Rain is falling lightly when piano player Paquito Hechavarria gets the bum’s rush from a Coral Gables restaurant. The musician is three nights into a gig accompanying a blues singer at Mike’s Hideaway, an upscale eatery that boasts a pristine white baby grand but few customers for dinner on a…
Bid your fondest farewell to Lua (409 Espanola Way, Miami Beach, 534-0061), the South Beach club that has provided much of the pomp and circumstance on the beach for the last three years (that has to be some kind of record on South Beach). On Saturday, February 1, Lua celebrates…
Various Artists Enzso (Epic) How to describe this record? Well, let’s begin with the basics. This is a compilation of songs by the Eighties New Zealand pop band Split Enz, original home to Crowded Houseniks Neil and Tim Finn. The songs, however, have been translated into orchestral arrangements by keyboardist…
Lou Barlow first appeared as an unsettling blip on the radar screen of Eighties postpunk. As the tape-looping bassist for Dinosaur Jr. and then as the original lo-fi bedroom bard of the early Sebadoh records, Barlow seemed like nothing more than an anomaly, an angst-ridden character bent on upsetting the…
Tonight (Thursday) help celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Sunshine Jazz Organization of South Florida at South Beach power haunt Amnesia (136 Collins Ave., Miami Beach, 531-5535). An unforgettable evening full of legendary tunes awaits when the organization, dedicated to keeping the tradition of jazz music alive, pays tribute to…
RuPaul Foxy Lady (Rhino) Like gangsta rappers, RuPaul — a black drag queen/diva/talk-show host — is into beats and poses. And like all the best gangstas, RuPaul Charles is most interested in using his funky beats and flamboyant pose to get down to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately many…
Get ready for radical times as party promoter Bobby Radical churns out some new nights. Start the weekend off early at Polly Esther’s (841 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 535-5633) tonight (Thursday) at “Phunky”; you’ll find two decades are better than one as the Seventies meet the Eighties. Expect to hear…
Lonnie Smith Trio Purple Haze: A Tribute to Jimi Hendrix (MusicMasters Jazz) The first time I saw Jimi Hendrix, at the Fillmore in San Francisco in 1967, he was just what his legend says he is: an exploding orgasm, pulling notes and sounds from places you could not see, leading…
If it seems like there’s a ska show coming to South Florida every week, maybe it’s because there is. For the last two years, ska bands from across the country — from Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, practically everywhere but the music’s homeland of Jamaica — have made Miami…
Careerists are rare in punk rock, but not as rare as you might think. The Queers, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, and Minor Threat/Fugazi auteur Ian MacKaye have all been entrenched in this fickle, youth-obsessed genre for well over a decade, and there are a few groups from the first wave…
Bill Orcutt’s new debut solo album is both a reiteration of Harry Pussy’s complex noise experiments and a move away from his main band’s barely controlled sonic assaults. Issued last month on the mighty fine NYC indie label Audible Hiss, Orcutt’s untitled set (actually, the spine reads Bill Orcutt “Solo…
Sun Ra The Singles (Evidence) Even in death space-traveling jazz man Sun Ra makes listeners choose sides. His admirers, whose numbers include Phish, Michael Ray’s Cosmic Krewe, and George Clinton’s P-Funk mob, remember him as a madcap entertainer and an eccentric, creative genius. Many avid jazz buffs give Ra his…
Teddy Morgan is only 25 years old, but the blues-guitar hotshot brings to his playing an economy, precision, and taste that is rare among the young guns currently slugging it out on the modern blues circuit. One listen to Morgan’s fine second album Louisiana Rain (Antone’s/Discovery) proves he has little…
Acoustic rock and quirky pop take over Tobacco Road (626 S. Miami Ave., 374-1198) tonight (Thursday), as women of rock Diane Ward, Magda Hiller, and Marianne Flemming do it In the Round for a night of soul-stirring sounds and some pretty nifty guitar playing. The ladies take the stage at…
Back before there were long-form videos and CD-ROMs for overweening artiste types to wallow in, musicians used the concept album to overextend their half-baked ideas. Not content with letting a single song do its job, groups charged an entire collection of tunes with the mission of delivering a single dunderheaded…
At the suggestion of a friend, this week’s column was going to be a breakdown of the ten best and worst locally produced albums/cassettes/compact discs of 1996. The best-of thing was easy to compile — Kreamy ‘Lectric Santa’s Music For Meditation, Relaxation and the Imminent Overthrow of All World Governments,…
Another New Year’s Eve has slipped by, so we can get on with the truly important things in life. And this Friday, January 3, it’s all about renewal when the Kitchen Club reopens its doors after a monthlong hiatus. Experience the dark and the dank as this party place moves…
The Louvin Brothers were country music’s best-ever brother team, and when they titled their greatest album Tragic Songs of Life, they weren’t kidding around. Over the course of that record, a woman wanders “this wide world all over,” leaving her abandoned lover to contemplate suicide; a man, rich beyond his…
New Year’s Eve again, kiddies. Surely the most overrated night ever to enjoy celebrity. It’s the annual call for overindulgence (“amateur night,” Jimmy Breslin once dubbed it). Oh, well, no amount of complaining will rid the streets of throngs of club kids and grooving grandmas. So you might as well…
1. Sex Pistols (no future, no integrity, no point) 2. Styx (oh, no, Mr. Reduxo) 3. The Monkees (another Pleasant Valley payday) 4. Kiss (The Elders) 5. Journey (open palms) 6. The Who (will get fooled again — and again) 7. Van Halen (slummin’ with the devil) 8. The [Talking]…
I could have easily filled this space with my own review of the music year that was, not to mention reel off at least 40 albums that helped carry me along from day to day and month to month. But as this is a charitable time of year, I figured,…
The news that there’s a new Van Morrison album out should be thrilling. But for some of us there have been so many Morrison discs in the last year alone that it’s a bit anticlimactic. And if anyone mentions that Ronnie Scott or that Georgie Fame is on the album,…
