Long before slide-guitarist Ry Cooder helped off-island audiences rediscover Cuban music with the Buena Vista Social Club, U.K.-based label Tumi Music was releasing the best in Cuban and Latin-American styles, both traditional and forward-looking. Neither David Alvarez nor the members of his back-up band Juego de Manos, whose name can…
Like a zombie in a shopping mall, impervious to the bullets fired at its heart by the desperate and weary, the tribute album continues to stomp across the landmarks of rock, pop, and soul, destroying all in its soulless, heartless path to destruction. The latest victim is Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen’s…
Who stole the soul? Add Rawkus Records, the label that puts out the Lyricist Lounge series, to that list. In hip-hop the name of the record label often carries as much weight as the artists themselves when it comes to influencing sales (see Cash Money Records). Armed with arguably the…
At an altitude of 8660 feet, the massive sound system at last month’s Rock in the Park 2000 injected the thin Bogotá air with a three-day dose of hardcore and heavy metal. Thrashing guitars reverberated off the Spanish colonial buildings that surround the Plaza Bolivar, while 200,000 angry youngsters clad…
Asked how he feels about his first trip to the United States, 24-year-old Yotuel of the Paris-based Cuban hip-hop group Orishas says it will be like tasting forbidden fruit. “We were raised to think of the U.S. as el enemigo (the enemy),” he explains. ” We were told, “The U.S…
Ignore for a moment Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson’s feelings about hip-hop radio in 2000. Glance back with him as he recounts the first-ever spin of a track by his group the Roots, cofounded by the drummer and producer, on New York City radio in early 1993. “It was anticlimactic for two…
In Griot Time stands magnificently on its own as a sampler of Malian string music styles, but it works even better as a soundtrack. Don’t look for the film at your neighborhood video store, though. The CD is the companion to the Temple University Press book In Griot Time, by…
It has been about a year since vocalist Luis Bofill dropped off the stage of Miami’s Café Nostalgia. Shortly after the establishment relocated from its glory-day Little Havana setting to its swankier Miami Beach digs on 41st Street, the seasoned singer, who once fronted the house band Grupo Nostalgia, fell…
Watch any fairly recent interview clips with Brian Wilson, and you’re faced with a very good example of therapy gone horribly forever wrong. A jittery knot of unsettled nerves and body ticks, mush-mouthed and seemingly mush-brained, Wilson clearly is damaged in a way that makes candidly accessing his work feel…
The flyers for the 2000 Rasin Festival boasted a Boukan Ginen “reunion concert.” The Haitian roots band appeared to have broken up after performing in the first annual rasin festival in 1996, when bass player Richard Laguerre stayed behind while his mates returned to the island. Boukan Ginen has not…
About 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, November 8, under the auspices of the Miami Light Project, the doctor was in. Escorted by a well-dressed man to a microphone at the center of the Gusman Center’s stage, Dr. Nina Simone, recipient of honorary degrees from Amherst College and Malcolm X University, began what…
Tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd turns in another ECM recording that looks and sounds like much of the German label’s high-quality “chamber jazz” output with an emphasis on clean recording sound and austere record cover graphics. ECM has garnered a reputation for a uniformity of sound and presentation during the past…
In just a little more than a year since its inception, See Venus has generated more buzz than most local bands do in their entire careers — and thanks to the Internet, the group has done it without performing a single live show. Thirty-year-old founder and guitarist Christopher Moll has…
Doug Sulpy and Ray Schweighardt’s book Get Back: The Unauthorized Chronicle of the Beatles’ Let It Be Disaster contains the sort of minutiae that gives a hard-on to the hard-core. The 332-page book, published last year, is less a narrative than an autopsy constructed from bootlegged outtakes made during the…
Oh, the crimes that have been committed in the name of world beat. The United Nations is convening a court in the Hague to deal with the atrocities of Scandinavian didgeridoo players, scat-singing Bulgarians, Brits performing in made-up languages, Americans affecting Caribbean accents, classical Indian ragas set to drum machines…
Each of Atlanta duo Outkast’s three previous records refined their Dixie-fried funk a little bit more, but Stankonia — hard, fast, and chaotic — is a dramatic leap forward. This is the sound of Prince and George Clinton hooking up with Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad for a chitlin circuit tour…
Rising out of the Mississippi hill country earlier this year on the strength of an engaging if uneven debut album, Shake Hands with Shorty, and some overripe hype (a Time magazine spread a few months back was so heavy on down-home mystique that it should have made any actual Southerner…
What does the music wrenched from the reluctant psyche of a tortured man sound like? Kid A. With more audience anticipation than the birth of a nation, Radiohead has released Kid A, the fourth album from the media-defined Most Important Band in Rock. To listen to the album is to…
It’s all too typical that a man who should be revered for co-writing “Soul Man,” “Hold On! I’m Comin’,” or “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” for Sam & Dave or any number of stellar achievements has stickers placed on his albums telling the world that this is the…
In terms of quantity and quality of music produced during the decade, Polly Jean Harvey can make as much of a claim to being most significant music maker of the Nineties as anyone. But while all five of her previous albums are astounding aesthetic artifacts, it’s hard to put them…
Pianist Brad Mehldau is an interesting critter: a rather uncommercial-sounding jazz player who alternates between solo piano and work with his trio of bass, drums, and piano. He is not quite 30 years old, has a multirecord deal with Warner Bros., writes brainy and ponderous liner notes to accompany his…
Until recently, two constants have defined Elvis Crespo’s career: a chin-length bob and choruses built on the same three-note melody. That’s all over now. The waifish merengue megastar has traded in the familiar hairdo for a sophisticated layered cut and exchanged producer Roberto Cora, who oversaw Crespo’s first two blockbuster…
