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Best Star Wars Tribute

New World Symphony

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 original Star Wars score on to their own chosen instrumentation, the ever-so-proper stage of the Lincoln Theatre suddenly became host to a wide range of oboe-playing aliens and a very imposing Darth Vader (no Michael Tilson Thomas jokes, please). Frankly by the time the NWS got to the "death star" scene, it was hard to tell who was having more fun, the audience or the musicians themselves. One thing's for sure, after watching a brace of finely choreographed bassoon-blowing Stormtroopers bring down the house (while gliding on rollerskates no less), anything further from George Lucas is bound to be anticlimactic.

Best Rock Concert In The Everglades

Phish

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 converged for an old-fashioned campout-cum-rock fest, complete with an on-site radio station to remind them not to feed the alligators. The soundtrack (and the magnetic draw that saw a virtual city appear overnight on a scrubby field) was the little cult phenomenon that could, Vermont's premier improvisatory neohippie outfit, Phish. While news choppers buzzed overhead and newspaper critics scratched their brows, Phish's devout fans gleefully settled in for two days of Little Feat-style guitar play and whimsical freeform jamming. A Porta Potti even was rolled out onto the stage to enable a midnight-to-dawn uninterrupted set, a supreme test of endurance. After all, what better way was there for a jam band to properly christen the century turnover? Pundits may have argued over the concert's cultural significance and made tiresome Woodstock references, but Phish's flock was much more concerned with boogying.

Best Blues Radio Program

Portraits in Blue

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 a dark sky. Portraits (Monday from 11:00 a.m. to noon) devotes its entire hour to a single artist's music. Brief, often poignant, biographical information about the artist also is included throughout a set of tunes spanning the musician's career. Informative and entertaining, Portraits is produced in New Jersey. Too bad. Let's hope more local radio programmers take note and follow suit with shows of their own.

Best Female Radio Voice

Tracy Fields

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 always my love." Since 1995 on WLRN, her sultry jazz selections and intimate intonations have conveyed that romance, wooing listeners and providing a cozy respite from the elements. Hear her 8:00 p.m. until midnight Saturdays.

Best Local Songwriter

Raul del Sol

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 begin at 10:00 Thursday evenings at Starfish, you might hear ballads like "Encuentro" and "Diferencias," both recorded on Spanish-language rocker Amaury Gutierrez's latest album. Francisco Cespedes, Chayanne, and even Jamaican pop sensation Beenie Man also have tapped del Sol's gifts for composition and arrangement. While love often is del Sol's subject, his music recalls the confections of the troubadour-style Cuban nueva trova movement of the Sixties. He writes polished, apolitical folk rock with a tropical feel.

Best Posthumous Live Album

Live

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 Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore during his guest-VJ slot on MTV -- the more South Floridians scratched their heads and passed the Tylenol. Which may have been apropos. As the band attacked its instruments during (interminable for some) fifteen-minute sets, the message often seemed to be: "We suffered for our art; now it's your turn!" Harry Pussy launched its final sonic assault in May 1997 at Churchill's. That parting shot has been enshrined in its entirety on this posthumously released live album. Aside from capturing the outfit in all its shrieking glory, the record also serves as a welcome reminder that not everybody's creative response to our burg's fabled sun and surf is "Don't worry. Be happy."

Best Local Acoustic Performer

Victor Manuel "Chocolatin" Casanova

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 a powerful voice, Chocolatin often exclaims with pride for his race and national origin. He learned to sing and play largely from his family during childhood, beginning a career that has spanned nearly three decades. He has mastered an array of international standards and Peruvian favorites, including "La Flor de Canela" ("Cinnamon Flower") by the Andean nation's most beloved composer Chabuca Grande. The rich tones of Chocolatin can be heard every Saturday at the Peruvian Grill in Kendall.

Best Local Caribbean Band

Bahamas Junkanoo Review

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. In Overtown Bahamian migrants founded the Sunshine Junkanoo Band in 1957 under the direction of Bruce Beneby. In 1993 former Sunshiners Langston Longley, David Dean, and Eddie Clark recruited more recent arrivals to create the Bahamas Junkanoo Review, which invades public school classrooms with whistles and bells, plays for tourists at hotels, and livens up nearly every local parade. The tireless Longley and his whistle-blowing, foot-stomping crew move back and forth between Miami and our nearest neighbors, taking with them the most brilliant costumes and latest Bahamian beats.

Best Locally Produced Play

Quills

In many American political plays, a guy (it's usually a guy) comes onstage and talks. The set, the costumes, the lighting -- they're all window dressing, which helps to explain the sorry state of political drama. Doug Wright's 1995 work Quills, however, dissects the issues of censorship through the trials of the Marquis de Sade. It's a play of ideas, driving home the notion that you can't get rid of art you don't like merely by destroying its author. But it's also a play of images. In the exquisitely designed Florida Stage production, Jim Fulton's lighting design reproduced the Marquis's naughty writing as luminescent streaks across the theater walls. Allen D. Cornell's inventive turntable set gave rise to multiple arresting scenes, not the least of which was the yanking out of the Marquis's tongue. Suzette Pare's costumes smartly outfitted the small-minded denizens of nineteenth-century France as well as the increasingly-more-disrobed Sade. And Scott Burgess's sound design created an asylumwide orgy we could "see," though it happened off-stage. At the helm was artistic director Louis Tyrrell, whose fluid hand and wicked sense of humor proved to be assets the Marquis would have loved.

Best Solo Show

Judith Delgado as Diana Vreeland

In a season fraught with top-drawer solo performances (Charles Nelson Reilly in Life of Reilly, Kathleen Turner in Tallulah, Melinda Lopez in Medianoche, and Jean Stapleton in Eleanor: Her Secret Journey), Judith Delgado towered over all. Playing fashion diva Diana Vreeland, the actress delivered a performance that lived up to Vreeland's motto: "Give 'em what they didn't know they wanted." Vreeland's life story garnered 1996 Drama Desk and Obie awards for creators Mark Hampton and Mary Louise Wilson when Wilson starred in it. Elizabeth Ashley did the honors when the national tour passed through South Florida in 1998. Nonetheless Delgado, a genius at transforming herself, turned the tastemaker and long-time Vogue editor into something of her own (and director Joseph Adler's) making. Even the actress's elegant, oversize hands conspired to become a perfect physical match for Vreeland's elegant, larger-than-life personality. It was a performance that reached out and grabbed us by our lapels.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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