Fulano de Tal Normal (BMG) Pepe Alva y Alma Raymi Pa’ Mostrarte Mi Amor (Alma Raymi Music) Over the past year, the mainstream media discovered rock en espanol, with wide-eyed items about Latin American bands appearing in Spin, Newsweek, and even USA Today. Of course, this was old news in…
Various Artists Cuban Gold 4: !Fuego, Candela! The Smokin’ ’70s (Qbadisc) The utopian balladeers of the earlier years of the Cuban revolution — Silvio Rodriguez et al. — became worldwide ideological icons, and they have remained enduring symbols of their place and time. Meanwhile, the funk of the same era…
thursday december 18 Triumph of the Spirit: Carlos Alfonzo’s turbulent, mystical abstractions evoke Afro-Cuban symbols, European icons, violence, sex, the specter of death, and the tropics (his mural in the Santa Clara Metrorail station, The Mystery of the Tropics, typifies his grand scale). One of Miami’s most celebrated and beloved…
Inner Circle vocalist Kris Bentley recalls when the band performed for an audience of 60,000 at an 1995 outdoor festival in Switzerland. “We’re playing with a lot of big guys,” Bentley says, “Elton John, Page, and Plant.” “Lenny Kravitz,” adds drummer Lancelot Hall. “We’re high up in the lineup among…
thursday december 4 Elba Ramalho: A superstar in her native Brazil, Ramalho has been called the Queen of the Lambada and likened to Tina Turner. She certainly has a mop of hair, manic energy, shapely legs, and a powerful voice. But don’t be fooled: Just because she’s Brazilian doesn’t mean…
thursday november 27 Santa’s Enchanted Forest: Okay, so the seasons don’t really change so much in Miami. Locals spend winter holidays baking themselves on the beach; it did snow once, but don’t count on a white Christmas. How to capture the holiday spirit? You have two options: Go shopping tomorrow…
thursday november 20 Rose’s Rock On Anniversary IV: Everything is new at Rose’s Bar & Music Lounge — stage, sound system, lighting, decor, lower drink prices, cover charge — except for one thing: Rose’s itself. On fickle South Beach for four years, the club provides a rare forum for local,…
Albita Una Mujer Como Yo (Crescent Moon/Epic) Albita Rodriguez used to open her local club shows by joking that she would give a three-part performance: Cuban music, followed by Cuban music, wrapping it up with Cuban music. The singer’s allegiance to the classic Cuban sound made for good shtick, but…
Info: Calendar for the week By Larry Boytano, Judy Cantor, Nina Korman, and Jennifer Osorio thursday november 6 House of Blues Tour: The blues comes to Broward in a big way tonight at 8:00 and Sunday at 7:30 p.m. when the House of Blues presents Dr. John, Charlie Musselwhite, and…
February 27, 1968, was Carnival Tuesday in Trinidad, and 22-year-old Claude Clement was rushing to join a band of masqueraders gathered in downtown Port of Spain. Led by a group of parading steel pan players, Clement and the other revelers danced. They jumped. They gyrated. Just as they reached Charlotte…
thursday october 30 Naomi Wolf: Naomi Wolf sure knows how to piss people off. A controversial figure among the feminist elite, she discusses her latest book Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood, today at 10:30 a.m. as part of the Jewish Book Fair’s Women’s Day Luncheon. A Rhodes Scholar and…
thursday october 23 Writers Harvest National Reading: Like a good book? Like it even better when the author reads it to you? Then you’ll love this. Tonight is Writers Harvest, the nation’s largest literary benefit. At 600 bookstores nationwide, 2000 of your favorite authors read from their works simultaneously. Attend…
La Casa de la Trova in Santiago de Cuba occupies a small colonial building with high-beam ceilings and long street-level windows that at noon on a September Sunday are filled with the faces of people looking in. The austere room feels more like a chapel than Santiago’s most storied music…
thursday october 16 Guitar Greats: The rock guitar pantheon brings its traveling exhibition of flying fret virtuosity to the Sunrise Musical Theater (5555 95th Ave., Sunrise) for a four-hour rock and blues bash. The promoters of the G-3 Tour, whose uninspired title presumably translates into “three guitarists,” need to check…
Chorrillos, the black neighborhood outside Lima, Peru, where Susana Baca grew up, borders the sea, and her speech mimics the rolling rhythm of breaking waves. Laughter rims Baca’s rich voice, even as she talks on the phone from a hotel room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on a recent afternoon. The…
thursday october 9 Celluloid Vampires: This lecture sucks — blood, that is. With Halloween just around the corner, the Wolfsonian (1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) has gotten a bit ghoulish and invited a professor (no, not Van Helsing, Dracula’s nemesis) to talk about vampire films tonight at 6:30. Bill Rothman,…
When jazz pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba walks up to the entrance of the Van Dyke Cafe on Lincoln Road, no one wields a Cuban flag like a weapon, throws a bottle, or spits, the way protesters in front of the Gusman Center did the night he performed in Miami last year…
“Those, like poets, who have not distanced themselves from their childhood will remember that as children they believed that animals thought and behaved like men,” wrote the late Afro-Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera in her book Animals in the Folklore and Magic of Cuba. “In the inner world of childhood, insects,…
thursday october 2 Maluala: Oh, what a paradise the Cuba of yore seemed. Except for one thing (no, not Castro): slavery. Yes, Cuba was not always so libre; plenty of Africans were oppressed there too. Regarded by some as the father of black Cuban cinema, Sergio Giral, now a resident…
The summer doldrums have taken their toll on the South Florida art scene. Most local galleries and museums, it seems, have been on vacation — or might as well have been. With few culturally minded out-of-towners to cater to and with Miami art aficionados off at the Venice Biennial or…
Ann Lorraine Labriola’s sculpture Stargazer sits on the ocean floor five miles southeast of Key West in eighteen feet of water. On a brilliantly sunny Saturday afternoon recently, a light breeze wrinkled the surface as the artist and her boyfriend approached the site in his fishing boat. After the boat…
When the Cuban dance band Los Van Van played the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl in June, festival president Dick Rosenzweig told the Los Angeles Times that the audience reaction was unlike anything he had seen in the event’s nineteen-year history. A Times critic described the fervor at…
