There was something in his eyes, Augustus Pablo’s inevitably reefer-blurred eyes, that was alternately haunting and sad, chilling and beautiful. In the numerous photos of the dub innovator that grace the slew of albums released during his life (which ended May 17 at the age of 46 after a bout…
Ask for James Baldwin. That’s how you get Chris Rock on the phone this morning, by telling the hotel operator in Philadelphia you want to talk to the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, and Blues for Mr. Charlie. The operator chuckles slightly when…
Where were the Cubans? That was the nagging question hanging in the air at this year’s MIDEM Americas conference. Cuban music may be hotter than ever, but it was virtually invisible at the convention. The official word out of MIDEM head Xavier Roy’s office was that the conference was “diversifying”…
Wayne Coyne is no madman. Julian Cope may have fried his brain and come out the other side barely intact, but Coyne (rock’s other modern-day psychedelic warrior) makes it a point to soberly lead the Flaming Lips into the studio playground to tweak and twist the five senses. The Soft…
The Beta Band fits approximately nowhere. Signed to a label known for spearheading the pop-electronica invasion in America, the band’s records feature nary a danceable track. Beta’s music bears some resemblance to the hip-hop folk of Beck, but the group doesn’t even try to traffic in singles. And now it…
Rubberoom Architechnology (3-2-1) Like Public Enemy in the late ’80s, Staten Island’s Wu-Tang Clan has cast a long shadow over the ’90s hip-hop scene. Public Enemy’s great innovation was to speed up the beats pioneered by rap artists such as Run DMC, with lyrics as politically direct as the Clash’s…
Delano security is acting a bit nervous. It’s a beautiful afternoon in the hotel’s artfully sculpted grassy back yard, but today’s lounging guests look very different from the usual run of schmoozing businessmen, high-rolling European tourists, and Hollywood figures. Instead it’s a parade of thug chic, with a large gathering…
Miles Davis Panthalassa: The Remixes (Columbia) When the Star Wars trilogy was updated for re-release over the past few years, George Lucas’s crew at Industrial Light & Magic tooled around with added special effects to modernize those sci-fi classics. Fans who were up for a few new surprises were happy…
Kiss the Cameo Theatre goodbye. That’s the word from Chicago-based developer Ken Smith, who has just signed a ten-year lease to take over the operating reins at the Miami Beach venue. The winner of a fierce bidding war for the site, Smith intends to drastically overhaul the interior of the…
Percussionist Francisco Aguabella is emphatic when asked whether anyone else can perform the types of rhythms he has been playing since he came to the United States from Cuba in 1957. “No,” he says in his heavy Cuban accent, “nobody else can play these rhythms because I’m the only one…
The sophomore slump is a popular phenomenon in modern music. A band’s debut release does well; the next album falls short of expectations as the group stumbles to re-create the magic that brought fans into its realm in the first place. Maybe this lack of inspiration is owing to a…
The word crossover hangs in the air at this year’s MIDEM Americas 1999 conference, which rolls into Miami Beach next week with a series of daytime panels and evening music showcases, all spotlighting Latin, Caribbean, and African artists and the record labels eager to sell them to American audiences. “What…
On one typically addictive track of trombonist Jimmy Bosch’s upcoming album, piano and brass embrace like an inspired couple on the dance floor, shimmying together then breaking apart for some saucy solo moves. Congas keep the rhythm, and a male chorus chants, “Keep the tradition,” words that have been a…
Faust Ravvivando (Klangbad) For aficionados of the genre known as Krautrock, Faust is a big deal. A style that flourished in the early ’70s, Krautrock was an attempt by (mostly) German artists to fuse two major streams of twentieth-century music: the extremely advanced classical sound of Stockhausen and the extremely…
In California a crowd of 10,000 shakes the Santa Monica Pier for the last free concert of the summer. High school kids, industry types, the homeless, cholos, black, white, and brown all make elbow war for room to dance. Ozomatli pounds its sound out on to the beach while the…
Vinicius Cantuaria Tucumo (Verve) Maybe Brazilians are just musically superior to the rest of us. It’s food for thought not only because the leading lights of Brazilian popular music — artists such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, who defined the genre in the late Sixties — are still releasing…
At a recent well-attended reading, a fan asks writer Nick Hornby about the influence of music on his work, asserting maybe a bit too strongly that his personal soundtrack directly influenced the text. Hornby steers the question a bit, answering it, but deflecting the image of him sitting in a…
In the summer of 1953, a shy Memphis teenager steals up enough courage to go into a local recording studio, pays eight dollars and twenty-five cents, and, accompanied only by his rudimentary guitar playing, cuts two ballads: the pop standard “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” a silken…
On a recent afternoon, pianist Chucho Valdes gives a master class to students at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Arte. Valdes sits casually before a worn grand piano in a large classroom on the conservatory campus, overlooking the palm-shaded tangle of grass that in the Fifties was the Havana Country Club…
When drum and bass first washed up on these shores from London in the mid-Nineties, there was rampant talk that it would rejuvenate hip-hop. Drawing on the same Jamaican traditions of toasting MCs, cut-up DJ moves, and the manic street-level sensibility that sparked the first rap parties in the South…
Before Buena Vista Social Club gained fame as the title of the best-selling Cuban-music album of all time, it was an actual social club, a prerevolutionary gathering place for black residents of Havana’s working-class Buena Vista neighborhood. An early scene in Wim Wenders’s documentary Buena Vista Social Club, which opens…
Carlinhos Brown Omelete Man (Metro Blue) Omelete Man, the wide-ranging new album by Brazilian singer and multi-instrumentalist Carlinhos Brown, may surprise listeners whose image of Brazilian music is confined to the sophisticated bossa nova of J‹o Gilberto or the intelligent international pop of Caetano Veloso. It shouldn’t though, because over…
