It was one of the stranger sights of late: On an early Tuesday evening, about 50 people were enthusiastically gathered in the middle of Spec’s record shop on South Beach. They weren’t shopping; they were staring. And the performer who transfixed them wasn’t singing or playing a guitar. In fact…
Over the past year, makeshift venues from Señor Frog’s to Bennigan’s have been pushing the tables against the walls and squeezing in stages to feed our city’s hunger for live music. Home to the ever-shifting roster of musicians who make up Grupo Nostalgia, the swanky nightclub Café Nostalgia has done…
You could literally see the changing of the cultural guard as the Orishas whipped through their set of rumba-steeped rap at Starfish this past November. In front of the stage was a sweaty mass of Cuban-American teens and twentysomethings, singing along with every verse. Back at the bar was a…
Last year Liliana Rodriguez’s show (7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Wednesday) took honors for Best Latin Radio Program. This year the show breaks out of the barrio to take the prize for Best Rock Radio Program, period. This is a plea to all the powerful commercial stations across the dial: We…
Somewhere in the world tonight, the music of Philip Glass will be playing. Maybe it’s The Light, performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra this week in Hungary; or String Quartet no. 2 on Monday in Linz, Austria, by the Anton Bruckner String Quartet; or the String Quartet no. 3’s “Mishima,”…
It’s a blazingly bright afternoon in late winter, and inside the intimate Baileys Club at the Sheraton Biscayne Bay, the joint is jumping. Bebo Valdés and Israel “Cachao” Lopez, two Cuban-born octogenarian musicians starring in Calle 54, noted Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba’s loving tribute to the joys of Latin jazz,…
Dave Valentin has just walked into his Bronx apartment, arriving home after a gig in Costa Rica, to find himself fielding questions on the phone about the shows he’s done in Miami. “When was that?” asks the reporter, trying to pin down a particular concert. “When was that?” he asks…
Twice over the course of what purportedly will be his last album, Something Nasty, Luke rants against the bad press he expects the disc will get. In his parting shot he complains, “You know a lot of niggas gonna be critics and shit. A lot of these motherfuckin’ magazine niggas…
A couple of years ago, a record came out that sounded like a lost collaboration between James Brown and Fela Kuti. Bristling with off-kilter African horn harmonies and bubbling with tight syncopated funk, the Daktaris’ Soul Explosion (Desco) came simmering out of your speakers raw and unpolished with a scratchiness…
With his dual Ultra Records releases AM and PM, Miami native and Shadow Lounge resident DJ George Acosta has submitted an impressive résumé for the post of U.S. ambassador to the European kingdom of trance. A regular guest at clubs in Germany and Ibiza for the past five years, Acosta…
For Marcelino Valdes, the Cuban singer who hopes to release his debut disc on the troubled label RMM, destiny has followed two signs: patience and the musical patrimony carried in the blood of the Valdes family. His Vicentico Valdes, the unforgettable bolero singer whose music was still heard on Havana…
The members of the altrock trio Carnival Waste sit outside a local Starbucks, sipping coffee just before closing time. Cars rush by on darkened U.S. 1 as the musicians try to agree on the cover art for … A Perfect Day, their forthcoming album. The South Florida band’s frontman-keyboardist Robert…
We do this because we love it,” the Crumbs guitarist Johnny B declares over a pint of Guinness in singer-guitarist Raf Classic’s Spartan South Miami apartment. “There sure isn’t any money in it.” In this statement are enough grains of truth to brew a keg of stout. After eight years…
Over the course of three superb solo albums, a stint with the Waterboys, and celebrity associations with members of U2, Mike Scott, Kirsty MacColl, and others, Irish fiddler and accordionist Sharon Shannon has earned her share of critical kudos. Dubbed Ireland’s Number One Traditional Artist and Folk Artist of the…
The phenomenal success of Buena Vista Social Club did much to reawaken interest in Cuban music around the globe, but more remarkable was the effect the album had on the lives of its featured artists. As he approaches his 100th birthday, Compay Segundo probably is the most internationally recognizable of…
Am I the only person who almost killed herself walking down Washington Avenue during the Winter Music Conference? Didn’t anyone think 37 layers of palm cards and flyers stretching for blocks and blocks just might be a little hard to walk on? Luckily I made it to the show unharmed…
During the recent World Economic Forum in Cancún, anti-globalization activists took visiting journalists on a tour of what they called the real Cancún: the tin-roofed shantytowns that surround the resorts and nightspots that make up the postcard version of the city. The activists argued that the scrubbed-clean white plaster walls…
Barefoot dancers orbit the DJ booth at Nikki Beach Club, their legs white with sand. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, the British duo known as Basement Jaxx, plunge listeners into the wobbly bounce of “Romeo” and the g-funk-inflected swing of “Do Your Thing.” One of the songs (though not one…
“One More Time” is the ubiquitous and unsurprisingly faceless first single from Daft Punk’s sophomore album, Discovery, but it might as well be an affirmation of the band’s artistic mantra. The track, which throbs on a building 4/4 beat and horns passed down from the gods of disco, seems to…
Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the Havana-based producer behind the Afro-Cuban All Stars and the A&R man and conceptual artist of the now-legendary Buena Vista Social Club, is on the road behind his latest CD, Baila Mi Son, featuring yet another unsung Cuban singer, sonero Felix Baloy. After touring the world…
You expect a smoky room for this music. Not the cigarette swirls that surround a sultry jazz singer. Not a dry-ice machine rolling out fog to electronic dance music. I’m thinking more burnt-toast smoke, anything that might explain the sustained high-pitch alarm-tone coming through the speakers just now and piercing…
Castanets and tablas may seem an unlikely combination. But a New York City production called Nacho Nacho: Gypsy Storytelling actually combines flamenco traditions with northern Indian kathak dance styles. Samir Chatterjee, one of the foremost Indian tabla drummers in the United States, conceived and directed the project. “Flamenco has a…
