I’ve worked with the Jordanaires and D.J. Fontana,” says Elvis Presley, naming his long-time back-up vocalists and drummer. Throwing his head back and curling his lip in the lobby of Fort Lauderdale’s Sunrise Musical Theatre on January 21, he adds, “I’ve even worked for Elvis Presley Enterprises.” All this may…
Big Youth may not have been the first of the great Jamaican DJs, but he was the second. U-Roy preceded him, virtually inventing what then was called toasting by improvising rants, brags, and poetry atop the instrumental B-side of reggae 45s at Kingston dance halls where records provided sole entertainment…
“Have I been tarred with the brush of Dylan, Beck, and Harmony Korine, who all used down-home imagery ironically to amuse sophisticated urban audiences? Am I a craven and opportunistic rootless charlatan posturing when it suits me, as a Scot?” These musings come courtesy of Nick Currie, a.k.a. nutty old…
It seemed as if December 10, 2000, would be known as the day the music drowned. Undeterred by the sheets of rain that flooded the streets in Miami-Dade County, Ellen Bukstel Segal was preparing to host a little musical get-together. A graphic designer and the vocalist for the folk band…
Over the electronic din on Washington Avenue after midnight, amid barking club promoters and sprinting valets with lips kissing walkie-talkies, the incongruous sound of live music escapes through heavy curtains hung from an open door. On the other side is Bolero, a 21st -century supper club graced with perfect lighting…
I have too much time on my hands. I daydream of assembling tribute bands for the truly deranged. I’d like to make one for AC/DC comprising octogenarian housewives, because only they could reproduce Brian Johnson’s vocals and Angus’s movements with anything approaching accuracy. I used to want to make folk…
Everclear’s Art Alexakis can’t seem to make up his mind about who he wants to be. He writes lyrics that reveal his desire to be recognized as a moody anti-capitalism type with a big grungy chip on his shoulder. To accompany these wannabe anthems for Generation X (or is it…
University of Miami film student Scott Alboum ventured into Liberty City to look at life through the eyes of former UM cornerback Nathaniel Brooks. In Alboum’s 30-minute documentary, Black with No Excuses, the camera pans the trash-lined streets of the James E. Scott Homes, where the football player grew up…
“Nicole, Nicole! It’s me,” exclaimed a woman outside Level, trying to get the attention of one of the keepers of the door late last New Year’s Day. Clad in a green sweater and a green-and-yellow-stripe knit cap, Nicole surveyed the more than 1500 fans trying to get into the first…
R.L. Burnside Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down Fat Possum Back in the late Sixties, Marshall Chess, the son of Chess Records co-founder Leonard Chess, made some of the most jive-ass albums in the blues lexicon. The young Marshall paired the label’s greatest artists, among them Muddy Waters, Howlin’…
Hi. It’s Keith Sweat. Remember me? Didn’t think so. Well, just to help you out, track number one on my new CD, Didn’t See Me Coming, is a little reminder of all my hits over the past ten years. I know, I know, a little self-indulgent. Okay, maybe a little…
Trinidadian-born R&B singer Trini did a double take a few months ago at the 183rd Street Flea Market. Suddenly the 23-year-old Miami resident realized that the sexy woman in a black tank top and cowboy hat staring out at her from a poster tacked up at a record booth was…
The club in the photograph is filled with laughing Taiwanese, their eyes riveted on the Latina woman with the microphone dancing on the tiny stage, dressed in a gold minidress with black boots. Jessi James Campo is on tour in Taipei, teaching an eager audience how to dance merengue. The…
Many years later, as she sat facing the interviewer, singer Laura Pausini was to remember those distant afternoons when her father took her to discover her voice. At that time her native town of Bologna, built centuries ago in the north of Italy, hosted singing competitions at festivals and in…
Ms. Badu is back with another soundtrack to live by. Full of sublime beauty and profound sorrow, Mama’s Gun seeps straight from your stereo into your soul. Forget about your silicone so-called divas; Badu’s blues prove the real thing is righteous (even if, as she sings on “Cleva,” her luv-yaself-sista…
Venezuelan jazz troubadour Maria Rivas’s tribute to coffee, Café Negrito, could easily be a featured item at Starbucks — and not simply because java serves as the unifying lyrical theme for this collection of contemporary, classic, and traditional Latin songs. Even more to the point, this highly crafted world-beat fusion…
So let’s say the missing piece to your perfect record collection is the essential Ska Boo-Da-Ba by the Skatalites, an original Top Deck issue. Or let’s say your triple-LP Grounation, by Count Ossie and his Mystic Revealers of Rastafari, met its end in that unfortunate bong incident. Or maybe the…
Don’t call the Curious Hair classic rock. Don’t call them a jam band. In fact if you’re a major record label, don’t call them at all. As far as frontman Jeff Rollason is concerned, the industry can kiss his white ass. “It’s not the music business,” he contends. “It’s the…
Al Galvez has a plan. The leader of Miami’s dreamy acoustic trio A Kite Is a Victim not only resides at the center of his own little music-business ecosystem, he also has managed to tap into the nationwide network of the indie-rock cognoscenti. He has made friends, influenced people, and…
All the funky new performance spaces in Little Havana dressed in tatters on Friday, December 15, to honor Saint Lazaro, otherwise known as Babalu Aye, the Afro-Cuban orisha of plague and healing. At El Hueco, the makeshift theater inside Ozone Video on SW Seventeenth Avenue, two empty chairs sat ominously…
Ornette Coleman is the kind of artist trad-jazz idiots like Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and the editors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz love to hate. Since his foundation-shattering debut in 1958 with the aptly named Something Else!!!!, the saxophone genius has scorched a singular path through modern jazz; he’s…
Various ArtistsCalypso Awakening Smithsonian Folkways In his notes to Trinidad Carnival Roots, musicologist J.D. Elder calls calypso “undoubtedly the national song of Trinidad and Tobago.” Today that “national song” has all but gone the way of its nineteenth-century predecessor, kalenda. A collection of 1962 field recordings by Alan Lomax, Carnival…
