“Live instrumentation is really the essence of Latin musical cultural roots. The intention of this festival is to shake things up a little bit and define our own sound,” notes Yerba Buena vocalist Andres Levin. “This festival” is a four-act bill with a kitchen-sink approach to the fusion formula: Yerba…
At sixteen years old, Miami native DJ Ralph Falcon had already identified himself as an emerging house artist, quickly earning a record deal with Atlantic in the mid-Nineties. Influences such as New York DJs Timmy Regisford, Merlin Bobb, and Bobby Konders led to Falcon’s dance-pop style, which grew increasingly popular…
On the cover of this month’s DJ magazine, the influential British dance publication, Christophe Le Friant’s pure white visage stares out against a bright red and blue backdrop. And it’s not the Stars and Stripes. The headline blares, “The French Revolution,” while the name Bob Sinclar, a pseudonym for Le…
One of last year’s biggest hip-hop beefs occurred between celebrity mogul Diddy and reggaeton’s leading man, Tego Calderón. It all began gently enough when Diddy offered Tego the opportunity to be the official fashion model for his new fall line of clothing. The catch was that Puffy was willing to…
With Usher languishing in the Broadway production of Chicago, and Michael Jackson kickin’ it in the Middle East behind a burqa or two, the tap shoes must fall to seventeen-year-old R&B ingénue Chris Brown to dance the ladies right out of their hot pants via his puppy-dog-sweet tunes and gravity-defying…
With its always-free admission, Laundry Bar might just be the best musical bargain to be had in pricey South Beach — well, maybe ever. This is especially true when a world-renowned jock such as DJ Sneak takes to the turntables to unleash his brand of blunted house and funk groovage…
There’s a long list of big names percussionist Sammy Figueroa has played with, including Miles Davis, David Bowie, and Mariah Carey. Born in Brooklyn, Figueroa began his musical career performing in Bobby Valentin’s band when he was eighteen, shortly before founding the Brazilian/Latin-fused band Raices, which brought Figueroa his first…
The world has become obsessed with Brazilian culture. Whether referring to svelte bodies on soccer fields, award-winning films, or amazingly complex and powerful music, we love it all. Celebrate your fetish for this sexy nation at Gil Santos’s Brazilian Independence Day Celebration at the Deauville Beach Resort. Santos is the…
Key words: liver spots, life insurance, Emma Bo-Bemma, Dick Royale, skeeze, beer, loitering. If Bob White were still around, he could tell ya that the preceding can refer to only one band, a band that is back with a new CD and a series of live concerts serving up across-the-board…
Combine the grandeur and rockabilly twang of Texas with the attitude and speed of punk, and the result is a bastard child known as psychobilly. Perhaps now the Quakes have come across a new hybrid of “-billy,” mixing Eighties and rockabilly. Retrobilly? Okay, not really, but the group has done…
What do U2, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Ella Fitzgerald, and Michael Jackson have in common? Aside from being music legends, these artists (and many more) are named on Peruvian percussionist Alex Acuña’s resumé. Further bullets on Acuña’s impressive list of accomplishments include his being recruited for Pérez Prado’s big band…
Val Wisecracker knows plenty about tunecraft, and she’ll share it at the songwriters’ showcase series at the Wallflower Gallery (a three-time New Times “Best of Miami” winner). Val, whose real last name is Caracappa, uses the pseudonym because Caracappa is difficult for journalists and radio announcers to spell and pronounce…
It’s difficult to imagine a guy in a suit writing Criteria’s riff-based anthem rock. That’s why lead singer Stephen Pedersen quit his nine-to-five at a law firm to pursue music full-time. The result of his brave endeavor is When We Break, an emotionally and physically moving album with intelligent lyrics…
Like fellow Vikings, artists, DJs, and quirk-rockers Eirik Glambek Boe and Erlend ÿye of Kings of Convenience, Bardi Johannsson persists in being a hyphenate of performance. The lead singer of Icelandic surfer-songsters the Bang Gang, Johannsson is on a tour of the United States that showcases his tune-mixing abilities. The…
Anna Nalick’s melodic, slightly miffed, but contemplative alt-pop sound is likely to jive with anyone who can confess to having belted out Avril Lavigne’s whimsical “Complicated” while listening to the radio on the way to work. Okay, let’s face it, that would be a lot of us. Also running in…
According to Tango36’s Website, www.tango36.com, the Miami-based musicians make up a rock band that just happens to sing in Spanish. They kind of cut you up and spit you out with that eerie retro goth sound on songs like “Camino al Sol ” and “Vaquero,” but the next thing you…
Hahahelp! fits into a long Miami tradition of experimental noise-trash musicians, in the line of Harry Pussy, Laundry Room Squelchers, Monotract, the Curious Hair, and others. The band exists as a collection of odds-and-sods drums, cheap synthesizers, out-of-tune guitar and bass, and improvised vocals. The group began as a free-form…
A side project of Miami hip-hop group Phoenicia, Soul Oddity fuses Detroit electro with Miami bass funk to create a sound that, if anything, is much more odd than soulful. Founded by producers Romulo Del Castillo and Joshua Kay in 1996 after the two supposedly saw a UFO, the band…
A jazz performance student at the University of Miami, Devin Bing has always been a little bit blue. Growing up in New York, he began playing piano at age six and performing at local blues clubs at age fifteen, and when he was eighteen, he was already headlining his own…
This Miami-based outfit composed of three international talents is a mélange of Spanish rock, pop, and salsa influences. The lyrics have soul; the music has flavor. Erick Bolívar, who began his career as a child singer on Venezuelan television and has written salsa songs for many artists, is the voice…
Classifying themselves as a retro-Latino act, Rhett y Los Borrachos Empeñados have worked hard to perfect the Latin-rock sound they’ve strived for since they began the band two years ago. Their music varies from sensitive soft-rock to faster funk, all the while maintaining the band’s Cuban roots. All four members…
Opening its metaphorical door in 2000, the Green Room is the musical cooperative founded by Colombian-born Jorge Mejia. Though he sports a degree in piano performance from the University of Miami, the 33-year-old Mejia is as adept at New Wave-style rock — something evident with one spin of his first…
