The only reason why qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis, is known in the West when other types of Pakistani music remain hopelessly obscure is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. While he may not have been the greatest qawwal of the Twentieth Century, his two fusion CDs with British producer…
The first-floor lounge of the Radisson Deauville Resort Hotel is precisely the kind of place one would expect to find the cocktail set. Fifty blocks north of bustling South Beach, this gem of postwar-modern design features a sprawling lobby of sweeping curves and giant columns. Behind the bar the large…
Four years ago James McCauley received a phone call from what sounded like two knuckleheads putting on their best Hans and Franz routine. “Yah, ve are caw-ling for ein James Maggotron,” managed the caller in the thickest of Teutonic accents. “Ve haf come from Germany because ve luv your myu-zik!”…
Curd Duca looks out from behind his laptop at the crowd assembled in this warehouse loft-cum-living room/lounge somewhere in the shadows along the Miami River. Young artists, musicians, and hipsters are perched on couches against the wall, packed tightly near the bar and spilling out on to the terrace. A…
Perusing old demo tapes in a Tijuana recording studio in May 1999, Pepe Mogt came across the key elements of a new electronic border sound: forgotten recordings of the traditional Mexican tambora and norteño music. Mogt quickly alerted his friends Jorge Ruiz and Ramon Amor Amezcua. “Pepe called me to…
The needle on my record player is wearing thin./This record has been playing since the day you’ve been with him.” If you’re in the lucrative 12-to-24-year-old pop-music target market, you’ve heard this refrain from New Found Glory’s “Hit or Miss.” Rock radio is playing it ad nauseam. It’s being put…
Female impersonator Trinity, self-styled “next lady of jazz,” describes herself as “everyone’s typical Jewish aunt” in steep heels and rhinestones. “I get a lot of elderly people who come to the show and say it reminds them of Judy Garland,” says Jamie Grace, a 38-year-old Jewish guy who created Trinity…
Throughout Cirque du Soleil’s spectacular Dralion, a stunning team of Chinese gymnasts flip through hoops, balance stacks of rice bowls on their limbs, and tumble atop large wooden balls — often incredible acts based on ancient Asian acrobatics and dance. The accompanying music, a tapestry of vaguely ethnic sounds interwoven…
“I brought my car phone!” Mr. Entertainment boasts loudly as we file down the “Three-Four Persons” aisle of the Rascal House cattle chute. He waves a bright red Princess tabletop model in the air, chord dangling, attracting the attention of the two persons and one persons lined up on our…
Woe unto the lowly melodica. Why must it be consigned to the Fisher-Price page in the annals of great instruments? I can handle the nicknames: The pocket piano, toot-flute, blow accordion, wind piano, melodeon, melodyhorn, pianaca, and hooter all offend me not. But it still is shocking — shocking! –…
Some 40 years ago Cuba’s octave-hopping queen of melodrama, Xiomara Alfaro, poured her persona so thoroughly into the torch song “Siboney” it became impossible to imagine another soul attempting a straight-faced rendition of the same. But Raul Malo of the Mavericks matches Alfaro’s sun-extinguishing angst, and the all-star ensemble backing…
Something witty this way comes … then stops short with a screeching halt. The second release from these rock-country kidders, Brainwasher opens with a prophetic little tune that sounds like something off the English Patient soundtrack and aptly named “Overture: Love Theme from Brainwasher.” Obviously not afraid to make fun…
Let’s get this straight. Rock and roll is dead. Killed off sometime in the mid-Fifties when Elvis first copped that hip swivel and lip thing from Wynonie Harris and Bill Haley mapped the course of every rock and roll clown prince to follow: meteoric rise, decadent climax, rapid descent into…
Strumming an acoustic guitar does not a folksinger make. True, ability to play a guitar is a must. (Piano is fine, but a guitar’s portability allows for plucking around the campfire and hopping trains on the spur of the moment.) A hard life is not vital but useful for song…
Listening to tracks featured in Amores Perros — the viscera-twisting Mexican film up for an Academy Award — is like surfing border radio. The punkish props of the Mexican hip-hop group Control Machete, the shopworn spice of a recent Celia Cruz hit, standard cumbia, and the Hollies’ “Long Cool Woman”…
To make a tribute album to Sarah Vaughan is like paying court to the queen. Vaughan was beyond standard-bearer. With a voice that resonated with supreme nobility and magnitude throughout a career that spanned nearly 50 years until her death in 1990, she was her own genre. To compare Dianne…
When Brazilian bossa nova invaded the United States in the Sixties, the legacy was immediate and enduring: Kenny Dorham, Herbie Mann, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, and other American jazzers sunk their choppers into the likes of “Corcovado,” “Desafinado,” “Meditation,” and “One Night Samba” and concocted their own tunes…
In The Dirty South producer and director Wills Felin follows four strippers and a host of hip-hoppers on a musical-sexual romp around three infamous cities: Daytona Beach, Atlanta, and Miami. Against a backdrop of blue sky and blue water, blazing sun and blazing weed, bikini-clad booties jiggle to the boomin’…
When a teenage girl in the remote Chilean town of Antofagasta heard Ricardo Montaner for the first time, she could hardly believe the voice on the radio came from so far away. The lyrics about love that could “submerge her in altitudes” and discover within her “a heart naked to…
Like a bad habit, long-time local promoter Tom Bowker is back on the scene with a show featuring his favorite virus, Antiseen. In true South Florida do-it-yourself fashion, Bowker is flying his own personal “punk-rock gods” down from the Carolinas as a 30th birthday present to himself. It is bad…
If Bob Marley had not left us for Zion on that May day back in 1981, he would have turned 56 years old this month. And as with Elvis, Jim Morrison, and my late hamster Lucky, I sometimes fantasize about what the world would look like if Bob Marley were…
Goodfellas gangster Paulie coined the phrase, but at the MIDEM-Cannes conference, which took place last month, Talal G. Shamoon, senior vice president of media for Intertrust USA, used the movie mobster’s strong words to describe the current state of the music download biz. “2001 will really be the year where…
