It strains the brain to think that Takashi Hirayasu and Bob Brozman had never played together, never met, never really spoken, and had no idea if they’d even get along before sequestering themselves for a week in a small wooden cottage on Taketomi, the most untrammeled of the Ryukyu Islands…
At a time when most indie labels have either lost their artistic punch, aligned with the majors, or simply folded, Chicago’s Bloodshot Records has consistently delivered some of the finest altcountry (as they like to call it, “Insurgent Country”) on the planet. Although by definition a limited genre defined in…
The U.S. Census has it all wrong. The question is not whether you are “white (non-Hispanic),” “black (non-Hispanic),” or “Hispanic.” The question is not even whether you are Latino, non-Latino, or none of the above. According to the Bacardi Salsa Congress 2000, the real question is: How do you dance…
Can’t we all just get along? Not if you look to the demise of Veruca Salt, which went down in flames two years ago after singer/guitarists Nina Gordon and Louise Post had a major falling out. The band scored big with its 1994 debut, American Thighs, and seemed destined to…
It’s become increasingly easy and respectable to create electronic music. Platinum-selling artists such as Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Brothers have steadily worn down America’s innate resistance to sampled dance music, and in many ways, the challenge to create engaging new sonic forms of music now falls to the future…
Just a few years ago, releasing an anthology of music from the Dominican Republic that wasn’t dedicated to merengue would have been unthinkable. Now it’s all bachata, a working-class meat-and-potatoes music that hit the big time with Juan Luis Guerra’s 1990 album, Bachata Rosa. Although widespread for decades, bachata was…
From its affiliation with the White Panther Party to its political platform that called for “Rock and Roll, Dope, and Fucking in the Streets,” Detroit’s MC5 was among the most incendiary rock and roll bands of the Sixties. As both harbingers of Seventies punk and a group whose taste spanned…
“Mama, I want to know where the singers are from,” announced the Trio Matamoros in their most famous song, “Son de la Loma.” Eighty years later that’s still a good question. At the Billboard Latin Music Awards this past month, three young men from Colombia took home two prizes for…
A man is alone and drunk, stumbling around the emotional prison that is his bedroom, his heart completely shattered. Another man is haunted by the memory of an ex-lover he knows he’s better off without, but he’s haunted nonetheless. Another throws shame to the wind and pursues a woman who…
Anyone who’s ever complained about the difficulties of escaping the shadow cast by a parent should be shamed into silence by the story of Femi Anikulapo-Kuti. After all, Femi’s dad, the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, wasn’t just a star in his native Nigeria and many other African nations; he was a…
The tremendous new Columbia box set Miles Davis with John Coltrane — The Complete Columbia Recordings, quite simply is the compilation of one of the most influential and unique partnerships in jazz history: the stay of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane in Miles Davis’s band from 1955 to 1961. But the…
Plenty of masculine R&B and hip-hop is little more than narcissistic posturing — a sweaty platform for self-styled superheroes who feel the need to tell you over and over again why they’re the toughest, the hardest, the sexiest, the most street. J-Shin, Miami’s latest smooch-music specialist whose thoroughly enjoyable debut…
Chances are if you’ve heard any of the big-name Jamaican toasters or crooners in concert here, then you’ve heard Hal Anthony and his Millennium Band backing them up. The ensemble of choice for visiting vocalists holds up quite well on its own. Playing regularly for the past two years at…
While the rest of the free world consumed itself in the anticipatory hype over Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace late last spring, the precocious members of the New World Symphony staged a more twisted salute to the glories of Chewbacca: an opera. Transposing sections of John Williams’s…
As South Beach slowly filled with New Year’s Eve revelers looking to ring in the millennium underneath a glitter ball, a far more curious spectacle was unfolding deep within the Everglades swamp. There, on a swath of semidry land inside the Seminole Indian Reservation, nearly 80,000 folks from across America…
Live blues seems rather common in South Florida clubs. Blues on the radio is another story. Jazz DJs such as WDNA’s Frank Consola, WLRN’s Len Pace, and WTMI’s China Valles occasionally spin the blues, but full shows are sparse. WDNA’s weekly program Portraits in Blue is a bright star in…
Saturday night, eyes bleary, rain slapping hard on your car. You turn up your radio to hear her silky narration, the aural equivalent of hot chocolate during a snowstorm. Although Fields, who studied broadcasting and journalism in college, makes her living as an Associated Press reporter, she confesses, “Radio was…
Many a fan of local Latin pop band Rock’n Son have heard tunes in the group’s repertoire played by other musicians. That’s because the band’s keyboardist and writer, Raul del Sol, still has a soft spot for songs he has peddled to other artists. During Rock’n Son’s live sets, which…
Few local bands were ever more misunderstood, or more hated in certain quarters, than Harry Pussy, whose squalling feedback-drenched performances managed to clear rooms across Miami for a memorable chunk of the mid-Nineties. The more this no-wave trio was feted elsewhere — saluted onstage by Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, spotlighted by…
In 1979 Victor Manuel Casanova left Peru with a group of musicians for a tour of the United States that never ended. Over the past twenty years, this Afro-Peruvian singer, guitarist, and caja or “box” player, has performed for Miami’s ever-growing Peruvian population. A petite man with dark skin and…
Some say the Bahamians built Miami. Early immigrants, they laid down the first roads and then laid out the towels and sheets for the area’s first tourists. The drums and horns of Bahamian junkanoo music certainly have marched willy-nilly through the Miami soundscape since the beginning of the Twentieth Century…
Principal singer/songwriter Todd Thompson and his bandmates guitarist Sean Edelson, drummer Ari Schantz, and bassist Brad Berman maintain a busy schedule performing their insightful tunes, an array of pleasant rock melodies combined with deft lyric writing. A favorite among South Florida’s live-music fans, the foursome emerged victorious against several other…
