We all know Africa gave birth to the blues. Identifying the father has been a favorite game of recent CDs, which try to match John Lee Hooker’s DNA to a specific West African style. Taj Mahal traded songs with a six-piece Malian folk ensemble fronted by kora player Toumani Diabate…
If the combination of jazz and theater is rare, then the combination of avant-garde jazz and theatre is on the endangered species list. With the notable exception of Carla Bley and Paul Haine’s Escalator over the Hill, there are few recorded examples of avant-garde jazz artists who have created specific…
It’s that season when everyone’s thoughts turn to music, specifically what’s going to happen at the Winter Music Conference later this month. Mawla Music has turned thought into action by staging what is perhaps the first pre-WMC event, Thunderground at Amnesia (136 Collins Ave., Miami Beach) on Friday. Miami’s Trip…
When considering the Caribbean’s greatest dance bands, Cuba’s Los Van Van and Puerto Rico’s El Gran Combo usually are among the first to roll off the lips of Latin-music aficionados. But a table in that VIP section also should be reserved for the Dominican Republic’s incomparable merengue crew, Los Hermanos…
Vestiges of the old head-solo-head structure, the familiar but still viable blueprint for bebop combos everywhere, were recognizable in Astral Project’s approach to all things jazz during a January daytime gig at a cocktail lounge inside New Orleans’s gargantuan Hyatt Regency. The quintet, easily one of the Crescent City’s most…
Purists may have scoffed, but lovers of New Orleans’s evolving music spirit rejoiced when the Dirty Dozen injected funk, R&B, and pop influences into traditional brass-band music in the late ’70s. Since then that rich, party-hearty blend has been successfully exported far beyond the confines of the Crescent City. The…
The talent, if not the ego, of prodigious Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure tended to eclipse the accomplishments of his accompanists. But now that Toure has retired to his family farm with a Grammy-winning disc under his arm, one of his band members is making good on Toure’s desire that…
“Stop! In the Name of Love” might be what the boys will be singing on Friday at Level (1235 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 305-532-1525) for the Federation/1235 party, at which Elaine Lancaster hosts the Supremes in concert. Okay so it won’t exactly be the group Diana Ross led in Sixties…
Bogotá, 1998. It was another bummer of a Valentine’s Day. In Colombia the lovers’ holiday is known as the Day of Love and Friendship, and though it falls in October rather than February, the end result is likely to be as disappointing as Uncle Sam’s celebration of the saint of…
Like the best mid-Sixties work by Bob Dylan, the first three albums by the Clash redefined the rock and roll landscape into which they were unleashed. Between 1977 and 1979, the British punk foursome issued The Clash, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, and London Calling, along with a brilliant string of…
It’s got to be one of the strangest box sets ever released, even though it stars the Stooges, one of rock’s most celebrated bands. 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions is a seven-CD collection, clocking in at just under eight hours and thoroughly documenting what has come to be known…
(Sub Pop) From Brian Wilson and Nick Drake to Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, rock and roll has never been short on guys who’ve been kicked around by love and roughed up by romance. Northampton, Massachusetts, singer/songwriter Joe Pernice has his share of bruises and scars, and he’s used them…
When people talk about rock in Miami, most think of the white stuff smuggled in on barges from Haiti. But this week a few parties are out to change that perception. And no matter what musical genre you’re talking about, when the DIY attitude is adeptly displayed, there’s simply a…
Alexandre Pires does not want to talk about the days when he played at weddings and wakes. Looking back over his career during a stop in Miami to promote his latest CD, Juegos de Amor (Games of Love), the Brazilian singing sensation prefers to remember the time troubled boxer Mike…
As the Marley clan gathers to celebrate the high-profile birthday of reggae’s avatar at Miami’s annual Bob Marley family fest this Saturday, reggae itself continues to struggle to bust out from its long-term underground sentence as the musical catharsis of choice for a loyal but still relatively small international fan…
Shelton Williams was just another face in the crowd, an anonymous punk with safety pins in his clothes (and, occasionally, his skin) playing in unknown bands with names like Buzzkill. He was onstage from the time he was fifteen years old, yet he was rarely the frontman, usually playing drums,…
(World Circuit) By now you know the heartwarming story of the Buena Vista Social Club: American guitarist goes to Cuba, locates almost-forgotten elder statesmen of classic Cuban music, records album, watches album become worldwide smash. Said Cuban musicians receive long overdue recognition, adulation, and royalty checks. But one sometimes-overlooked fact…
(Delmark) From concept to execution, Design in Time is a visionary marvel, an album that honors jazz innovators as it steps boldly into the music’s future. The maiden release by the Sound in Action Trio, a Chicago outfit led by reedsman Ken Vandermark, Design in Time presents the young sax/clarinet…
Perverts, you’re in luck. With more hedonists per square mile than most other cities, Miami Beach offers more than a few chances to get any wicked urges out of your system before the traditional chocolates and roses of Valentine’s Day bring you down. And New Times will even help you…
The faces of the men nursing their beers at Mango’s Tropical Café fill with wonder, like children watching a fireworks display. Brazilian bartender Nice Taber has just mounted the mosaic-tile bar that opens on to Ocean Drive like a proscenium stage. Wearing space-age silver boots with six-inch platform heels, Taber…
For someone who describes himself as a “social misfit,” documentary filmmaker Les Blank has a tremendous knack for crawling inside his subjects and capturing their souls on celluloid. Over the course of a career that stretches back more than 30 years, the Tampa-born Blank has penetrated the insular communities of…
Thirty years ago — on December 6, to be exact — the Altamont Speedway, located about a half-hour’s drive from Berkeley, California, was the site of a free concert presented by the Rolling Stones. The band’s 1969 U.S. tour (its first in three years) had been a huge success, grossing…
