The phenomenal success of Buena Vista Social Club did much to reawaken interest in Cuban music around the globe, but more remarkable was the effect the album had on the lives of its featured artists. As he approaches his 100th birthday, Compay Segundo probably is the most internationally recognizable of…
Am I the only person who almost killed herself walking down Washington Avenue during the Winter Music Conference? Didn’t anyone think 37 layers of palm cards and flyers stretching for blocks and blocks just might be a little hard to walk on? Luckily I made it to the show unharmed…
During the recent World Economic Forum in Cancún, anti-globalization activists took visiting journalists on a tour of what they called the real Cancún: the tin-roofed shantytowns that surround the resorts and nightspots that make up the postcard version of the city. The activists argued that the scrubbed-clean white plaster walls…
Barefoot dancers orbit the DJ booth at Nikki Beach Club, their legs white with sand. Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe, the British duo known as Basement Jaxx, plunge listeners into the wobbly bounce of “Romeo” and the g-funk-inflected swing of “Do Your Thing.” One of the songs (though not one…
“One More Time” is the ubiquitous and unsurprisingly faceless first single from Daft Punk’s sophomore album, Discovery, but it might as well be an affirmation of the band’s artistic mantra. The track, which throbs on a building 4/4 beat and horns passed down from the gods of disco, seems to…
Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, the Havana-based producer behind the Afro-Cuban All Stars and the A&R man and conceptual artist of the now-legendary Buena Vista Social Club, is on the road behind his latest CD, Baila Mi Son, featuring yet another unsung Cuban singer, sonero Felix Baloy. After touring the world…
You expect a smoky room for this music. Not the cigarette swirls that surround a sultry jazz singer. Not a dry-ice machine rolling out fog to electronic dance music. I’m thinking more burnt-toast smoke, anything that might explain the sustained high-pitch alarm-tone coming through the speakers just now and piercing…
Castanets and tablas may seem an unlikely combination. But a New York City production called Nacho Nacho: Gypsy Storytelling actually combines flamenco traditions with northern Indian kathak dance styles. Samir Chatterjee, one of the foremost Indian tabla drummers in the United States, conceived and directed the project. “Flamenco has a…
Outside a hangar at Perry Airport in south Broward, grips and gaffers roll out cords and set up lights to a dancehall beat as a DJ teases a captive audience of film extras and celluloid hopefuls. Inside the nearby Maydays Bar and Lounge, a young woman in bandanna, bikini top,…
For U2’s Elevation Tour 2001, kicked off last month with two shows at the National Car Rental Center, Willie Williams designed the most exquisite set in the history of arena rock. So artfully spare that there were no obstructed views from any of the seats surrounding the stage, the production…
Jerry Rivera has stayed offstage for the past year, taking a turn that may surprise those who have followed his voice since he was the youngest salsa singer in the world. The pupil and undisputed heir of erotic salsa pioneer Lalo Rodriguez, Rivera risks losing the salsa faithful he has…
Artist/director Julian Schnabel may not be immortalized with a monument in Havana à la John Lennon, or even recognized with an Oscar, but Before Night Falls will endure as a requisite portrait of the agony and the ecstasy of the intelligentsia in revolutionary Cuba. Schnabel took poetic license with the…
Duke Ellington Allegro Sarah Vaughan and Duke Ellington are entries in Allegro’s Cocktail Hour series of double-shot tributes to mid-twentieth-century musical giants. Attractively, if sparsely, packaged musical icebreakers for the novice listener, the two-CD sets are an intoxicating (and, just under $18, affordable) introduction to some of the sweetest sounds…
Who sent you? Who sent you?” ask the intimidators. Slap! Crack! Pop! Crash! The radio crackles with the sound of a man being beaten. “Who sent you here?” the voice repeats. The terrified captive stutters, his big lips fumbling for the words, “The HATERS!” On January 10, the day former…
Level. 12:01 a.m. After night falls Junior Vasquez rises. His shaved head surfaces like a planet orbiting the turntables twenty feet above the dance floor. His eyes, unobscured tonight by his signature wraparound shades, are intent on the spinning vinyl. Now and then he flashes the grin of a man…
Audiences have known local fixture Raul Midon as soulman, singer/songwriter, and Latin balladeer. Some, in a reverential sense, even say he is “a monster.” Absent from the live scene of late, Midon is back with a different tone. He would prefer to be called, simply, a jazz singer. “I love…
Former Florida homeboy Walter Salas-Humara may not have invented Latin alternative, but, to retool an old expression, he certainly was Latino before Latino was cool. Over the course of six critically acclaimed albums with his band the Silos; two solo stabs; a pair with his sometime side band, the Setters;…
The only reason why qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis, is known in the West when other types of Pakistani music remain hopelessly obscure is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. While he may not have been the greatest qawwal of the Twentieth Century, his two fusion CDs with British producer…
The first-floor lounge of the Radisson Deauville Resort Hotel is precisely the kind of place one would expect to find the cocktail set. Fifty blocks north of bustling South Beach, this gem of postwar-modern design features a sprawling lobby of sweeping curves and giant columns. Behind the bar the large…
Four years ago James McCauley received a phone call from what sounded like two knuckleheads putting on their best Hans and Franz routine. “Yah, ve are caw-ling for ein James Maggotron,” managed the caller in the thickest of Teutonic accents. “Ve haf come from Germany because ve luv your myu-zik!”…
Curd Duca looks out from behind his laptop at the crowd assembled in this warehouse loft-cum-living room/lounge somewhere in the shadows along the Miami River. Young artists, musicians, and hipsters are perched on couches against the wall, packed tightly near the bar and spilling out on to the terrace. A…
Perusing old demo tapes in a Tijuana recording studio in May 1999, Pepe Mogt came across the key elements of a new electronic border sound: forgotten recordings of the traditional Mexican tambora and norteño music. Mogt quickly alerted his friends Jorge Ruiz and Ramon Amor Amezcua. “Pepe called me to…
