In an effort to keep minds from slipping into recession — and worse yet, depression — the University of Miami’s monthlong 23-concert Festival Miami music series is knocking down prices and spreading its shows to venues across South Florida. The first can’t-believe-elegance-was-so-affordable event comes in the form of an opening…
World-renowned Argentine electro-fusion outfit Bajofondo has always dug deep into its cultural roots to create a modern mystical ambiance. While the group still retains much of its original electro-dub-tango essence, its latest album, Mar Dulce, dredges even deeper. The new sound traverses a sea of mixed-up musical genres including Andalusian…
Even though Miami’s famous Latin ska fusion band Locos por Juana has recently been struttin’ and skankin’ across big stages from here to L.A., the group hasn’t forgotten its deep underground roots. Just a month after showcasing their latest album, La Verdad, at the Manuel Artime Theater in Little Havana…
It’s cool to be kind in an era of food and fuel crises, scarce access to healthcare, and fears over depleted natural resources, and that charitable trend has even caught on in sometimes-frivolous Miami Beach. This Friday at 10:30 p.m., a group of local artists will band together at The…
South Florida’s multicultural roots have been bearing musical fruit for a long time, but the Adrienne Arsht Center has harvested it for the center’s summer concert series, Cosecha 2008, an exotic cornucopia of Afro-Latin and Caribbean artists from across the lower part of the Western Hemisphere. Some of the best…
This Friday, one of Miami’s longest-standing underground bands, Locos por Juana, will have the opportunity to skank the pants off new and old fans alike during the group’s album-release extravaganza at Little Havana’s Manuel Artime Theater. Thank the forward-thinking folks at FUNDarte, a local cultural nonprofit dedicated to promoting new…
Some cats really know how to scratch at your heartstrings. A little more than a year ago, Miami’s popular octogenarian tango interpreter La Gata reduced a crowd of Latin American émigrés to tears following a screening of a self-titled documentary about her at the Spanish Cultural Center in Coral Gables…
On a recent evening on the deck of The Standard Hotel, singer-songwriter Sol Ruiz wears a sophisticated black-and-white polka-dot dress and slowly nurses a vodka and cranberry. Her conversation is laced with self-reflective commentary. It’s a big change in aesthetics and attitude from two summers ago, when New Times last…
It’s totally normal to envy up-and-coming Latin alternative pop diva Sacha Nairobi. Her vibrant voice explodes melodically from her chest when she sings her catchy, ironic lyrics to the song “Princesa,” which recently appeared nationally on Putumayo’s Radio Latino compilation. She comes from a family of well-known Venezuelan musicians and…
It’s hard to hold an interview with Argentine rock band the Gardis at Finnegan’s Pub on Lincoln Road. Each question is interrupted by a bartender, bar crawler, or obsessive Gardis fan patting the boys on the back, kissing them on the cheek, or dropping free beers on the table. What…
Just because the hurricanes have yet to blow in doesn’t mean Biscayne Bay’s docks aren’t a-rockin’ and a-rollin’. This Thursday, beginning at 7:30 p.m., during the weekly Rock the Dock concert series at Bayside, the concert pier will dip and skank to the ska-lectrifying sounds of Prato Principal and the…
Argentine guitarist and producer Erico Schulz has spent the past few years showcasing a higher-falutin’ musical fusion at the city’s five-star hotels and restaurants. In fact 2008 marks his band’s fifth year in residency at Baleen, at Grove Isle Resort. What’s kept it there is a decadent instrumental mix of…
About the only music lovers making out in this scorching heat are the crickets. But no worries — while they’re rubbing their wings into a sweat, you can saunter inside to the cool club feel of the Coral Gables Congregational Church’s Community Arts Program and rub shoulders with artists who’ve…
It takes a nimble-fingered hand to master the complexities of the guitar, and it takes a local genius to handcraft a sound reflective of Miami’s cultural rebirth. The University of Miami Gusman Concert Hall will reverberate with that kind of musical renaissance during Orchestra Miami’s season finale at 8 p.m.,…
Chambao, an Andalusian band from Málaga, Spain, introduced the concept of “flamenco chill” to the world in 2002 when it released an album by the same name. But since then, it seems the trade winds blowing up through the Straits of Gibraltar have brought many changes to the group’s music…
When people refer to Brazil as a land of endless rhythms and melodies, what comes to mind isn’t usually a wacky mix of grunge, metal, booty bass, and funk. But Brazilians are an eclectic folk. So it’s not surprising that in 2002, Bonde do Rolê, the nation’s latest youth sensation…
“Once upon a time in a French city called Lyon, some young people decided to rule the world with the best weapon, which was music,” David Baruchel — vocalist, guitarist, and founder of the 10-piece band Babylon Circus — says by phone from France. He chuckles at his own theatrical…
Maybe you never recognized the marvels of the flute ’cause back in eighth grade you had to puff out the Smurfs theme song in marching band. That’ll all change when award-winning Cuban flutist Nestor Torres unfurls a sweet mix of rumba-symphonic compositions. Torres, who won a Latin Grammy for his…
Beach Food Market clerk Pratap Chowdhury spends a lot of time focusing on South Beach diplomacy efforts. He practices basic Spanish, learns customers’ names, and reaches out with a handshake or fist bop deemed appropriate for each patron’s apparent nationality or culture. As such, New Times decided to offer our…
Will you recognize me?” Argentine singer and part-time Miami resident Nito Mestre asks New Times during a phone conversation to set up a face-to-face interview. It seems like an odd question. How could we not know him? He is, after all, one of rock en español’s earliest pioneers, and this…
Your stomach grumbles as the office clock ticks slowly toward lunch hour. A co-worker is oblivious to the racket made by her speakerphone, and her fave totally-Eighties radio station has played Madonna so many times you feel your mind will go straight over the borderline. At your wit’s end, you…
Frustrated by the anticlimactic feeling you get when Wynwood and the Design District lower the curtain on the cultural stimuli of their monthly early-evening art walks? Saddened by the fact that the only time the ever-up-and-coming areas get decent foot traffic is once every four weeks, if that? Tonight you…
