Over the past two years the Funk Jazz Lounge has hosted numerous soul singers of varying quality, from relative unknowns to burgeoning stars like Dwele. But this week’s showcase should be a keeper: Maya Azucena is known for putting on exciting, dynamic performances, thanks to a promising self-released CD, Maya…
As the year of crunk draws to a close, it’s amazing to consider how a music that sounds so provincial and Southern has penetrated popular consciousness. Lil’ Jon and the Eastside Boys are now certifiable pop stars, and David Banner’s Mississippi: The Album has made him a critic’s darling of…
Last November 22, Ben “Wrekonize” Miller stood triumphant inside a ring, the survivor and winner of MTV’s second MC Battle. As Roc-A-Fella CEO Dame Dash and rappers Freeway and Memphis Bleek ostensibly congratulated him on his new recording contract with Roc-A-Fella Records, a scantily clad hostess gave him a large…
At one point on her new album This Is Not a Test, Missy Elliott defines her style as “old-school rap to old-school R&B.” That’s pretty accurate. Back in the Eighties, when George Clinton and Roger Troutman ramped up their funk and disco with synthesizer machines and vocoder, then cut down…
Several evenings ago, P.M. and I stood in the lobby of an enormous luxury apartment building just outside downtown Miami as he talked to me about three different major labels he was currently in discussions with over a recording contract. Standing next to us by the elevator was a middle-age…
These days, any band who ventures into postrock territory is bound to get compared with Mogwai, which is akin to every trip-hop/downtempo/chillout act being written off as a DJ Shadow knockoff. Although Canadian quintet Do Make Say Think shares its Scottish predecessors’ knack for stop-start commotion, the details in Winter…
We are the robots: The title Electro Dziska, according to Venezuelan-American director Iris Cegarra, doesn’t really mean anything beyond attempting to define a distinctly Miami experience. “It basically encompasses going to a disco or a club … experiencing electro in all of its forms,” she explains via phone from New…
On any given night in Miami, you can find a member of the collective known as Deep House Movement www.dhmonline.net spinning records at a restaurant or nightclub. Every night one or more of the group — Edwin Adams, Stephen Flynn, and Omar Suardy — can be found at Touch restaurant…
Across the nation, countless activist groups have designated Miami as a target for direct action, a place to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement scheduled to be negotiated by trade ministers from 34 countries. If all goes according to plan for them, the streets of downtown Miami…
It’s not easy getting into Jay-Z’s recording home at Bassline Studios, tucked away on West 26th Street in Manhattan. I have to sneak in behind a woman walking into the building, take an elevator to the eighth floor, then knock on a pair of glass doors before a security guard…
It was 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday at M-80, the tragically hip Design District boutique, when Phoenecia’s Josh Kay and Romulo del Castillo finally stepped behind a makeshift stage — actually, the store counter — to perform their set. Hours earlier M-80 was bustling with life, powered by fashionistas, music…
Some of My Best Friends Are DJs, the second album by Canadian DJ Kid Koala, is cut from the same cloth as his earlier records, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the Scratchcratchratchatch mixtape (later released as the Scratchappyland EP). But there’s no overarching concept this time around, just a series of…
Does Robert Henke make repetitious machine music? Yes, he deals with electronic sounds, compiling them into cold instrumental landscapes. In some ways his fifth album under the Monolake name, Momentum, sounds like a gazillion other minimal techno records you may have (been unfortunate enough to have) heard: all bleeps and…
During the Nineties, British DJ/producer LTJ Bukem seemed to take the more famous Goldie and Roni Size’s penchant for watery, atmospheric drum and bass to the extreme; on the Logical Progression compilation his music was seemingly defined by organic, jazz-fusion escapades, not the lightly syncopated drums that made it so…
Jaylib promises to be a dream collaboration between two of the hottest producers in hip-hop, Jay Dee (formerly of Slum Village) and Madlib (Lootpack, Quasimoto). But the resulting Champion Sound is slightly more earthbound, as each tries to outdo the other with numbskull raps about players and hoes. It gets…
Beth Gibbons’s first album since her last Portishead project is both agonizingly beautiful and uncomfortably intense, a pairing with Paul “Rustin Man” Webb (formerly of Talk Talk) that dives headfirst into her vocal eccentricities. At various times she coos soft, comforting lullabies (“Sand River”); strains her voice into a thin…
It’s yet another sweltering fall day on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, yet Billy Paul Williams stays cool as a cucumber, seemingly unfazed by the constant, sticky heat. The 37-year-old musician is dressed in typical SoBe gear — shorts, a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and a Champion Athletic…
When Space 34 announced on October 2 that it was shutting its doors with an October 11 “closing party,” two months after a highly publicized drug raid by the Drug Enforcement Administration that netted eleven arrests, all you could hear for days was the churning of the rumor mill. Some…
Q and Not U specializes in the kind of ultra-funky, super-abrasive rock (or, as Spin magazine would erroneously label it, “emo”) that every self-respecting postpunk loves. First forming in Washington, D.C., in 1998, the trio has released two albums for the legendary Dischord Records. Their most recent, Different Damage, bristles…
It was a Friday afternoon on August 7, the second to last day of the Billboard R&B and Hip-Hop Conference Awards, and Little Brother — Phonte, Big Pooh, and producer Ninth Wonder — had already grown tired of the networking and the schmoozing that characterized the week-long event. They had…
Gang Starr is something of an institution, the last remaining link to the glorious, so-called “golden age of hip-hop” in the late Eighties. Unlike their peers who have been forced to record for independents and chase after a gradually shrinking audience, Guru (Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal) and DJ Premier are…
On a balmy June evening, Duece Poppi opens the door to his Hollywood apartment dressed in a college-patterned Kangol fisherman’s hat, white T-shirt, jean shorts, and tennis shoes with no socks. More important than his casual clothes is the way he wears them; he looks cool and relaxed, luxuriating in…
