Ornette Coleman is the kind of artist trad-jazz idiots like Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, and the editors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz love to hate. Since his foundation-shattering debut in 1958 with the aptly named Something Else!!!!, the saxophone genius has scorched a singular path through modern jazz; he’s…
Various ArtistsCalypso Awakening Smithsonian Folkways In his notes to Trinidad Carnival Roots, musicologist J.D. Elder calls calypso “undoubtedly the national song of Trinidad and Tobago.” Today that “national song” has all but gone the way of its nineteenth-century predecessor, kalenda. A collection of 1962 field recordings by Alan Lomax, Carnival…
Helen had a happy thought. Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that…
Clinging to a busy stretch of U.S. 1 just south of Red Road, Fox’s Sherron Inn is a one-for-the-road roadhouse, a nightcap paradise. Little flashing bulbs beckon to me as soon as I walk through the door, leading me to the jukebox: a shapely late-Sixties model carved out of steel…
The most anticipated album in years from any reggae artist, Baby Cham’s first solo LP, Wow … the Story, has been six years in the making. Don’t mistake the double CD as a vote of overconfidence, though; this collection showcases the careful collaboration between the DJ born Dameon Becket and…
Arhoolie-label founder Chris Strachwitz spent 40 years combing the nation in search of idiosyncratic ethnic music. His travels are traced in the five-CD set, The Journey of Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Collection: 1960-2000. Strachwitz was attracted to songs lit with an earthy honesty that commercial music just can’t…
If you take good care of your bird, it can fight a very long time,” says a swarthy expert on cockfighting in the 1973 documentary Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa). Introducing the world to the now legendary Fania All-Stars, the film intercuts concert footage of that monster salsa band with…
Topping 110 degrees in the summertime, Maracaibo has the highest average temperature in the hemisphere. Indoors, however, the oil-rich industrial city in northwestern Venezuela is one of the coldest places on Earth. Matrons draped in furs overcompensate for the heat with air-conditioner settings that would chill a polar bear. This…
In April 1998 Issac Delgado made musical history, playing Club Onyx as the first national of the socialist state of Cuba to give a live concert in Miami-Dade County. A small group of protesters shouted at the 2000 concertgoers that night, but the show went on without incident. Looking back…
Whenever Tony Thrown makes his way to Lincoln Road, he takes the back alleys that run behind the tourist boulevard. He emerges into the light at Pennsylvania Avenue, an old refrigerator shelf stacked on his head like an oversize hat ready to be knocked off by the next puff of…
At the Van Dyke Café on a rainy Wednesday night, a tall blond with an American accent is singing in Portuguese to a crowd of couples sipping wine and chatting softly. As her hips sway slightly and her feet trace out samba steps on the stage, Heather Davis sings “Tristeza,”…
Sitting on a concrete wall beside Biscayne Bay at sunset, a teenage boy in baggy jeans and a black T-shirt watches fairies dance. A trio of young women with sparkling wings attached to their backs slowly circle their hips and shoulders to the smooth drumbeat of trance beneath the Zen…
Wearing big baggy dungarees and a loose red sweatshirt with extralong sleeves, k.d. lang proved this past Thanksgiving weekend that there wasn’t another diva in oh-so-fashionable South Beach, White Party be damned, who could top her. After an opening set by sister duo the Pierces (think Indigo Girls lite), the…
In an earlier life, DJ Slow, Ja-Jazz, and DJ James Spectrum produced a few swank slow jams for a phone-sex company overseas. Experience pays. The thirteen tracks collected on the Finnish turntable trio’s debut warms up with soft-core-porn grooves and then swells into the kind of catchy big-beat hooks that…
Titan Elevator (Tombola!/Virgin) Of these two Mexican discs, Plastilina Mosh’s sophomore release, Juan Manuel, is the better, mostly because it’s more of a live-band thing than a band-in-a-box product. “Boombox Baby,” the record’s second track, is its best: bubble-gum bass, chicken-scratch guitar, lemon-meringue synth. Its tongue barely fits in its…
Backstage at DJ Khalid’s birthday bash over Thanksgiving weekend, rappers from New York City’s Terror Squad fill the cramped Club Amnesia dressing room with a steady flow of Hennessy, freestyle verse, and the contraband aroma of hollowed out Cohiba blunts. Senior squad member and Atlantic Records talent Cuban Link pours…
Churchgoers at the Tabernacle du Plein Evangile in North Miami are dressed in their best on a Sunday evening in July. Women wear African silks and men wear neatly pressed suits. Outside shortly after the services begin, a caravan of yellow luxury cars arrives. A Lamborghini, followed by a Hummer…
Deftones don’t want their listeners to get too comfortable. After releasing White Pony on Madonna’s Maverick label last June, the Sacramento skate-punk graduates came up with an opening track they liked better and released the disc all over again three months later. A rallying cry for the oppressed, the in-your-face…
I’m having a dark moment. It’s Friday night, and I’m in the Roof Top Lounge on the eighth floor of the Howard Johnson Hotel on Alton Road. Dark is good. I go to dark places when I want to be alone and drink, when I don’t want to pack my…
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…
