Bruce Springsteen spent most of the Nineties in an artistic haze. Die-hard fans kept hoping for a return to past greatness after he eliminated the E Street Band and went into a recording tailspin, but it’s safe to bet that not one of those fans would call any album after…
To be alive today, fifteen years after Rata Blanca first tasted fame in mid-Eighties Argentina by playing traditional hard rock and a variation of melodic heavy metal, is a miracle. Walter Giardino, the band’s leader, guitarist, and main songwriter, says that to be able to release a new album, and…
After a week twelve hundred miles away from Miami, it’s time to gather the senses and return to the neon lights and glow stick swirls of Vice Land. A quick little turn in the Big Apple really revitalizes a clubber’s love for, shall we say, the little coconut. But the…
Who needs birthday candles when you’ve got an RSVP from the Radiators and Chubby “Who Stole the Hot Sauce?” Carrier? For almost a century now (okay, so we’re a decade shy), Tobacco Road has sparked up the wildest live shows in town. Not even Miami is hot enough to celebrate…
Something is missing at the Rock the Tiki Luau, the Friday-night party at the Palms Hotel. But what is it? It’s not sex appeal. There’s doorman Rich, with his model good looks, reassuring the hetero-curious that there’s no “construction-worker convention” under way out on the patio. No, packed elbow to…
Since the release in 1991 of Flight to Freedom, Arturo Sandoval’s U.S. recording debut on the GRP label, the Cuban trumpeter has given ample evidence of his indefatigable search for ways to remain true to his muse. In the little more than twelve years that have passed since his defection…
Surprise is the one reaction you don’t anticipate from an Eliades Ochoa album. Admiration, yes. But you don’t expect the unexpected. If anything the master of the Cuban country son usually errs on the side of tradition, as on 1999’s enjoyable yet slightly stiff Sublime Ilusion. But Estoy Como Nunca…
For six years, Songwriters in the Round existed as a kind of Camelot of the Miami music scene. For a time, the monthly event was an enlightened industry gathering, a benevolent amateur opportunity, and a place where Miami’s cultural diversity came together in harmony, quite literally, to create many of…
For such an effective purveyor of paranoia, Your Enemies Friends singer/guitarist Ronnie Washburn is a sunny-side-of-the-street kinda guy. “It’s amazing that we’ve managed to accomplish everything we have on just a six-song EP,” he beams. Sure enough, critics have lauded generous praise upon Your Enemies Friends’ brand of quirky-yet-accessible, muscular-yet-danceable…
By the time MTV Latin America aired Los Prisioneros’ (The Prisoners) video “We Are South American Rockers” — the first video to roll when the network hit the air nine years ago — the Chilean rock band that released four studio albums between 1984 and 1990 was already dead. But…
If you don’t know Teddy Pendergrass by now, you will never, never, never know soul at its most sensual. After all, it was Pendergrass — a Philadelphia native who grew up singing the Lord’s praises and was an ordained minister by the age of ten — who as much as…
Despite the seemingly endless waves of exiled South American rock fanatics washing into Miami in recent years, most Latin rock festivals in town have been flops. Even the 1999 and 2000 Florida stops of the fully beer-sponsorship-funded Watcha tour came up empty despite boasting such big Latin alternative names as…
“Gimme the Light” has become a solid radio anthem for dancehall DJ Sean Paul Henriques, commonly known as Sean Paul. In Jamaica, it isn’t color or racial heritage that sets people apart; it’s class. Paul, lucky enough to be born into an uptown family as the son of an esteemed…
Astute indie listeners with ears to the ground have been coming up to call Rilo Kiley the best new American band of the year. A reputation — including a habit of stealing shows — is ever-growing. Music journalists, having dragged their sprezzatura out to analyze the Breeders, Superchunk, or Weezer,…
Any fan of music, be it hip-hop, jazz, downtempo electronica, or R&B, will find Mark Farina’s latest Mushroom Jazz compilation a successful modern-day fusion. The preternatural DJ who’s made his name on the looped-out frames of San Francisco and Chicago house continues the trend of cutup artists sampling a more…
Nearly 25 years ago Gilberto Gil hit big in Brazil with a Portuguese version of Bob Marley’s anthem “No Woman No Cry.” Now the Brazilian legend pays tribute to the Jamaican legend once again, this time with an entire album honoring the king of reggae. In Brazil, Bob Marley and…
Miles Davis’s electric period — roughly from 1969 until 1975 and then from 1981 to his death in 1991 — hasn’t received the kindest treatment from the jazz cognoscenti. Ken Burns’s lavish PBS documentary Jazz roundly dismissed Miles’s later years, while Wynton Marsalis and others have criticized Davis’s electric music…
All Hallow’s Eve isn’t exactly a Clubbed family tradition. Mom wasn’t the Grinch who stole it or anything, but as kids we never had much holiday spirit. “You ain’t gonna be puttin’ on no mask and runnin’ ’round like a fool. That’s for Satan,” she’d say. “Trick me and I’ll…
Not so long ago, the fate of Cuban salsa superstar Manolín depended on the whims of a dictator and the policies of the INS. Would he stay? Would he go? Now, permanently settled in Miami, the only question that matters is, will he sell? Certainly if anyone has the cure…
The invitation to Select magazine’s launch party the other week read: “Pronouncements of the end of Miami Beach are nothing new.” Not greatly exaggerated, mind you, just not new. Hoping this is just the first of all the season’s parties, hoteliers Eric Gabriel and Caroline Carrara (Aqua and Hotel Leon)…
Snipers, impending war, and an economy that still has indigestion from eating dot-coms. But to listen to penthouse rappers like Busta Rhymes and P. Diddy telling us to “Pass the Courvoisier,” you’d think everyone is safe, rich, and happy, just like Diddy himself, “P. D-I-D-D-Y” in case you couldn’t spell…
Showtime at Mango’s on Ocean Drive. A few moments before six on a Thursday evening, the reggae band once known as Innasense is milling about the postage-stamp stage — checking gear, tweaking instruments, scanning the small happy-hour crowd for babes. 4:20 singer/keyboardist Jimi Dred sits on the side of the…
