“I’m moving to Europe because I want to be close to Africa,” says pianist Omar Sosa over the phone from a Paris hotel room. The Cuban-born Sosa is in the midst of a European tour supporting Inside, his latest CD on Ota Records, and he’s talking about his recent move…
Frank Emilio Ancestral Reflections (Metro Blue/Blue Note) While Cuban pianist Frank Emilio hasn’t benefited so far from the wave of international adulation that has swept other Cuban musicians, particularly pianists, into the limelight over the past few years, he’s no less an integral part of the island’s musical history than…
The club scene in South Florida flaky? Venues come and go quicker than a riptide. Over the next two weeks there will be a glut of new night spots opening, and most likely a good number will get sucked out to sea. First off don’t expect to attend the much…
The sorry fate of vanguard voices in American jazz is having their homeland turn its back on them. All too often jazz masters are ignored at home while being feted abroad. Unable to make a living in the States, they are forced to travel to Europe or Japan to find…
A critic once called composer John Adams the Hamlet of contemporary classical music, accusing him of not being able to make up his mind and settle on a specific musical style. It is a charge with which the Berkeley-based Adams is all too familiar. “Recently,” he explains, “I read another…
Even before its release earlier this year, George Jones’s Cold Hard Truth already was the most hugely hyped album of the honky-tonk hero’s four-decade career, for two reasons: an alcohol-induced auto crash that damn near killed him, which would have made the set his last collection of new studio recordings;…
Beck Golden Feelings (Sonic Enemy) Midnite Vultures (DGC) While the hype already has begun on Midnite Vultures, Beck’s new major-label effort, understanding Los Angeles’s premier boho boychild-cum-mack-daddy is sharpened considerably by listening to a less high-profile release, the concurrent CD reissue of Golden Feelings. (If you’d like to score a…
Beck Golden Feelings (Sonic Enemy) Midnite Vultures (DGC) While the hype already has begun on Midnite Vultures, Beck’s new major-label effort, understanding Los Angeles’s premier boho boychild-cum-mack-daddy is sharpened considerably by listening to a less high-profile release, the concurrent CD reissue of Golden Feelings. (If you’d like to score a…
Egads! The Misfits and Gwar on a double bill. Sounds too grim to be true. But it is. At the Chili Pepper (200 W. Broward Blvd, Fort Lauderdale) on Sunday, the gruesome twosome will fill the club with dark music and morbid theatrics. These Misfits are different from the group…
Bill Laswell Imaginary Cuba (Wicklow) Your taste for Bill Laswell’s collection and “reconstruction” of various Cuban sounds, Imaginary Cuba, will depend entirely on your taste for the patented sonic stamp that the producer, bassist, and self-described “mix-translator” affixes to nearly all his musical projects. Imaginary Cuba stands as a virtual…
On the cover of his first and so far only CD, Soul Serenade, Jesse Jones, Jr., is pictured gazing intently into the distance, clutching his alto saxophone to his chest as if it were a newborn child, an irreplaceable part of himself. The photograph may make Jones look maniacally possessive,…
Long before the hipsters of Manhattan began lining up to see the venerable elders of the Buena Vista Social Club, country boys Nicholas Woloschuck and Aaron Halva were scraping together a meager living playing traditional Cuban son in New York City’s subways. Oregon-born Woloschuck and Iowa native Halva formed the…
Various Artists Viva CuBop! Jazz the Afro-Cuban Way (CuBop) The fact that CuBop, the Latin jazz arm of the independent label Ubiquity, has released twenty-two records in three years is proof enough that something is going right with “the little Latin jazz label that could.” The label’s first compilation, Viva…
It’s hard to top the mammoth anniversary party with George Clinton, but Tobacco Road (626 S. Miami Ave.) is trying with three consecutive nights of national blues talent. Old-time master blues interpreter John Hammond, Jr., returns to the Road on Thursday for two shows, at 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. Hammond,…
The Drepung Gomang college earned its name a little differently than most Western centers of learning. The Tibetan word gomang literally means “many doors,” and the story is that spiritually advanced monks of Drepung Monastery were able to walk through the college’s solid stone walls without the need for doors…
Anyone looking for yet more signs of Lincoln Road’s devolution from bohemian enclave to tourist-overrun strip mall should consider Miami Beach’s new open-air music policy. As part of the city’s attempt to fine tune its vision for the street, it has decided to sanitize the sound along the promenade’s public…
Yellow bandannas with black letters bearing the Western Union logo graced nearly every head, neck, or waist at Rasin ’99, held early this November at Bayfront Park. The fans of Haitian roots music — a music based on the rhythms and traditional refrains of Haitian vodou — wore the sponsor’s…
Dan “The Automator” Nakamura laughs when he recalls how his DJ career ended before it really began. Fifteen years ago, as a high school student, DJing was all Nakamura wanted to do. He was learning how to spin records and make his own pause tapes and drum-machine beats, the kind…
It’s the age of cultural mixing, and one of the best examples of mutual musical understanding anywhere is found on Kulanjan, the recorded encounter between Taj Mahal and Mali’s Toumani Diabaté. A more natural pairing for cultural collision could hardly be imagined. Taj Mahal’s rootsy blues have always resonated with…
In the waning years of the ’70s, Arto Lindsay “sang” and “played guitar” for DNA, and his musicianship deserved the quotes. Emerging in the wide-open aftermath of punk rock, DNA was part of what was dubbed the New York “No Wave,” a movement of bands whose music was belligerently chaotic…
In this season of thanks, forget about the food and think about the dance floor. If the Pilgrims had had a plethora of nightclubs that stayed open late and housed glorious debauchery, we might all be tossing back cocktails and gobbling down rolls (not the dough variety) instead of turkey…
The room is filled with screaming skulls, fiendishly grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons hanging from the ceiling, and several Puppet Master dolls, which, even standing at a mere six inches tall, manage to evoke that cult splatter flick’s sense of dread. “Cemeteries, the full moon: I’ve just always loved stuff that’s creepy,”…
