After a two-year hiatus, the members of local Latin funk fusion outfit Bacon Bits are back and shaking their funky sazón all over Miami’s alternative hot spots. But now the boys have a fuller flavor. Founding trombone player John Speck (a.k.a. Tocino) and his loyal guitarist Kevin Sanchez (a.k.a. Buffalo…
Wearing stiletto heels and a tight minidress with a wild Sixties print, Cuban cabaret singer Daya cheerfully trots out from the dimly lit table area and onto the stage of the newly relocated Café Nostalgia. She shakes her massive mane of kinky black hair and nods to the band before…
Andrea Echeverrí, organic rocking front-woman for the alternative Colombian band Los Aterciopelados, is milking the groove-mama experience for all its worth. The artist had her first baby, Milagros, three years ago, and is now stepping out with a solo album, Andrea Echeverrí, dedicated to the joys of motherhood. In typical…
During a New Times interview earlier this year (“Ugly Beautiful,” January 20), Miami-based Cuban-American rocker Rhett said his first Spanish-language album, which comes after two decades of his performing Anglo rock in three bands (Young Turk, the Butter Club, and now Rhett and the Pawn Shop Drunks), was like taking…
It began with a single stray strand of sun-streaked brown hair. At the age of nine, Veronica Milchorena — who would become a curvaceous, beautiful multimedia star as an adult — was a confused Salvadoran expatriate living with her aunt in tiny Oneida, Tennessee. “I remember this girl telling me,…
Latin Grammy-winning rocker Jorge Moreno’s new bilingual album El Segundo is cultural hodgepodge that seamlessly shifts from alternative tropical rock to British pop and touches on all points in between. The album’s first single, the brooding, lovelorn “Avión” (“Airplane”), mixes bachata with rockabilly. Elsewhere, “La Cama” (“The Bed”) spruces up…
Aina Candela might want to think about changing the name of its new weekly show at Jazid from “Cooltura” to “Trance Tuesdays.” After all, lead singer and percussionist Philbert Armenteros’s mixture of modern instrumentation and an intense flurry of traditional Cuban percussion has been known to propel his audiences into…
Tiempo libre roughly translates to “free time” in English. It’s a luxury that Jorge Gomez, pianist and director of the Cuban timba band Tiempo Libre, usually doesn’t have. Even so, he made sure to arrive fifteen minutes before a scheduled interview with New Times at the Segafredo café on Lincoln…
There’s a lot riding on singer-songwriter Javier Garcia. Super-producer Gustavo Santaolalla, who has worked with Café Tacuba and Molotov, produced the 30-year-old’s highly anticipated sophomore album, 13, and released it on his Surco imprint last month. 13 is also being distributed through major label powerhouse Universal Latino, which hopes to…
Expressing the band’s desire for widespread appeal, Locos por Juana’s long-awaited second CD, appropriately titled Música P’al Pueblo (Music for the People), begins with a medley of old LPJ favorites blasting across the airwaves every time the dial hits a new station. It’s a realistic aspiration. LPJ’s festive songs are…
It’s no wonder Brazilian singer Maria Rita is an eclectic bossa nova baby. She suckled from the breast of Brazil’s all-time greatest female singer, the late Elis Regina, and she was raised by her father, pianist/composer Cesar Camargo Mariano. Considered a South American Norah Jones, Rita’s music rocks like a…
Colombian-American pop diva Soraya is gaining momentum. El Otro Lado de Mi (The Other Side of Me), her second album since overcoming breast cancer, is more upbeat than her previous, self-titled album, a philosophically breathless effort that won a Latin Grammy last year for Best Singer-Songwriter Album. “It’s more aggressive,”…
From the first Latin funk stage at Coral Gables’s annual Sunday on the Mile jazz festival, a new generation of Hispanic musicians will boldly spin Latin rhythms into a realm of fusion where no jazz improviser has gone before. The stage hosts local favorites Spam Allstars, Xperimento, Suenalo Sound System,…
During the seventh annual Afro Roots World Music Festival, local artists will showcase Mama Africa’s life-giving reach into the community through vibrant performances. Latin funk group Buya and cumbia-fueled jam band Xperimento get into the groove on February 19 at Tobacco Road. A cappella Haitian gospel ensembles The Heavenly Brothers…
In one Miami International Film Festival documentary, The Supreme Uneasiness: Incessant Portrait of Fernando Vallejo, the titular Colombian polemic urged his young compatriots to refrain from the cruel act of reproducing in a nation infested with guerrillas, paramilitaries, soldiers, and drug traffickers. But born out of that cruelty are some…
Puerto Rican band Plena Libre isn’t boricua, it’s barbicua. Contributions to the Afro-Rican plena music were made in part by Barbadian immigrants in the Nineteenth Century, but plena is the most organic of Puerto Rico’s sounds. What sets the gregarious down-home jam of a plena apart from other tropi-Latino styles…
With Alan Hughes, chef extraordinaire and lead singer of the hard-driving band Prole, songwriting and baby-making have a lot in common. They both require some serious rocking. “Somebody who makes songs has a cosmic duty to be wise with the [words they choose]. It’s almost like human conception,” says the…
When I moved from Madrid to Miami two years ago, I was lost in a sea of poppy salsa and merengue. It was a far cry from the cosmopolitan mix of artistic expression among Spaniards and immigrants in my former, centuries-old Malasaña neighborhood (praised by Manu Chao in “Me Gustas…
Past the traffic jams on 836 West with cars blaring bachata music, and beyond the hysteria of crowded strip malls with plastic signs advertising everything from Pizza Hut and Office Depot to Cuba-bound courier services and Don Pan arepas, three members of Locos Por Juana (or, as they call themselves,…
It turns out that Venezuela’s oil-rich state of Zulia also has a wealth of musical talent. The vocally driven sextet Voz Veis has a range of octaves as broad as the state’s massive Lake Maracaibo. Originally an a cappella boy band formed seven years ago to serenade señoritas, the group…
With George W. Bush in office for another four years and Castro recovering from his fall, it seems most gringos may never know the apolitical pleasure of riding with a lover, two to a bike, along Havana’s Malecón as the waves lap against the seawall and a seductive son resounds…
Trying to get out of a bland funk? From the land of chimichurri, mojo, and mole comes the flavorful second annual Latin Funk Music Festival, which should get your chops drooling and your cola wagging. Take a hit of Grammy-nominated Afro-Cuban soul group Yerba Buena, and let Suenalo wash it…
