Gaby Gabriel is best known as the long-time leader of the house orchestra at the Fontainebleau Hilton’s Club Tropigala on Miami Beach. The exuberant Cuba-born singer/percussionist has developed a musical repertoire to match the diversity of his audiences, which range from Latin-American tourists to sunbirds and celebrities. But Gabriel hasn’t…
If ever an album title seemed appropriate, it’s Ischemic Strokes, the moniker Phoenecia slapped on its most recent collection, which gathered up kindred souls recording for their own Schematic label and placed them alongside the duo’s own skittering, frazzled creations. After all, an ischemic stroke — a sudden, sharp cutoff…
Drawing from a stock of blues standards, William “Max” Maxwell lends Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road a touch of cultural credibility. Many the fashion-savvy beachcomber ignores this “old school” busker while he haunts the stretch between Lenox Avenue and Alton Road. Sitting on a milk crate and thumping away on his…
Mike Gerber works the piano as if he had begun playing in the womb. Actually he took to the instrument when he was just two and a half years old. Nearly 50 years later, the keyboardist (blind since birth) never ceases to wow audiences when he attacks the ivories. After…
Face it, this is a recording-company town. When bands sit down to play, they’re more likely to be laying tracks for a CD or mugging for a television camera than working a late-night crowd. Live music is less likely to waft through smoke-filled rooms in Miami than it is to…
The voice-mail message begins with the caller identifying himself in a clear, sharp tone: “Hey, this is Chris Thompson, executive producer of Action and Ladies Man, and I hear you’re trying to get ahold of me….” Long pause. “For some ungodly reason.” Then, in a split second, the voice goes…
A South Florida native who rocks, singer/songwriter DeNisco has been playing guitar since childhood and performing professionally for thirteen years. Now living in Dania Beach, she’s a regular on Miami-Dade stages. Riding the wake of her first CD, 1995’s On My Way (which garnered two Billboard songwriting awards for the…
People in Buenos Aires protest that the world never gives Argentines credit for their inventions: the radio, the bus, the ballpoint pen. Charly Alberti, retired drummer of South American pop phenomenon Soda Stereo, has a hi-tech version of an old complaint. He claims the Swiss watch company Swatch ripped off…
In the case of MC Brother J.C. Crawford, it was a legendary 1968 Halloween night call to arms at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom that launched both his and one particular garage band’s meteoric rise to cult stardom. “Brothers and sisters!” Crawford extolled, his invocation already set to a fevered pitch. “I…
Blackalicious doesn’t pay lip service to the false gods of commerce, name-drop hot clothing labels, seek celebrity endorsements, or pray fervently for a solid-gold single to drop from the sky and deliver them from obscurity. The Bay Area duo, composed of lyricist Gift of Gab and producer Chief Xcel, have…
The fusing of ancient Eastern mysticisms with the Western muscle of modern technology, while a noble concept, is one rarely accomplished to a satisfying artistic effect. For example bhangra, originating in the farms of the Punjab in the Indian subcontinent, marries its modern mutation of chirpy, bouncy melodies favored in…
Just call Wynton Marsalis the Terminator. No, he’s not replacing strongman-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger as a homicidal cyborg in yet another sequel to the sci-fi action-adventure flick. But to some the 38-year-old Marsalis — virtuoso trumpet player, composer, teacher, band leader, and ardent traditionalist — is a murderer. He is killing…
“Percussion is one aspect of musical culture that needs to be highlighted,” insists Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain, on the phone from his Peoria, Illinois, hotel room only minutes after arriving there from a sold-out stop on his current Masters of Percussion tour, an electrifying company of Indian percussionists that…
Most music that reaches us from the Balkans is emotionally of a piece with the area’s tragic history. But Gypsy brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia proves on Baro Biao, World Wide Wedding that Romanian music also can be deliriously celebratory. Well equipped to make momentous music for equally momentous occasions, the…
There’s something gracefully modest about the ten-year career of Kelly Hogan, a postpunk diva from Atlanta whose mastery of songcraft is rivaled only by her artistic range as a writer and interpreter. Her work in the early Nineties with the Jody Grind balanced rootsy traditionalism with altrock irreverence, and she…
In the white-tile living room of his sparsely furnished two-story house in Kendall, Roberto Martino is watching a video of his band, T-Vice, playing at Carnival 2000 last March in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A mass of black bodies clad in yellow T-Vice T-shirts moves from left to right across the big…
Glenn Danzig is a living, breathing cartoon character. No, really, just take a look at the cover of the new Danzig album, which pictures the singer emerging from a bog like the comic book character the Swamp Thing. Inch-deep third-degree burns scar his massive biceps. “Yeah, I’ve got 666 burned…
There is a compilation disc of Miami-based bands that frequented Churchill’s Hideaway, the Little Haiti haunt that has been a long-standing haven for all manner of rock and roll noise and punk-rock chaos. Issued in 1993 on Frank “Rat Bastard” Falestra’s Esync label, the CD’s title embodies both the ethos…
It pays to be young, tragic, and talented in the ’00s. A couple of years ago, our generation frowned upon the lay-me-bare memoir and the confessional song. The mere mention of such things conjured horrible images of James Taylor turning his heroin addiction into nursery rhymes or Elizabeth Wurtzel dining…
The debate about whether or not a scratch DJ is a “real” musician should be finished by now. It’s been more than twenty years since Grandmaster Flash first began working over the instrumental sides of disco twelve-inches at Bronx block parties, a little less than that since Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”…
For a fix of Finnish fiddle music, you’d naturally look in the Finland section of your friendly neighborhood CD store. But to satisfy that Finnish-harmonica jones, you’d best bypass the international bins altogether and grab this one-of-a-kind disc from the Marquette, Michigan-based Les Ross, Sr. Playing in the all-but-extinct lumberjack…
When people write about Yo La Tengo, they typically concentrate on the fact that the band’s drummer, Georgia Hubley, and its singer-guitarist, Ira Kaplan, are married, and that they sometimes sing about it. But the Hoboken trio is far more than an indie-rock version of the Eurythmics. It’s really about…
