Music

I can’t stand the rain, and I still have jet lag from my belly-dancing trip to Egypt, but I want to check out Zo’s Summer Groove block party on a soggy Sunday last month. Looking for the press room in the tunnel beneath the American Airlines Arena, I get lost…

There are two ways to tell the story of Cristian Castro. The first is the story of the artist who was born in December 1974 to Latin television luminary Veronica Castro, inheriting her penetrating eyes and a voice experts deem one of the most powerful in the world. This is…

At Ozzfest this year a female fan showed her appreciation for the return of Nonpoint by letting the rap-metal band’s frontman Elias Soriano rub his face against her chest. As the former Fort Lauderdale resident buried his head in the groupie’s mammaries, his long black dreads flapped in the humid…

We come alive after our nine-to-five.” That is the creed of moneyman Mel Cheren and impresario Michael Brodi, the nightlife visionaries who in the late Seventies opened what may be the most heralded club in history. “We come alive after our nine-to-five” was the mantra of New York City’s Paradise…

Matti Bower picked an awkward moment to make her pitch. Eager to get out the word about Music Fest Miami, a Labor Day weekend event designed to celebrate the cultural diversity of Miami-Dade County, the Miami Beach city commissioner joined WQBA-AM (1140) radio commentator Ninoska Perez Castellon on her show…

This Friday Level will open its doors for a night benefiting Jungle Habitat, and who better to spin the event that will save the orangutan than the dance remix duo that has been saving divas in the club wilderness: Thunderpuss. The Billboard-topping team of DJs Chris Cox and Barry Harris…

When Juan Esteban Aristizabal woke up on July 12, he was not a rock star. By the time he went to bed that Tuesday night, he was. “It’s completely absurd,” says the 27-year old called Juanes, while a television camera caresses his face, a newspaper reporter scribbles notes, and a…

With the salsa market saturated in the Seventies by the ever-multiplying Fania All-Stars and their imitators in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Bronx, “romantic” or “erotic” salsa emerged in the mid-Eighties to stimulate exhausted fans. Gone was mean street talk of prostitutes and prison raps improvised over pounding percussion…

Hunting autographs at CB Smith Park in Opa-locka, neighborhood kids hurry past the unguarded gate backstage where hip-hop act Iconz waits to perform. With their debut album Street Money, Volume 1 approaching gold, the performers headline the ninth annual Janet’s Youth Talent Showcase, sponsored by Jah-Net’s Jamaican Cuisine, and return…

The sense of imminent doom began around 7:15 p.m. The doors of Little Havana’s Manuel Artime Performing Arts Center were supposed to open at 7:30 p.m. for an 8:00 show, but they were wide open fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. The signs were ominous. No line snaked out the door,…

Against the shadow of a day’s stubble, a half-inch of gravity-defying ash hangs from a wrinkled Marlboro at the corner of the DJ’s mouth. A look of intense concentration crosses the face of DJ Corrado Bay (Corrado Bailone) as he studies his turntables and threads a new beat into the…

The British are coming. And this time they’re cooking. Every so often our U.K. cousins get bored with the fog and rain and pot pies and decide to bake in the sunny American pantry. And so comes Gods Kitchen, landing on Miami’s shores for a residency at Shadow Lounge the…

To most of us, “weird sounds from Boca Raton” means diamonds caught in a disposal or wheezing geriatrics struggling with groceries. And that stereotype is unlikely to change soon. Finding something edgy and hip in this subculturally deprived suburb is about as likely as finding bean sprouts on a Big…

Three nights in Miami in the heat of June. Three DJs descend on clubland. Paul Van Dyk, David Waxman, and Timo Maas represent the history of trance, spinning out the vibe’s chronology on their turntables. Police cordon off sections of NE Eleventh Street, and traffic snarls to a stoplight standstill…

When I set up a phone interview with Mark Eitzel, the last thing I expected to hear were Britney Spears jokes. The singer-songwriter’s work with American Music Club and on subsequent solo albums suggests a despondent, dreary soul. Although underground-music mavens have anointed him one of the nation’s greatest living…

In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain imagined an abrasive New Englander transforming Medieval England into a precursor of the nineteenth-century United States, complete with the plagues of a stock market, baseball leagues, and telephones. Radio Tarifa gave me an equally audacious thought: What if, instead of…

The Invisible Band, the highly anticipated album from British pop stars Travis, comes out a week after the even-more-anticipated Radiohead album. Travis continues to sound like old Radiohead: accessible and friendly. Meanwhile Radiohead continues to sound like new Radiohead: lush, layered, and dark. So this is a win-win situation. Those…

In the photograph the merengueros are decked out in Afros and bell-bottoms, Seventies-style. In the middle of the salsa boom taking place in New York, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, Milly y los Vecinos (Milly and the Neighbors) was the first group to bring merengue to the growing Dominican community in…

On a rainy night in late January, three mostly female bands held a “Women in Salsa” summit at a packed La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California. Headlined by Texas transplant Marina Garza and her Orquesta D’Soul, the event was an attempt to raise much-needed recording funds for the group’s…

Whirlaway takes the stage in a wash of loud guitar atmospherics and a flash of psychedelic lighting effects. Singer Adam Rosenberg takes center stage, bathed in the glow of a red light that spills out to cover the rest of the group. A projection of multicolored bubbles appears to melt…