This welcoming second-floor rabbit warren of rooms located in the heart of downtown Miami was ahead of the pack in the area’s renaissance. In fact it’s still way ahead of everyone else. Opened in the late Nineties by David Haskin, the Wallflower was strictly art based at first, with the…
Forget everything you’ve heard about Lynyrd Skynyrd’s snarling Floridian frontman dying in a fiery 1977 plane crash. He’s alive and well, just as pissed off as ever about the sorely maligned Southern Man, and presently heading up local outfit the Holy Rollin’ Hellfires. That Dixie-steeped flavor of old is still…
Music by the light of the moon — an intoxicating combination. Certainly something that’s gone on forever and a day. But on a regular basis in Miami? Apparently not. That is until 1995, when Barnacle State Historic Site park manager Terry Coulliette and friends dreamed up the idea for the…
The usual kudos go to perennial winner Fusión Latina at WDNA-FM (88.9), but for those whose tastes are not exclusively tropical, the University of Miami’s Invasión Latina with Liliana Rodriguez is the only outlet in town for Latin alternative music. The vibe is very late-night-in-the-dormitory, with Liliana laying out groovy…
As hip-hop continues down its path toward world domination, cash registers ringing loudly all the way, it seems in increasing danger of calcifying. For more and more up-and-coming rappers, pursuing their art often appears simply to be a matter of choosing a role: Gangsta thug? Macked-out pimp? Or smooth balladeer?…
There’s an easy way to weed out the musical heavyweights from the merely mediocre. Regular songwriters craft works about love, loss, and universal experiences. Boring. True visionaries turn their attention to more pressing matters: their own trials in the spotlight. Witness the navel-gazing tunes of Van Morrison (“The Story of…
Gaby Gabriel is best known as the long-time leader of the house orchestra at the Fontainebleau Hilton’s Club Tropigala on Miami Beach. The exuberant Cuba-born singer/percussionist has developed a musical repertoire to match the diversity of his audiences, which range from Latin-American tourists to sunbirds and celebrities. But Gabriel hasn’t…
If ever an album title seemed appropriate, it’s Ischemic Strokes, the moniker Phoenecia slapped on its most recent collection, which gathered up kindred souls recording for their own Schematic label and placed them alongside the duo’s own skittering, frazzled creations. After all, an ischemic stroke — a sudden, sharp cutoff…
Drawing from a stock of blues standards, William “Max” Maxwell lends Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road a touch of cultural credibility. Many the fashion-savvy beachcomber ignores this “old school” busker while he haunts the stretch between Lenox Avenue and Alton Road. Sitting on a milk crate and thumping away on his…
Mike Gerber works the piano as if he had begun playing in the womb. Actually he took to the instrument when he was just two and a half years old. Nearly 50 years later, the keyboardist (blind since birth) never ceases to wow audiences when he attacks the ivories. After…
Face it, this is a recording-company town. When bands sit down to play, they’re more likely to be laying tracks for a CD or mugging for a television camera than working a late-night crowd. Live music is less likely to waft through smoke-filled rooms in Miami than it is to…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get ahold of me….” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice goes…
A South Florida native who rocks, singer/songwriter DeNisco has been playing guitar since childhood and performing professionally for thirteen years. Now living in Dania Beach, she’s a regular on Miami-Dade stages. Riding the wake of her first CD, 1995’s On My Way (which garnered two Billboard songwriting awards for the…
People in Buenos Aires protest that the world never gives Argentines credit for their inventions: the radio, the bus, the ballpoint pen. Charly Alberti, retired drummer of South American pop phenomenon Soda Stereo, has a hi-tech version of an old complaint. He claims the Swiss watch company Swatch ripped off…
In the case of MC Brother J.C. Crawford, it was a legendary 1968 Halloween night call to arms at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom that launched both his and one particular garage band’s meteoric rise to cult stardom. “Brothers and sisters!” Crawford extolled, his invocation already set to a fevered pitch. “I…
Blackalicious doesn’t pay lip service to the false gods of commerce, name-drop hot clothing labels, seek celebrity endorsements, or pray fervently for a solid-gold single to drop from the sky and deliver them from obscurity. The Bay Area duo, composed of lyricist Gift of Gab and producer Chief Xcel, have…
The fusing of ancient Eastern mysticisms with the Western muscle of modern technology, while a noble concept, is one rarely accomplished to a satisfying artistic effect. For example bhangra, originating in the farms of the Punjab in the Indian subcontinent, marries its modern mutation of chirpy, bouncy melodies favored in…
Just call Wynton Marsalis the Terminator. No, he’s not replacing strongman-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a homicidal cyborg in yet another sequel to the sci-fi action-adventure flick. But to some the 38-year-old Marsalis — virtuoso trumpet player, composer, teacher, band leader, and ardent traditionalist — is a murderer. He is killing…
“Percussion is one aspect of musical culture that needs to be highlighted,” insists Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, on the phone from his Peoria, Illinois, hotel room only minutes after arriving there from a sold-out stop on his current Masters of Percussion tour, an electrifying company of Indian percussionists that…
Most music that reaches us from the Balkans is emotionally of a piece with the area’s tragic history. But Gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia proves on Baro Biao, World Wide Wedding that Romanian music also can be deliriously celebratory. Well equipped to make momentous music for equally momentous occasions, the…
There’s something gracefully modest about the ten-year career of Kelly Hogan, a postpunk diva from Atlanta whose mastery of songcraft is rivaled only by her artistic range as a writer and interpreter. Her work in the early Nineties with the Jody Grind balanced rootsy traditionalism with altrock irreverence, and she…
In the white-tile living room of his sparsely furnished two-story house in Kendall, Roberto Martino is watching a video of his band, T-Vice, playing at Carnival 2000 last March in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A mass of black bodies clad in yellow T-Vice T-shirts moves from left to right across the big…
