On the other side is Bolero, a 21st -century supper club graced with perfect lighting…
The week before Christmas, Old Havana was open season on foreigners, more of them than ever, who had come to see Castro’s Cuba for themselves. Entrepreneurs, ready to pose for pictures, waited by the cathedral to charge tourists for the photos. Pretty young women in frilly folkloric dresses smiled stiffly…
The hyperbolically titled The Story of Cuba could not possibly live up to its name with a mere fifteen tracks. While its compilers certainly take poetic license, the disc does offer a lively variety of contemporary Cuban music, including songs performed by NG La Banda, Elio Reve, Los Van Van,…
Although it has been long awaited by her fans, Albita’s pleasing new release, Son, is not an especially remarkable album. But it is a personal coup for the singer, who arrived in Miami in 1993 for a total immersion course in record-industry politics that included being rejected as “too Cuban,”…
Omara Portuondo is the latest (and last) of the featured members of the Buena Vista Social Club to record a solo album, and it is a brilliant crescendo to the series that began with the collective’s 1997 Grammy-winning debut. It is not surprising that on this rhapsodic CD Portuondo shows…
Psychedelic clothes may be hip on college campuses, but the political activism that went with them in the Sixties apparently is not. The sobering facts: Forty percent of Floridians between the ages of 18 and 24 registered to vote in the 1996 general election. Only half of those registered actually…
Watching as the imbroglio surrounding Los Van Van’s Miami concert played out on local television last month, Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba felt as though he had tuned in to a rerun of old news. “I feel sorry that they had to have that disagreeable experience,” sighs Rubalcaba, who was performing…
I will anxiously wait to see the light of dawn, of every dawn. That the smell of life should excite me when it brushes against my bones and my gratitude, that of a banished man, always responds to its call All of us, all of us are in Memorial Park…
To those saddened by the news of fado queen Amalia Rodrigues’s death earlier this month, consolation comes with this CD. Rest assured the soul of Portuguese blues will be transported into the next millennium by stalwart Cape Verdean chanteuse Cesaria Evora. Fado and Cape Verde’s mournful morna — sung in…
I was playing a show in Miami in the theater of divine comedy…. — Bob Dylan, “Caribbean Wind” A tailgate party with teeth is the best way to describe the protest of more than 4000 Cuban exiles, all screaming themselves hoarse outside the Miami Arena, while many of their fellow…
The 1000 people in the audience last Thursday night at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, didn’t know much about the Cuban band Los Van Van. “Everybody here who speaks Spanish raise your hand,” singer Roberto Hernandez called from the stage (in Spanish). “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro … uh, okay…
Eusebio Escobar sits at the sewing machine in his Kendall workshop, smoking a cigarette and listening to Sarah Brightman’s pop arias with the stereo turned up loud. On his lap he holds a manila folder full of fantasies. He sifts through a sheaf of colorful sketches illustrating his designs for…
Choreographer and dancer Neri Torres wants you to enjoy a rumba. But she also wants Miami audiences to remember that the blood-stirring music and dance developed not in ballrooms and Hollywood films, where it eventually turned up, but in Cuba’s black barrios, originating among the almost one million Africans brought…
Miami Mayor Joe Carollo needs to brush up on basic civics, not to mention civility. Appearing recently as a guest on Radio Mambí’s (WAQI-AM 710) weeknight call-in show, Mesa Redonda, Carollo egged on host Armando Perez-Roura and callers as they hurled insults at the Cuban dance band Los Van Van…
Cuban band leader Roberto Torres rarely performs in Miami these days, but on a recent morning he is eager to reprise his personal hit parade for an audience of one. The venue: the office of his independent record label, Guajiro Records, located in a small warehouse in west Miami-Dade. The…
On a recent morning in Little Haiti, geese honk, a rooster crows, and a goat named Michelle Jordan pokes around the kitchen of the Earth N’ Us Farm, two acres of enchanted tropical forest, vegetable gardens, fantastic tree houses, honeycombs, and compost heaps hidden behind an unassuming wooden fence. Brother-and-sister-homesteaders…
Ruben Blades’s Tiempos may surprise fans who identify the singer with the socially conscious salsa that was his trademark in the Eighties, a time when his albums served to introduce more than a few Anglos to Latin music. His introspective new release consists of fourteen interrelated tracks that, at times,…
