It’s difficult to write about Tori Amos without acknowledging her prodigious talent, and harder still to sanction that talent without serious reservations. Classically trained from an early age to tickle the ivories, the North Carolina-born Amos struggled for years to find her place in the musical food chain. While still…
Some forms of creative expression never receive the respect they deserve. In humor, it’s the clever pun or play on words that, however ingenious its construction, seldom earns more than a begrudging groan of acknowledgment. In the world of pictorial art, it is the caricature that, however penetrating its perception…
There’s a marketing strategy currently faddish among manufacturers of pop detritus that advocates slipping to an unsuspecting public something new, odd, or unexpected during the slow, sweat-drenched summer months, when the brain cells are less alert but more susceptible to manipulation. And while this tactic is usually reserved for debut…
Who’s the hippest DJ in South Beach? Hard to say. What is certain is that whatever your tastes, there is but a handful. A distinct breed apart among record breakers who balance instinct and acumen to make a good night great. A select group who spin at all the right…
No doubt the biggest challenge of Elvis Presley’s remarkable career has been his recent effort to help Bill Clinton get elected president. Whose idea did you think it was to don the shades and jam with the band on Arsenio? Did you think the selection of “Heartbreak Hotel” was a…
Yes, Henry Rollins, former singer for Black Flag and present leader of the Rollins Band, does come off as an angry young man. It’s a description that sounds trite and calculated, doesn’t it? Consider some of the events in Rollins’s life, which he freely reveals: He remembers a man in…
The owners of The Stephen Talkhouse say they will sell their new club to denizens of the heart of the Art Deco district by providing nothing more than “a bar with music.” Good luck. But the music this joint displays won’t come from a jukebox or a going-nowhere bar band…
If working jazz musicians had to depend on audiences consisting of only intensely serious record collectors and historians, professional critics, and other musicians eager to cop their stuff, sit in, and perhaps nail the job for themselves, no one would be able to pay the rent. So it was that,…
So much confusion, so much hype, so much of it old hat to those of us in this hotbed of censorship called Miami. It’s not something that would normally be addressed in this space, but when Florida’s largest retailer of recorded music bowed to a very small minority and joined…
First, there were the Crusades. Then, missionaries tried to spread the Lord’s word to savages in the South Pacific. Two Thursdays ago, a new addition was made to the list of Admirable Yet Thankless Endeavors: Jim Hayward presented the Slammy Awards to South Florida’s untamed hordes. The Slammies — as…
Due to the ugly business of politics, that is the politics of clubdom, where competition — and its inherent strains of dish, dis, and deceive — is the order of the night, this item almost didn’t see print. No one’s to blame; everyone’s guilty. That’s just the way it is…
The two current members of London Exchange have the “western disease” and they’ve got it bad. You can hear symptoms cutting through every dance-tech-pop driven track — this music for the Nineties. “The police came only for a reason,” says Alex Zaitsev, who is Christopher Phipps’s latest partner in the…
If the nightcrawlers of South Beach were to appoint a DJ King, they would most likely crown David Padilla. Sure, some spinners may be better off the cuff, in other modes, and others may be more famous, by virtue of seniority and hustle. But it’s Padilla who’s got just the…
We’re still up to our sweaty little ears in recorded music from around here, so cut on the a/c and find patience. If you’re waiting for reviews of other area projects, hang in there and stay tuned in. Everyone knows how much more time must be allotted to laundering clothes…
If you can’t wait to get your eyes on some newsletters from local bands, try writing to the addresses below. While newsletters are free, remember that struggling bands must come up with the scratch to finance photocopying and postage. A small contribution might not hurt. The Goods Box 64-0209 Miami,…
The way Homeboy DC (who I must note immediately is not a “black” person) tells it rings true to anyone who’s been wrung out in this town for more than a day or two. Three years ago cops stopped him on a DUI, took him to the station, where he…
A girl’s voice, tentative, uncertain, not too sure of her place in the thick of things. She knows where she wants to be, she’s just unaware how best to get there. Something’s off. The scene: a nightclub door in Everycity, U.S.A. Madness and confusion, the hip and the clueless come…
A sinister baritone, moaning some Gregorian-like chant, oozes from the woofers like so much blood from a sacrificial lamb. Doubling, tripling, and further multiplying the chant creates a multi-harmony, placing the listener in a demented medieval cathedral stalked by a crazed, undead vocalist. Holy Smoke, the latest creation of so-called…
It must be nice to be able to kick back, relax, and recount glorious and memorable moments from a world-circling, who’s-who-filling, three-decade-long spin around popular music’s inner circles. So Master Henry Gibson does. That screamy noise on Donny Hathaway’s “The Ghetto,” that was little baby Lalah Hathaway…Curtis Mayfield is hanging…
It’s 3:00 a.m., one of those all-too-infamous Saturday nights at the late Boomerang, and the dance floor is jammed with sweaty, jostling, grinning, working bodies. The pitch: fever. Not a soul in the house is standing still. And then at once, just like that, the music stops. A collective gasp,…
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. — Tom Stoppard It was one of those tragic cliches you’d hope would never come true, the stuff of which movies are made. And were it to come true, you’d never imagine it happening so close to home,…
Just like every other species that has survived through natural selection, so has the collector of jazz recordings. Contemporary observers claim to have spotted prototypes of this creature as far back as the early Twenties, when King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, and Bix Beiderbecke first began…
