If, as the dear departed Frank Sinatra once claimed, L.A. is a lady, then Nashville must be her sleazy sister — a fickle, powerful, vampiric whore who flits from from one new artist to the next, sucking each dry of all airplay and record sales before casting the pallid corpse…
Last week Haitian refugees made headlines again, and once again Jacquecine Etienne had to explain. For some of Etienne’s American colleagues in the Miami law office where she works as a paralegal, the whole notion seemed incomprehensible: Haitians journeying from their homeland to Miami in a leaky freighter — with…
Gary Numan Exile (Cleopatra) Gary Numan The Mix (Cleopatra) Synth-crazed robot and occasional musical innovator Gary Numan has been responsible for some of new wave’s most laughably dated moments, from “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” and the massive 1979 hit “Cars” to the dreary, sci-fi schlock typified by “Down in the Park”…
Frank Sinatra never gave a better performance as an actor than he did in The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), in which he starred as Frankie Machine, a poker dealer and junkie who emerges from prison hoping to kick all his bad habits (heroin included) and earn a living…
“You know that feeling when you’re in big trouble and you know it, but you just feel like laughing?” Mos Def asks from the stage at El Flamingo, a club on the western edge of the revitalized New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Indie rap’s rookie of the year laughs…
In 1970 Steve Boone, onetime bassist for the Lovin’ Spoonful, went down to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, bought himself a sailboat, and made it his home. For three years he sailed around the Florida Keys and the Caribbean. He lived frugally, eating mostly brown rice and fresh vegetables…
Miles Davis/Bill Laswell Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974 (Columbia) Listening to Bill Laswell remix, reconstruct, and recycle the work of trumpet legend Miles Davis on Panthalassa brings to mind Natalie Cole dueting with her long-dead father Nat King Cole at the Grammys a few years ago. Dead men,…
The Mavericks Trampoline (MCA) Trampoline, the fourth record by the Mavericks, wasn’t recorded in Miami. It doesn’t have any songs about Miami. And yet it has Miami in its blood. Once upon a time the Mavs were Miami’s brightest, newest musicians, a country-rock foursome whose powerful live shows packed in…
So you wanna be a rock and roll star. You can already see yourself up there trading licks with wailing Eddie Van Halen. Or maybe you consider yourself a silver-tongued rapper — ready, willing, and able to slam some grooves with Puff Daddy. Or perhaps even as an up-and-coming jazz…
Scott Weiland 12 Bar Blues (Atlantic) During Stone Temple Pilots’ short but amazing three-album run, frontman Scott Weiland excelled at fulfilling the expectations of both his fans and his critics. From platinum-selling faux-grunge icon to drug-addled rock star to tortured and rehabbed artiste, Weiland drove public passion and critical opinion…
Heading north on I-95 toward her home in Fort Lauderdale, Mary Karlzen takes a sip from a bottle of Miller Lite and returns it to the cup-holder hanging from her dashboard. It’s well after three o’clock on a recent Sunday morning, and Karlzen has just finished headlining a show at…
Bob Marley The Complete Wailers 1967-1972 Part 1 (JAD/Koch International) Although it’s neither as comprehensive as Island’s Songs of Freedom (1992) or as revelatory as Rounder’s One Love (1991), JAD’s triple-disc Complete Wailers collection covers a crucial period in the rich, extensive history of Bob Marley and the Wailers –…
Techno-dance junkie, speed-metal maniac, smooth-jazz fan — whoever you are, listen up: Some rainy day the raging inequities of life are gonna come knocking and you will understand, at long last, just what the concept of deep melancholia really means. It doesn’t matter if you’re living the good life out…
The Dirty Dozen Ears to the Wall (Mammoth) Back in the late Seventies, when disco ruled, the New Orleans-based Dirty Dozen Brass Band was busy attempting to keep its hometown’s old-fashioned “second line” tradition alive. The band accompanied marching funeral processions, a not uncommon sight throughout the city, and added…
Marthin Chan, rhythm guitarist for Miami’s Volumen Cero, sits in the driver’s seat of his Dodge Caravan, parked in front of the Kendall townhouse where vocalist-bassist Luis Tamblay lives. With his left knee drawn up to his chest, Chan contemplates how his band — himself, Tamblay, lead guitarist Christian Escuti,…
For the first time during a half-hour-plus telephone conversation, Alan Sparhawk really laughs. Not that the guitarist-singer for the minimalist avant-rock trio Low is humorless or anything. Rather, it’s just that he usually punctuates his measured comments about his music, his band, and his take on the record biz with…
“From this side,” reports London resident Cris Stevens, “the drum and bass dance scene is really dropping off.” Stevens is half of the new, beat-oriented instrumental act Chocolate Weasel. He and partner Marc Royal (both 29 years old) are veterans of the recent British drum and bass dance craze, having…
Porkpie hats and checkered suits make for great video imagery. So too stretchy-tubed trombones and overamped pseudopunks twisting their wiry frames around the syncopated beats of Jamaican dance music. Ska, the hyped-up progenitor of reggae, is simply made for MTV, its offspring M2, and any other channel that broadcasts music…
Pulp This Is Hardcore (Island) Jarvis Cocker’s songs are much like Martin Amis’s novels: The characters are distasteful, the situations sordid, the sex unsavory, and the humor cruel. It’s an ugly picture of humankind stripped to the skivvies with its immorality dangling in the wind. Amis likes to hide his…
Radio Kings Money Road (Bullseye) Dance crazes will come and go. Rock musicians will alternately grow their hair long and shave it off, according to fashion dictates. Entire new genres of music will spring up out of the fertile imaginations of urban youths and various far-flung, style-hopping experimentalists. And all…
Raul Di Blasio, the Argentine pianist, is brandishing a knife. He is not trying to teach a nosy journalist a lesson, nor is he attempting to maim himself. The piece of silverware he wields can do little harm. It’s a butter knife. He is sitting outdoors in the Courtyard restaurant…
Disc jockey, musicologist, record distributor, sometime bodyguard, and friend of Cuban musicians everywhere, Emilio Vandenedes was a pioneer in the dissemination of contemporary Cuban music in the United States. As a DJ in the early Eighties, he brought sounds from the island to radio listeners in Los Angeles. And after…
