Latin rock veteran Pepe Alva and his band Alma Raymi (“soul celebration” in Quechuan) spent much of the past year in the studio, working on the follow-up album to 1997’s Pa’ Mostrarte Mi Amor (MATT Entertainment). With a new disc tentatively titled Comprometida (Engaged), Alva makes a bid for the…
Get ready for a little Cuban chemistry with Grupo Nostalgia. The Latin jam ensemble that won New Times’s award for Best Latin Band in 1996 and 1998 has completely transformed itself. The nucleus remains bassist and band director Omar Hernandez. Circling around him for the past few years have been…
One by one 50 musical acts — that’s right, more than 4 dozen — alighted Tobacco Road’s upstairs stage from 9:30 p.m. until past 3:30 a.m. for this starry-eyed, six-hour extravaganza. The show’s loving creator was Jeff Rollason, musical son of former Miami City Manager Frank Rollason. Once known as…
Musicians around town often complain that Miami’s reputation as little more than an international playground makes it difficult for them to play styles that depart from the tourist-oriented mainstream. It’s certainly true in the local jazz scene, a genre that has a tough time, commercially speaking, almost anywhere in America…
With WDNA-FM’s Steve Radzi laying his Reggae Beat to rest after nearly twenty years, the Caribbean radio crown safely belongs to Clint O’Neil, who has provided the tropical soundtrack of choice for night owls since 1979. Aside from those gravel-voiced Bob Marley-show IDs (recorded back in the late Seventies, when…
Delia’s arrival in Miami one year ago is the stuff of fairy tales. Once upon a time on a tropical island, there was a lovely young woman with a voice like a precious instrument. She sang so beautifully that in 1991 she won the prestigious OTI prize for Latin music,…
After watching Trick Daddy’s last album, www.thug.com, go gold, and seeing his leering mug plastered all over MTV, the Box, and BET, it’s safe to say Miami’s hip-hop scene has definitely found life after Luke. Not that Trick Daddy himself sounds too happy about his newfound fame and fortune: On…
Among the warehouses just west of Biscayne Boulevard and north of the Design District lives birdman (a.k.a. Sean Gould). Since graduating in 1987 from Clemson University with an English degree, the six-foot-four blond-haired Gould has been honing the art of what he calls “urban pioneering.” What this amounts to: moving…
In a city of conga players, bell clangers, and maracas shakers, Brazilian percussionist Claudio Silva stands apart. The largest country in Latin America, Brazil also boasts the greatest number of percussion instruments, from the Amazonian rattle to the booming surdo of the samba schools. Silva dominates them all. The versatile…
Once again Rat Bastard’s cacophonous collective Laundry Room Squelchers are tops in Miami noise. Not that there aren’t other noise artists doing notable things, such as Monotract, which performed to a packed house with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore at the Knitting Factory in New York City. But no one wants…
Since 1989 the “mystic thunder” of Loray Mistik has boomed all over town. Led by Papaloko (Jude Thegenus), the self-crowned king of vodou pop, this ten-piece band mixes traditional vodou rhythms with West African percussion, rock and roll, blues, and hip-hop. A painter, political commentator, and cultural promoter as well…
No other Miami frontman can carry you through a tune like Endo’s Gil Bitton. First, understand the jet-fueled rock Endo belts out lands somewhere between Rage Against the Machine and Limp Bizkit. Second, realize Bitton puts everything he has into a performance, prowling the stage and gesticulating to each break-neck…
This welcoming second-floor rabbit warren of rooms located in the heart of downtown Miami was ahead of the pack in the area’s renaissance. In fact it’s still way ahead of everyone else. Opened in the late Nineties by David Haskin, the Wallflower was strictly art based at first, with the…
Forget everything you’ve heard about Lynyrd Skynyrd’s snarling Floridian frontman dying in a fiery 1977 plane crash. He’s alive and well, just as pissed off as ever about the sorely maligned Southern Man, and presently heading up local outfit the Holy Rollin’ Hellfires. That Dixie-steeped flavor of old is still…
Music by the light of the moon — an intoxicating combination. Certainly something that’s gone on forever and a day. But on a regular basis in Miami? Apparently not. That is until 1995, when Barnacle State Historic Site park manager Terry Coulliette and friends dreamed up the idea for the…
The usual kudos go to perennial winner Fusión Latina at WDNA-FM (88.9), but for those whose tastes are not exclusively tropical, the University of Miami’s Invasión Latina with Liliana Rodriguez is the only outlet in town for Latin alternative music. The vibe is very late-night-in-the-dormitory, with Liliana laying out groovy…
As hip-hop continues down its path toward world domination, cash registers ringing loudly all the way, it seems in increasing danger of calcifying. For more and more up-and-coming rappers, pursuing their art often appears simply to be a matter of choosing a role: Gangsta thug? Macked-out pimp? Or smooth balladeer?…
There’s an easy way to weed out the musical heavyweights from the merely mediocre. Regular songwriters craft works about love, loss, and universal experiences. Boring. True visionaries turn their attention to more pressing matters: their own trials in the spotlight. Witness the navel-gazing tunes of Van Morrison (“The Story of…
Gaby Gabriel is best known as the long-time leader of the house orchestra at the Fontainebleau Hilton’s Club Tropigala on Miami Beach. The exuberant Cuba-born singer/percussionist has developed a musical repertoire to match the diversity of his audiences, which range from Latin-American tourists to sunbirds and celebrities. But Gabriel hasn’t…
If ever an album title seemed appropriate, it’s Ischemic Strokes, the moniker Phoenecia slapped on its most recent collection, which gathered up kindred souls recording for their own Schematic label and placed them alongside the duo’s own skittering, frazzled creations. After all, an ischemic stroke — a sudden, sharp cutoff…
Drawing from a stock of blues standards, William “Max” Maxwell lends Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road a touch of cultural credibility. Many the fashion-savvy beachcomber ignores this “old school” busker while he haunts the stretch between Lenox Avenue and Alton Road. Sitting on a milk crate and thumping away on his…
Mike Gerber works the piano as if he had begun playing in the womb. Actually he took to the instrument when he was just two and a half years old. Nearly 50 years later, the keyboardist (blind since birth) never ceases to wow audiences when he attacks the ivories. After…
