“If you want to get energized about dance music, go to London for a few days,” declared DJ Times editor Jim Tremayne at the opening panel for this year’s Winter Music Conference. “It’s the mainstream there!” Of course Tremayne could have just stepped out onto the streets of Miami. The…
Van Morrison Back on Top (Pointblank/Virgin) Van Morrison can only blame himself for the daunting expectations that greet his every move. How else to approach a man who penned the all-time garage classic “Gloria,” wrote one of the most distinctively soulful singles of the ’60s, “Brown Eyed Girl,” then created…
Dusty Springfield was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this month. Queen Elizabeth II made her an officer of the British Empire this past December. But the woman with the husky voice that conveyed unendurable sadness and left an indelible mark on pop music won’t get a…
Churchill’s owner Dave Daniels was pleased to find his bar — a focal point for Miami’s underground rock scene — immortalized in Elmore Leonard’s new crime thriller Be Cool. A sequel to Leonard’s Get Shorty, this latest installment returns to the life of Miami Beach loan shark-cum-Hollywood-producer Chili Palmer. This…
If any Cuban musician is poised for stardom among Latin audiences in this country, it would appear to be Adalberto Alvarez. His music is already familiar to Spanish radio listeners, though they probably don’t realize it. Alvarez’s work is the most widely recorded of any contemporary Cuban songwriter. Salsa luminaries…
Rob Swift has fat ambitions: He wants to change the way you hear the turntable. To him decks are not to be relegated to backstage wick-wick-wacking and dope beat pumping; instead he wants to scratch out respectability for the turntable as a musical instrument like any other. Swift was the…
On a cold Thursday night at Detroit’s Wired Frog nightclub, a who’s who of the Motor City’s hip-hop scene checks out the weekly talent showcase put on by local rap group Da Ruckus. Attention turns to the video screen when Eminem’s “My Name Is” video comes on. It’s a strangely…
Mr. Airplane Man Mr. Airplane Man (Altitude Records) Digging into the old school for inspiration and authenticity is increasingly popular, but the Boston duo Mr. Airplane Man need make nary a scratch: They’ve already found some deep roots. With one foot planted in the hazy dissonance of art-punk and the…
Philadelphia’s greatest contribution to hip-hop, the Roots, like to open their CDs with a snatch of dialogue. It’s their way of introducing a new set of themes, of offering a kind of preamble to the state of the union message that’s on the way. But the exchange that launches the…
From his Cambridge, Massachusetts, home, Morphine’s Mark Sandman speaks slowly and lazily, his baritone voice rumbling over the telephone wires on a weekday afternoon. The bassist and vocalist sounds a bit worn down, or maybe it’s just his overwhelmingly mellow disposition. Either way he has been working on some music…
“Dance music has always been treated like a stepchild in this country. But now the music industry is seeing that this culture is at the forefront in addressing issues that affect the entire music industry,” says Winter Music Conference founder Bill Kelly, Jr. The 45-year-old DJ helms what has become…
From March 13 to March 17, DJ culture looms large as more than 4000 participants descend on Miami for the annual Winter Music Conference, a worldwide gathering of the dance-music industry. During the day most of the action centers around the Fontainebleau Hilton, home to the conference’s many workshops and…
Pole CD1 2 (Matador) Brian Eno put it best when, after working with U2 and DJ/producer Howie B on a project, he concluded that rock musicians think of albums as novels, while electronic musicians think of them as magazines. It’s a great analogy for understanding both the basic difference between…
“You’re not going to hear as much about bands anymore. That whole underground rock-and-roll scene is ending,” explains Toby Hauser, better known as DJ t.farmer. He’s part of the drum and bass lineup Thursday evenings at Beatcamp, a popular party held at the Mission nightclub on South Beach. “Sure, you’ve…
Papa Vegas Hello Vertigo (Sid Flips/RCA) The other day I was flying. No, not in an airplane. Really flying. I just flapped my wings and up I went. Anyway while I was up there soaring over the tops of trees and picking dragonflies out of my mouth (you’d be surprised…
In the liner notes to his new bluegrass album, Steve Earle concedes his primary motive for engaging in the project in the first place was to achieve immortality. An “ambitious and selfish” desire to be sure, but as Earle puts it, he “wanted to write just one song that would…
Hedwig and the Angry Inch Original Cast Recording (Atlantic Records) Hedwig Schmidt’s ill-fated pecker is the biggest thing off-Broadway in years. Apparently nothing gets the culturati in the seats quicker than rock operas about botched sex changes, especially when the star of the show’s a guy pretending to be a…
“I’ve always been an orchestral player and an orchestral thinker. I don’t even allow people to bill me as trio anymore, because it’s too limiting,” says 68-year-old pianist Ahmad Jamal. Coming from just about anyone else, this might be considered semantic nitpicking. But after reinventing jazz piano nearly 50 years…
For folk lovers the Broward Folk Club’s annual South Florida Folk Festival may be the ultimate venue to indulge their music jones. Every January the event, now in its eighth year, takes residence in Fort Lauderdale’s idyllic Easterlin Park. The festival’s five stages host dancers, workshops, children’s entertainers, local musicians,…
Original Soundtrack Louie Bluie (Arhoolie) With more and more prewar black and white string-band music hitting the reissue bins, from 1997’s Anthology of American Folk Music to the Yazoo label’s marvelous series of mountain-music collections, it’s fitting that Louie Bluie has finally been restored to the racks. Originally issued in…
I suppose it was the leopard-print pants, or maybe it was his tax exile move from England to Los Angeles in the mid-Seventies, or maybe it was the dreaded disco beat underpinning “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?” Or maybe it was the simple fact that the immensely popular song even…
In the kingdom of funk music, Larry Graham is a prince, of course. As the original bassist for Sly and the Family Stone, he played some of the most memorable bass riffs in the history of the genre, and created a pop-and-slap style that has been imitated but never duplicated…
