Rarely has an individual shot to the top of the underground as quickly as Loren MazzaCane Connors. Although he toiled in obscurity in New Haven, Connecticut, for nearly two decades, after moving to New York City in 1990 he became a darling of the avant-rock scene within a few years…
So you’ve made plans for New Year’s Eve. Now what’s on your agenda for the other six days of the week? Here are a few choices: Tobacco Road (626 S. Miami Ave.) begins “The Last Damn Parade” on Thursday. In case December 31 really is the end of the world,…
“Oh, he’s joking!” laughs Barbarita Hernan, on-air personality at oldies radio station Clasica 92 (WCMQ-FM 92.3). Barbarita squeals as programming director German Estrada introduces the voluptuous bottled-honey-blonde as “Marilyn Monroe.” Consulting a log prepared for her by Estrada, Barbarita punches buttons on the control panel and pops numbered compact discs…
Quick, name five Japanese bands. Chances are some of the more intense music nuts out there might name-check the Boredoms, Pizzicato Five, and Shonen Knife, and some might even recognize Melt-Banana or Guitar Wolf. But the reality of Japanese pop music (or J-pop, as it is referred to by its…
When the Wu-Tang Clan released its first single, 1993’s “Protect Ya Neck,” hardcore rap was associated almost exclusively with the West Coast. Dre, Snoop, and Cube were hip-hop’s most notorious rappers, and Death Row Records head honcho Suge Knight (currently serving time) was still at large, overseeing the whole g-funk…
Tommy McCook Tribute to Tommy (Heartbeat) When Tommy McCook passed away in early 1998, so did the heart and soul of his seminal Jamaican ska band, the Skatalites. McCook was one of the premier jazz musicians in Jamaica during the Fifties, and in the early Sixties his tenor sax helped…
Bash (655 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) picks up steam early next week, building to the millennium blowout. The club will be open Monday and Tuesday to make sure the decade-theme nights roll along uninterrupted. Monday is the Last Days of the Decade party, featuring a Sixties tribute; Tuesday is Flashback…
David Byrne — singer, author, filmmaker, and record-label president — is celebrated for many things, not the least of which is his own music. From the earliest days of his group the Talking Heads, bobbing up and down onstage at CBGB in 1975, to his solo projects of more recent…
One of the giants of Afro-Cuban jazz, Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill is restless. Plunked in a cushiony mint-green chair that seems to virtually swallow him, he’s outwardly impatient, posing for a photograph in a bright nondescript hallway of a restored Miami Beach Art Deco hotel. The photographer, swaying from side to…
“I’m moving to Europe because I want to be close to Africa,” says pianist Omar Sosa over the phone from a Paris hotel room. The Cuban-born Sosa is in the midst of a European tour supporting Inside, his latest CD on Ota Records, and he’s talking about his recent move…
Frank Emilio Ancestral Reflections (Metro Blue/Blue Note) While Cuban pianist Frank Emilio hasn’t benefited so far from the wave of international adulation that has swept other Cuban musicians, particularly pianists, into the limelight over the past few years, he’s no less an integral part of the island’s musical history than…
The club scene in South Florida flaky? Venues come and go quicker than a riptide. Over the next two weeks there will be a glut of new night spots opening, and most likely a good number will get sucked out to sea. First off don’t expect to attend the much…
The sorry fate of vanguard voices in American jazz is having their homeland turn its back on them. All too often jazz masters are ignored at home while being feted abroad. Unable to make a living in the States, they are forced to travel to Europe or Japan to find…
A critic once called composer John Adams the Hamlet of contemporary classical music, accusing him of not being able to make up his mind and settle on a specific musical style. It is a charge with which the Berkeley-based Adams is all too familiar. “Recently,” he explains, “I read another…
Even before its release earlier this year, George Jones’s Cold Hard Truth already was the most hugely hyped album of the honky-tonk hero’s four-decade career, for two reasons: an alcohol-induced auto crash that damn near killed him, which would have made the set his last collection of new studio recordings;…
Beck Golden Feelings (Sonic Enemy) Midnite Vultures (DGC) While the hype already has begun on Midnite Vultures, Beck’s new major-label effort, understanding Los Angeles’s premier boho boychild-cum-mack-daddy is sharpened considerably by listening to a less high-profile release, the concurrent CD reissue of Golden Feelings. (If you’d like to score a…
Beck Golden Feelings (Sonic Enemy) Midnite Vultures (DGC) While the hype already has begun on Midnite Vultures, Beck’s new major-label effort, understanding Los Angeles’s premier boho boychild-cum-mack-daddy is sharpened considerably by listening to a less high-profile release, the concurrent CD reissue of Golden Feelings. (If you’d like to score a…
Egads! The Misfits and Gwar on a double bill. Sounds too grim to be true. But it is. At the Chili Pepper (200 W. Broward Blvd, Fort Lauderdale) on Sunday, the gruesome twosome will fill the club with dark music and morbid theatrics. These Misfits are different from the group…
Bill Laswell Imaginary Cuba (Wicklow) Your taste for Bill Laswell’s collection and “reconstruction” of various Cuban sounds, Imaginary Cuba, will depend entirely on your taste for the patented sonic stamp that the producer, bassist, and self-described “mix-translator” affixes to nearly all his musical projects. Imaginary Cuba stands as a virtual…
On the cover of his first and so far only CD, Soul Serenade, Jesse Jones, Jr., is pictured gazing intently into the distance, clutching his alto saxophone to his chest as if it were a newborn child, an irreplaceable part of himself. The photograph may make Jones look maniacally possessive,…
Long before the hipsters of Manhattan began lining up to see the venerable elders of the Buena Vista Social Club, country boys Nicholas Woloschuck and Aaron Halva were scraping together a meager living playing traditional Cuban son in New York City’s subways. Oregon-born Woloschuck and Iowa native Halva formed the…
Various Artists Viva CuBop! Jazz the Afro-Cuban Way (CuBop) The fact that CuBop, the Latin jazz arm of the independent label Ubiquity, has released twenty-two records in three years is proof enough that something is going right with “the little Latin jazz label that could.” The label’s first compilation, Viva…
