On a recent afternoon, pianist Chucho Valdes gives a master class to students at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte. Valdes sits casually before a worn grand piano in a large classroom on the conservatory campus, overlooking the palm-shaded tangle of grass that in the Fifties was the Havana Country Club…
When drum and bass first washed up on these shores from London in the mid-Nineties, there was rampant talk that it would rejuvenate hip-hop. Drawing on the same Jamaican traditions of toasting MCs, cut-up DJ moves, and the manic street-level sensibility that sparked the first rap parties in the South…
Before Buena Vista Social Club gained fame as the title of the best-selling Cuban-music album of all time, it was an actual social club, a prerevolutionary gathering place for black residents of Havana’s working-class Buena Vista neighborhood. An early scene in Wim Wenders’s documentary Buena Vista Social Club, which opens…
Carlinhos Brown Omelete Man (Metro Blue) Omelete Man, the wide-ranging new album by Brazilian singer and multi-instrumentalist Carlinhos Brown, may surprise listeners whose image of Brazilian music is confined to the sophisticated bossa nova of J‹o Gilberto or the intelligent international pop of Caetano Veloso. It shouldn’t though, because over…
When Time placed Lauryn Hill on its cover this past winter, it seemed at first glance like an affirmation of hip-hop’s creative strength. Years after Yo! MTV Raps had become a staple of middle-American viewing and teenagers of all races had adopted the low-slung baggy-pants look, here was further proof…
Andre Williams & the Sadies Red Dirt (Bloodshot) Considering that he’s spent the past 40 years recording everything from bizarro doo-wop and horny R&B to sleazy funk and punked-up blues, it’s hardly surprising that Motor City madman Andre Williams decided to make a country album. And it’s a great one…
It was an anxious Tom Ze — guitarist, singer, and experimentalist — who took the stage in New York City’s Central Park six years ago. Back then Ze was a complete unknown in America, and not even terribly famous in his native Brazil. Indeed less than five years before, Ze…
Over the past ten years or so, Los Lobos have probably been referred to in print as the best band in America more frequently than any other. But the band’s level of popularity has seldom been commensurate with its formidable reputation. While groups capable of far less pack arenas, the…
Frank Consola, host of the morning jazz show on WDNA-FM (88.9) was a bit miffed at the implication in Kulchur that there’s pressure from station management to avoid pushing the programming envelope. He insists any parameters on his playlists are strictly self-imposed. “I’ve got free rein here,” Consola says of…
Kelly Willis What I Deserve (Rykodisc) After failing to find much of an audience for her four fine releases from the Nineties — beginning with 1990’s Well-Traveled Love on MCA and concluding with the 1996 A&M EP Fading Fast — honky-tonk chanteuse Kelly Willis was about ready to call the…
If one word describes Miami’s current club culture, it’s trance, the joyous, bubbly sound that currently dominates the playlists at the major nightclubs. “People like happy stuff. When they go out, they want to have a good time,” is how Duncan Ross explains trance’s triumph over house and techno as…
There’s nothing quite like the end of a millennium to bring about an era of artistic retrospection. Although this has been the trend in all the arts lately, it has been especially apparent in the jazz world. As the deaths of nearly all the pioneers of jazz make the preservation…
From 1998’s “Best Solo Musician” item about Midon: “… Hear him quickly before a major record label snaps him up.” Snap. Now that Raul Midon is signed to BMG US Latin, you might think success has changed the long-time Miami resident. But the only thing that’s changed is his name:…
The Balloon’s pop lifts the better elements of late-Sixties songcraft (they even cover a Kinks tune) and incorporates them into a driving, urgent approach that leaves all the sissified alternacrap on the radio facedown on the ground. Tommy Anthony has long been one of South Florida’s top songwriters, and he…
Singing since age three. Playing guitar since age eleven. Writing tunes in her teens. Pursuing her dreams of rock and roll stardom in Los Angeles. Becoming a wife and mother. Retiring from music. Relocating to Miami to start a new life. Picking up her guitar again. Wowing them at her…
Classically trained on the bass, Don Wilner may seem like a musical nerd. He holds a doctorate in music from the University of Miami (where he taught for many years) and he has published numerous articles about jazz performance and pedagogy. But when he plays in the Van Dyke Café’s…
If human evolution had taken this long, we’d still be monkeys. Already celebrated for their intensely engrossing live shows, the Baboons have neglected to record, opting at one point to put their efforts into a video but never making their mark on disc. Patience paid off this year with the…
Chugging along for the past eighteen years, this itinerant studio can claim more identities than a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Known in North Miami and on the Beach as Sync Studios, and in downtown Miami as The Studio, MBRS is now comfortably ensconced on Lincoln Road…
The goal: nothing less than the deconstruction and obliteration of rock and roll. The method: noise, a genre awash in dissonance and off-key chaos. Chief practitioners: nationally known local bands such as Harry Pussy and To Live and Shave in L.A. Results: nah. In fact the noise genre, which Miami…
The perennial winner of this category could easily have been eliminated from consideration this year if a major label had signed her to a deal and spread her fame beyond the boundaries of South Florida, as should have happened. Instead she iced the award by releasing in February another masterful…
Could be gourds. Or nuts. Maybe brown-tinted lima beans? Cannabis seeds. Yeah, cannabis seeds. Must be, considering this musically clever band is called the Kind, the same phrase connoisseurs use to describe high-grade pot. (For fans of wordplay, the band’s e-mail address is dobecautious@mindspring.com.) The intriguing photo was composed and…
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