As South Beach slowly filled with New Year’s Eve revelers looking to ring in the millennium underneath a glitter ball, a far more curious spectacle was unfolding deep within the Everglades swamp. There, on a swath of semidry land inside the Seminole Indian Reservation, nearly 80,000 folks from across America…
Live blues seems rather common in South Florida clubs. Blues on the radio is another story. Jazz DJs such as WDNA’s Frank Consola, WLRN’s Len Pace, and WTMI’s China Valles occasionally spin the blues, but full shows are sparse. WDNA’s weekly program Portraits in Blue is a bright star in…
Saturday night, eyes bleary, rain slapping hard on your car. You turn up your radio to hear her silky narration, the aural equivalent of hot chocolate during a snowstorm. Although Fields, who studied broadcasting and journalism in college, makes her living as an Associated Press reporter, she confesses, “Radio was…
Many a fan of local Latin pop band Rock’n Son have heard tunes in the group’s repertoire played by other musicians. That’s because the band’s keyboardist and writer, Raul del Sol, still has a soft spot for songs he has peddled to other artists. During Rock’n Son’s live sets, which…
Few local bands were ever more misunderstood, or more hated in certain quarters, than Harry Pussy, whose squalling feedback-drenched performances managed to clear rooms across Miami for a memorable chunk of the mid-Nineties. The more this no-wave trio was feted elsewhere — saluted onstage by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, spotlighted by…
In 1979 Victor Manuel Casanova left Peru with a group of musicians for a tour of the United States that never ended. Over the past twenty years, this Afro-Peruvian singer, guitarist, and caja or “box” player, has performed for Miami’s ever-growing Peruvian population. A petite man with dark skin and…
Some say the Bahamians built Miami. Early immigrants, they laid down the first roads and then laid out the towels and sheets for the area’s first tourists. The drums and horns of Bahamian junkanoo music certainly have marched willy-nilly through the Miami soundscape since the beginning of the Twentieth Century…
Principal singer/songwriter Todd Thompson and his bandmates guitarist Sean Edelson, drummer Ari Schantz, and bassist Brad Berman maintain a busy schedule performing their insightful tunes, an array of pleasant rock melodies combined with deft lyric writing. A favorite among South Florida’s live-music fans, the foursome emerged victorious against several other…
It was 1997 and the lawn around the cosmic house of rock was shaggy and rife with worn-out musical monikers. But bassist and songwriter Chris DeAngelis (formerly of The No, Raw B. Jae and The Liquid Funk, and The Whistling Tin Heads) was determined to find a fresh one for…
How the planet’s greatest living Latin-jazz flutist made it in and out of town with barely a passing notice is one of those mysteries peculiar to South Florida. Indeed late this past winter Dave Valentin, woodwind-player extraordinaire, ascended the stage of Miami Beach’s Van Dyke Café for two nights of…
Miami: heat, entropy, and the concomitant disintegration of form. We love it. Want to love it more? Try a little dramatic tension. Have some bona fide sonic structure with your sweltering decomposition, and meet the people who can give it to you. For the steamy drive home, tune in to…
The shrill whistle, the rumble of the engine rolling down the tracks. It’s 8:00 on a Sunday night. Ted Grossman takes his usual seat as conductor of the Night Train on WLRN. As he has every week for 25 years, Grossman leads a four-hour journey through his deep collection of…
Whether playing a Gershwin song or Madonna’s latest hit, pianist and singer Nathaniel Reed is always in tune with his audience. Perched atop the one-foot-high stage at the Piccadilly, Reed’s baby grand piano faces the restaurant’s main entrance. The entertainer, who can be heard weeknights from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m.,…
Turntablist extraordinaire and reigning DMC champ DJ Craze dropped by the home studio of Edgar Farinas (a.k.a. Push Button Objects). The end result is this abstract meeting of the hip-hop minds: an odd blend of off-kilter beats suffused in a crunchy timbre that attains a head-nodding forward motion almost in…
“I gave you Quaaludes/I held your cock/We spoke in diphthongs/ Clubnite!” Update the drug of choice in this bitter early Eighties anthem from West Palm Beach punkettes Sheer Smegma, and it’s clear some things haven’t changed in South Florida’s nightclub scene. “Clubnite” is just one of dozens of singles released…
Whatever you do, don’t refer to saxophonist Keshavan Maslak as an avant-garde musician. “You know what an avant-garde musician is?” scoffs Maslak. “It’s somebody who’s starving!” That may be the reason Maslak finally bailed on his adopted home of New York City in 1986 — despite a résumé of playing…
The fallen in search of a strong dose of that old-time religion should skedaddle posthaste to a particular stretch of strip mall in Hialeah. It’s there on most Saturday afternoons, near the corner of East Tenth Avenue and NW 62nd Street, outside the Flamingo Plaza, that you’ll find James Kendrick…
Latin rock veteran Pepe Alva and his band Alma Raymi (“soul celebration” in Quechuan) spent much of the past year in the studio, working on the follow-up album to 1997’s Pa’ Mostrarte Mi Amor (MATT Entertainment). With a new disc tentatively titled Comprometida (Engaged), Alva makes a bid for the…
Get ready for a little Cuban chemistry with Grupo Nostalgia. The Latin jam ensemble that won New Times’s award for Best Latin Band in 1996 and 1998 has completely transformed itself. The nucleus remains bassist and band director Omar Hernandez. Circling around him for the past few years have been…
One by one 50 musical acts — that’s right, more than 4 dozen — alighted Tobacco Road’s upstairs stage from 9:30 p.m. until past 3:30 a.m. for this starry-eyed, six-hour extravaganza. The show’s loving creator was Jeff Rollason, musical son of former Miami City Manager Frank Rollason. Once known as…
Musicians around town often complain that Miami’s reputation as little more than an international playground makes it difficult for them to play styles that depart from the tourist-oriented mainstream. It’s certainly true in the local jazz scene, a genre that has a tough time, commercially speaking, almost anywhere in America…
With WDNA-FM’s Steve Radzi laying his Reggae Beat to rest after nearly twenty years, the Caribbean radio crown safely belongs to Clint O’Neil, who has provided the tropical soundtrack of choice for night owls since 1979. Aside from those gravel-voiced Bob Marley-show IDs (recorded back in the late Seventies, when…
