R.L. Burnside Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down Fat Possum Back in the late Sixties, Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess, made some of the most jive-ass albums in the blues lexicon. The young Marshall paired the label’s greatest artists, among them Muddy Waters, Howlin’…
Hi. It’s Keith Sweat. Remember me? Didn’t think so. Well, just to help you out, track number one on my new CD, Didn’t See Me Coming, is a little reminder of all my hits over the past ten years. I know, I know, a little self-indulgent. Okay, maybe a little…
Trinidadian-born R&B singer Trini did a double take a few months ago at the 183rd Street Flea Market. Suddenly the 23-year-old Miami resident realized that the sexy woman in a black tank top and cowboy hat staring out at her from a poster tacked up at a record booth was…
The club in the photograph is filled with laughing Taiwanese, their eyes riveted on the Latina woman with the microphone dancing on the tiny stage, dressed in a gold minidress with black boots. Jessi James Campo is on tour in Taipei, teaching an eager audience how to dance merengue. The…
Many years later, as she sat facing the interviewer, singer Laura Pausini was to remember those distant afternoons when her father took her to discover her voice. At that time her native town of Bologna, built centuries ago in the north of Italy, hosted singing competitions at festivals and in…
Ms. Badu is back with another soundtrack to live by. Full of sublime beauty and profound sorrow, Mama’s Gun seeps straight from your stereo into your soul. Forget about your silicone so-called divas; Badu’s blues prove the real thing is righteous (even if, as she sings on “Cleva,” her luv-yaself-sista…
Venezuelan jazz troubadour Maria Rivas’s tribute to coffee, Café Negrito, could easily be a featured item at Starbucks — and not simply because java serves as the unifying lyrical theme for this collection of contemporary, classic, and traditional Latin songs. Even more to the point, this highly crafted world-beat fusion…
So let’s say the missing piece to your perfect record collection is the essential Ska Boo-Da-Ba by the Skatalites, an original Top Deck issue. Or let’s say your triple-LP Grounation, by Count Ossie and his Mystic Revealers of Rastafari, met its end in that unfortunate bong incident. Or maybe the…
Don’t call the Curious Hair classic rock. Don’t call them a jam band. In fact if you’re a major record label, don’t call them at all. As far as frontman Jeff Rollason is concerned, the industry can kiss his white ass. “It’s not the music business,” he contends. “It’s the…
Al Galvez has a plan. The leader of Miami’s dreamy acoustic trio A Kite Is a Victim not only resides at the center of his own little music-business ecosystem, he also has managed to tap into the nationwide network of the indie-rock cognoscenti. He has made friends, influenced people, and…
All the funky new performance spaces in Little Havana dressed in tatters on Friday, December 15, to honor Saint Lazaro, otherwise known as Babalu Aye, the Afro-Cuban orisha of plague and healing. At El Hueco, the makeshift theater inside Ozone Video on SW Seventeenth Avenue, two empty chairs sat ominously…
Ornette Coleman is the kind of artist trad-jazz idiots like Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and the editors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz love to hate. Since his foundation-shattering debut in 1958 with the aptly named Something Else!!!!, the saxophone genius has scorched a singular path through modern jazz; he’s…
Various ArtistsCalypso Awakening Smithsonian Folkways In his notes to Trinidad Carnival Roots, musicologist J.D. Elder calls calypso “undoubtedly the national song of Trinidad and Tobago.” Today that “national song” has all but gone the way of its nineteenth-century predecessor, kalenda. A collection of 1962 field recordings by Alan Lomax, Carnival…
Helen had a happy thought. Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that…
Clinging to a busy stretch of U.S. 1 just south of Red Road, Fox’s Sherron Inn is a one-for-the-road roadhouse, a nightcap paradise. Little flashing bulbs beckon to me as soon as I walk through the door, leading me to the jukebox: a shapely late-Sixties model carved out of steel…
The most anticipated album in years from any reggae artist, Baby Cham’s first solo LP, Wow … the Story, has been six years in the making. Don’t mistake the double CD as a vote of overconfidence, though; this collection showcases the careful collaboration between the DJ born Dameon Becket and…
Arhoolie-label founder Chris Strachwitz spent 40 years combing the nation in search of idiosyncratic ethnic music. His travels are traced in the five-CD set, The Journey of Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection: 1960-2000. Strachwitz was attracted to songs lit with an earthy honesty that commercial music just can’t…
If you take good care of your bird, it can fight a very long time,” says a swarthy expert on cockfighting in the 1973 documentary Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa). Introducing the world to the now legendary Fania All-Stars, the film intercuts concert footage of that monster salsa band with…
Topping 110 degrees in the summertime, Maracaibo has the highest average temperature in the hemisphere. Indoors, however, the oil-rich industrial city in northwestern Venezuela is one of the coldest places on Earth. Matrons draped in furs overcompensate for the heat with air-conditioner settings that would chill a polar bear. This…
In April 1998 Issac Delgado made musical history, playing Club Onyx as the first national of the socialist state of Cuba to give a live concert in Miami-Dade County. A small group of protesters shouted at the 2000 concertgoers that night, but the show went on without incident. Looking back…
Whenever Tony Thrown makes his way to Lincoln Road, he takes the back alleys that run behind the tourist boulevard. He emerges into the light at Pennsylvania Avenue, an old refrigerator shelf stacked on his head like an oversize hat ready to be knocked off by the next puff of…
At the Van Dyke Café on a rainy Wednesday night, a tall blond with an American accent is singing in Portuguese to a crowd of couples sipping wine and chatting softly. As her hips sway slightly and her feet trace out samba steps on the stage, Heather Davis sings “Tristeza,”…
