El Vez G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues (Big Pop) The world’s most popular Hispanic Elvis impersonator uses his latest album G.I. Ay, Ay! Blues to attack current anti-immigrant fervor, adding his usual mingling of music cultures and a broad spectrum of rock history that begins with the King. From the resounding…
In its September 11, 1964, issue, the British pop magazine New Musical Express featured an article on the Kinks underneath the headline “This week’s chart-toppers.” Each member of the band, which had just stepped into the limelight on the strength of its third single, “You Really Got Me,” was asked,…
Nothing in Jeff Tweedy’s body of work prepares you for Being There, the ambitious and masterful second album by his band Wilco — not the charming, self-effacing songs he brought to Uncle Tupelo, the now-defunct band he co-fronted with Jay Farrar; not the tossed-off nuggets he sprinkled on the pair…
Eddie Palmieri Vortex (TropiJazz) Spike Lee’s new film Get on the Bus is the story of a bus full of men on their way to the Million Man March. But it has another very important character: an African drum that plays a key role as a link between generations living…
If the Sex Pistols made cash from chaos, Chicago’s Projekt label is making money from misery. Founded in the early Eighties by Fort Lauderdale native Sam Rosenthal, Projekt has built a hugely successful cottage industry from the dark thoughts and woeful states of a slew of bummed-out bands, including British…
It’s not easy being David Lee Roth. Notwithstanding his renewed TV ubiquity (via the canny use of “You Really Got Me” in that GI-Joe-in-a-Nissan ad), life for the former Van Halen frontman has not been kind lately. First, having shed another lead singer, his old band plucked Dave out of…
Punk rock’s greatest strength was its ability to crumble the wall separating technically proficient musicians and inspired, caterwauling amateurs — its insistence that anyone could form a band. With advances in technology making multitrack recording both easy to use and relatively affordable, you can broaden the dictum of punk rock…
Fall is the time for fashion, fashion, fashion — fashionable clothes, fashionable clubs, fashionable ideas. And what could be more fashionable than rock musicians? A bevy of such congregate tonight (Thursday) and for the following three nights at Rose’s Bar & Music Lounge (754 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 532-0228) to…
One day in 1951, a light bulb flashed over the head of Ernie Young, the white proprietor of Ernie’s Record Mart in Nashville, Tennessee. After watching his customers buy black gospel and R&B records, Young figured that if he made the records, there’d be that much more money for him…
Now that winter is slowly rolling in — the period affectionately called “season” in clubland — so are the parties. Eighties opulence abounds on Saturday when the Jockey Club (11111 Biscayne Blvd., North Miami, 893-3344), normally a private meeting place, opens its doors to the public to broadcast the Mike…
Boxing Gandhis Howard (Atlantic) Rock critics of the early Seventies did our best to banish all thought of eclecticism, since it was usually a key word denoting fraud of the art-rock or jazz-rock sort. No one ever called Bitches Brew eclectic, though it was; that term was reserved for the…
In a pop world where female musicians are designed, micromanaged, and as carefully positioned in the marketplace as a new brand of air freshener, how wonderfully earthy and real is the art of Joni Mitchell. As a writer immersed in all the current female musicos, I found it a jolt…
Shtick is hard to pull off in rock and roll, whether you’re dressed up in patriot garb a la Paul Revere and the Raiders, stomping around a dry-iced stage in monster boots and makeup (e.g., Kiss), or clad in yellow latex suits and proclaiming in anthemic skronks that you are…
Rene Alvarez is having fun. Honest. Granted, it might not be obvious when you see the brooding songwriter playing at local clubs, banging out songs of intense frustration and instability with his group Sixo, creating a ragged kind of rock and roll noise that squalls and hollers in the middle…
The collaborations between trumpeter Miles Davis — one of the most restless (and brilliant) figures in the history of jazz — and Gil Evans, a composer/arranger/pianist who was attracted equally to innovation and traditionalism, have spawned plenty of arguments among critics over the years. There’s no question that the three…
Halloween weekend, a time for twisted pleasures and deviant diversions with even more ghouls and goblins out on the street than usual. There will be tricks and treats of every variety in clubland. Tonight (Thursday) is fright night, and Bermuda Bar (3509 NE 163rd St., North Miami Beach, 945-0196) is…
Two benefits of note, both being held tonight, All Hallow’s Eve. Screamfest ’96, hosted by Bitter Crop Productions at Rose’s Bar & Music Lounge, features a three-act bill including local funk whiz Raw B Jae (in his last Rose’s gig before he takes off for possibly greener pastures in New…
John Mellencamp Mr. Happy Go Lucky (Mercury) When I first met John Mellencamp nearly fifteen years ago, he was a young buck awash in the success of Uh-Huh and its “Pink Houses” anthem, and on the verge of critical and commercial success with Scarecrow. But Mellencamp was already worrying about…
This week, grand openings abound in clubland with two particular parties standing out. For hearty fun from a bygone era, dust off those platform shoes and disco down to South Beach for the dazzling debut of Polly Esther’s (841 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, 535-5633) in a new SoBe location. If…
Lots of well-produced, spiffily packaged CDs make up the bulk of this month’s belated local-music roundup. Still, my favorite thing this time out is a low-fi, low-budget tape with a handmade cover. What does that mean? I don’t know, but it sure makes me happy. If you want to send…
Nirvana From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah (DGC) I’d finally reached a point where I could listen to Nirvana and think only “This is a cool song,” rather than “This guy is dead.” And now, along comes more new “product” — an industry term that Kurt Cobain despised –…
On his first album in more than 30 years, pianist Bebo Valdes pays musical tribute to two of his lost colleagues: one American, the other Cuban; both, like Valdes, were pioneers in merging Latin music with American jazz. The first track on Bebo Rides Again, “To the Dizzy Gillespie,” is…
