Music

You would be excused for suspecting there’s a secret subtext to A Man About a Horse (ECM). Minnesotan guitarist Steve Tibbetts admits that the ebbing and flowing compositions, held together by Indonesian drumming patterns, sheets of feedback-laden electric guitar, and delicate acoustic guitar passages, gang up to tell a story…

For a long time, Ed Hale’s sense of geography depended on rock and roll. “I knew about England, of course, because of the Beatles and the Stones, and I knew about Ireland because of Sinead O’Connor and U2,” Hale says matter-of-factly. “That was the way I related to the rest…

If you’re a DJ duo with exotic names based in D.C., be prepared for the inevitable comparisons with Deep Dish. It was just last year when Deep Dish’s Sharam (Tayebi) & Ali (Shirazinia) released the seminal mix compilation Global Underground21: Moscow and had clubs and charts worldwide buzzing about our…

Don’t get the wrong idea, Kinky is not the Mexican Marilyn Manson; its members don’t wear bondage or leather clothes. They just like the sound of the name. In fact, says singer and guitarist Gil Cerezo, “We are like The Flintstones now, breaking down all the boulders we can to…

Fanning through the clouds of Black and Mild seeded with herb that hover over the entrance to Rain, there’s Maseo, Plug Three of the once and now occasionally popular rap pioneers, De La Soul. Maseo and a posse of hangers-on are near enough to the entrance to be seen by…

When bebop hit the scene, critics and other unhepcats maligned the movement as inarticulate noise with little artistic merit. So it’s only fitting that another clan of outsiders, dance-music DJs, should re-interpret the now-classic sounds of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Shirley Horne. Granted this project could have turned ugly…

Black male vocalists tend to break down into two camps nowadays. There are the sweet, almost-too-precious crooners like Musiq and Remy Shand. Then there are the funky-butt stylings of folks like Cee-Lo and his Dungeon Family compadres. Houston’s Big Moe, who waxes playalistic on his latest, Purple World, leans toward…

While it’s true that Afro-Cuban music is the music of West Africa filtered through a distinctly Cuban lens, it’s only part of the story; Cuban music has profoundly influenced musical styles all over the continent of Africa. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Congolese rumba (which mutated into…

Totó la Momposina is a one-woman walking encyclopedia of Colombian musical folklore. She’s also something of a perfectionist. A band with the chops and horn section wielded by her ensemble could easily have cranked out an entire disc of the blazing salsa-influenced raveup that opens Pacantó. The title cut transforms…

As soon as we get there, we’ll call Emilio/I have a friend who’s a friend of a friend/With a direct line to the heaven of so many stars/After that I’ll be running here and there/With Paulina Rubio and Alejandro Sanz/Relax, honey, Paulina’s just a friend. Jorge Villamizar swears it’s true…

Chilean chanteuse Nicole never knew quite what to expect when she arrived at Fun Machine, the studio of producer Andres Levin. The Venezuelan track-doctor behind major projects with Amigos Invisibles, Aterciopelados, and Nicole’s labelmate Jorge Moreno — to say nothing of turns with Nirvana and Tina Turner — could propose…

The atmosphere is a little delirious at Volumen Cero’s rehearsal space in Miami Beach. After ten years of holding together one rock outfit or another, the quartet can hardly stand to wait one more week for Luces (Lights), its major-label debut, to hit the street. To prepare for all the…

They met at a local open-mike night in 1997, and although they grew up across the country from each other, they felt an instant connection, almost as if they were related. An Oklahoma native, Amy Carol Webb learned to raise her voice early, crooning around the Southwest with her three…

Everything you’d ever want to know about Momus — the effeminate, eye-patched, Scottish-born composer, singer, and essayist — is available for your perusal. Through interviews, pop-culture magazine columns, and a voluminous output of smarmy, hermetically sealed electronic-pop albums (more than fifteen since 1982, with more on the way), Momus has…

“They say he went to Europe and when he got there — incredible disillusion,” begins the title track of Orishas’ Emigrante, an intense mix of fierce grooves, melodic breaks, and highly expressive lyrics born of both rap’s urban political consciousness and the running social commentary characteristic of Cuban son. On…

It seems appropriate that the first single from Luis Fonsi’s English-language debut should be called “Secret.” Although the video suggests the song is about a beautiful model/singer/movie star who must hide her love for our little hottie — tucking him away in a warehouse where he must execute stylized hip-hop…

Things are getting rowdy around the sound board at the old ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute) recording studio in Havana. While the percussionist listens to instruction from the engineer, five or six other musicians, singers, dancers, and friends crowd onto the worn couches in the control room, passing around a soda…

Laura Quinlan will not stray from her mission. “I am trying to get Miami more on the music scene of the touring summer concert series,” she proclaims as she opens another series of performances under the stars at the 73rd Street Bandshell. “The Bandshell series is our version of Central…

Issac Delgado’s Miami concert at Rancho Gaspar last month was advertised only through radio bemba, the Cuban grapevine, and by a vague sign at the entrance to the nightclub-cum-ranch that read “Live Music Today” in Spanish. But by dusk on a hot Sunday afternoon, more than 3000 people had come…

Hip-hop has always had a soft spot for outlandish, over-the-top antics. With that in mind, you kinda wonder why more artists don’t take aim at this big fat target. Atlanta’s Ying Yang Twins, on the other hand, have this part of the hip-hop universe in their laser sights, driving that…