The hyperbolically titled The Story of Cuba could not possibly live up to its name with a mere fifteen tracks. While its compilers certainly take poetic license, the disc does offer a lively variety of contemporary Cuban music, including songs performed by NG La Banda, Elio Reve, Los Van Van,…
Oh God, it’s a world-beat record from two aging rock drummers who really ought to know better than to attempt something like this. Charlie Watts, long-time drummer for the Rolling Stones and American Civil War artifact collector, has never made it a secret that he loves jazz much more than…
Security grew tense backstage at the tenth annual Colombian Independence Day Festival at Tamiami Park late last month. A record crowd squeezed into the fairgrounds in front of the main stage, spilling over into the fenced-off VIP section. Ordinary folks eager to get close to their idols added to the…
The scope and depth of north Mississippi blues are amply documented on the latest releases by the Oxford-based Fat Possum label, the highly touted indie responsible for breaking the likes of R.L. Burnside and the late Junior Kimbrough. T-Model Ford’s She Ain’t None of Your’n and Robert Belfour’s What’s Wrong…
It’s commonplace in our cynical world for people to respond to an overabundance of inequality and suffering with an infuriating shrug of the shoulders: Well, hey, nobody said the world was perfect. But there’s a difference between inescapable imperfections — death specifically, for instance, or pain generally — and the…
Years ago the combination of Sonic Youth and Pearl Jam would’ve been a sure-fire misprint. Even when Sonic Youth were inching their way toward the rock mainstream at the turn of the Nineties, opening for Neil Young and writing damn near linear songs on their early major-label releases (e.g, 1990’s…
Eleven years ago Pepe Alva could not get to Miami fast enough. When the singer was seventeen years old, his father moved the family from northern Peru to southern Ohio. After a month in Cincinnati, Alva was itching for the highway. “I went to the map with a highlighter,” he…
Although it has been long awaited by her fans, Albita’s pleasing new release, Son, is not an especially remarkable album. But it is a personal coup for the singer, who arrived in Miami in 1993 for a total immersion course in record-industry politics that included being rejected as “too Cuban,”…
No one can argue with the amazing popularity of rapper Eminem. Still, his meteoric rise has been fraught with as much controversy as success. In his climb to the top of the charts, he’s managed to anger gay and women’s groups, the media, fellow musicians (‘N Sync, Britney Spears, Christina…
Whereas most drum and bass acts are identifiable by a signature sound (Goldie, LTJ Bukem, and the like), Spring Heel Jack doesn’t really have one, which makes its music all the more interesting. The duo’s inventiveness may be a result of pedigree: When he’s not with Spring Heel Jack, John…
It’s no exaggeration to say Jai Uttal is the best in his genre. He’s the only one in his genre. He’s built his devotional-music shtick from the ground up, and his contagious enthusiasm transcends any doubts I have about forebearing hymns to Shiva, Krishna, and others in the Hindu pantheon…
Although the mystical guitarist may be correct in believing otherwise, the phenomenal success of the diamond-selling, Grammy-sweeping Supernatural has a very natural explanation. In the face of volatile industry pressures, former Arista label-head Clive Davis made some brilliantly simple choices in this collaboration. He wed the growing public appetite for…
The crumpled funky white T-shirt lay at the bottom of the laundry bag. It had been there for years. A rainbow of colors on the front advertised Miami Rocks Too!, Vol. 3., a yearly industry showcase for a select few local groups hoping to hit the big time. The back…
They like the gray area. Like a pitcher who paints the corners of the plate with a late-breaking curve ball, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen (Steely Dan to us) avoid giving you anything you can hammer. Plenty of critics and pundits have the purple thumbs to prove that while their…
For Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman — known to their fans as Dean and Gene Ween, respectively — Ween’s new album, White Pepper, was a long time coming. The duo released a double live album, Paintin’ the Town Brown: Ween Live ’90-’98, last year, but it was a quickly assembled…
Rikki Rockett knows he’s in a band that has become the Rodney Dangerfield of rock. Poison gets no respect. Although the much-maligned “hair-metal” movement of the mid to late Eighties suffered near extinction at the beginning of the following decade, when Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the grunge elite rolled into…
In May 1997 singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley put on his best thrift-store suit and got a friend to drive him to the Memphis Zoo. Buckley, an ascendant alternative-rock icon and reluctant heartthrob, had decided to apply for a job as a zookeeper. The 30-year-old Buckley had temporarily relocated from New York…
Alternately dissonant and melodic, cacophonous yet inarguably tuneful, Chapel Hill’s Archers of Loaf were one of the greatest guitar bands to emerge from the indie-rock underground of the early Nineties. Taking cues from their hometown comrades in Polvo and the six-string battles between Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, Archers…
On the minus side, the self-titled first American release by Uzbekistan’s pop songbird Yulduz Usmanova could have been produced by the World Trade Organization. The hungry, spinning, microtonal singing of Usmanova comes together with gritty backing vocals by South Africa’s The Family Factory in a buttery blend of synthetic textures…
When Pepe Horta opened a second Café Nostalgia just more than a year ago on Miami Beach, the swanky new digs stood out, even amid the flash and glitter of the SoBe scene. But the sumptuous glamour could not prevent a pang in the hearts of many of the regulars…
When attacking the music business, one need not even break a sweat. After all, how hard is it to land a punch or a thousand upon a bloated carcass that can no longer move? In the not-so-distant future — maybe a decade from now, or a year from now, or…
Omara Portuondo is the latest (and last) of the featured members of the Buena Vista Social Club to record a solo album, and it is a brilliant crescendo to the series that began with the collective’s 1997 Grammy-winning debut. It is not surprising that on this rhapsodic CD Portuondo shows…
