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…
The needle on my record player is wearing thin./This record has been playing since the day you’ve been with him.” If you’re in the lucrative 12-to-24-year-old pop-music target market, you’ve heard this refrain from New Found Glory’s “Hit or Miss.” Rock radio is playing it ad nauseam. It’s being put…
Female impersonator Trinity, self-styled “next lady of jazz,” describes herself as “everyone’s typical Jewish aunt” in steep heels and rhinestones. “I get a lot of elderly people who come to the show and say it reminds them of Judy Garland,” says Jamie Grace, a 38-year-old Jewish guy who created Trinity…
Throughout Cirque du Soleil’s spectacular Dralion, a stunning team of Chinese gymnasts flip through hoops, balance stacks of rice bowls on their limbs, and tumble atop large wooden balls — often incredible acts based on ancient Asian acrobatics and dance. The accompanying music, a tapestry of vaguely ethnic sounds interwoven…
“I brought my car phone!” Mr. Entertainment boasts loudly as we file down the “Three-Four Persons” aisle of the Rascal House cattle chute. He waves a bright red Princess tabletop model in the air, chord dangling, attracting the attention of the two persons and one persons lined up on our…
Woe unto the lowly melodica. Why must it be consigned to the Fisher-Price page in the annals of great instruments? I can handle the nicknames: The pocket piano, toot-flute, blow accordion, wind piano, melodeon, melodyhorn, pianaca, and hooter all offend me not. But it still is shocking — shocking! –…
Some 40 years ago Cuba’s octave-hopping queen of melodrama, Xiomara Alfaro, poured her persona so thoroughly into the torch song “Siboney” it became impossible to imagine another soul attempting a straight-faced rendition of the same. But Raul Malo of the Mavericks matches Alfaro’s sun-extinguishing angst, and the all-star ensemble backing…
Something witty this way comes … then stops short with a screeching halt. The second release from these rock-country kidders, Brainwasher opens with a prophetic little tune that sounds like something off the English Patient soundtrack and aptly named “Overture: Love Theme from Brainwasher.” Obviously not afraid to make fun…
Let’s get this straight. Rock and roll is dead. Killed off sometime in the mid-Fifties when Elvis first copped that hip swivel and lip thing from Wynonie Harris and Bill Haley mapped the course of every rock and roll clown prince to follow: meteoric rise, decadent climax, rapid descent into…
Strumming an acoustic guitar does not a folksinger make. True, ability to play a guitar is a must. (Piano is fine, but a guitar’s portability allows for plucking around the campfire and hopping trains on the spur of the moment.) A hard life is not vital but useful for song…
