OK, so his singing may leave a bit to be desired, but Bob Dylan’s impact on music history is utterly immeasurable. And besides, this happens to be a great time to see the man. After two decades spent wandering hopelessly through the 1980s and most of the 1990s with such…
State fairs are undeniably the home of country music. Artists of this genre, well aware that they are unlikely to sell out large arenas, stick to the familiar. And rockers know better than to try to get their leather jackets and loud guitars through fair gates. The redneck crowd just…
Comedian and improvisationist extraordinaire Wayne Brady returns to his home state of Florida on Friday with Wayne Brady and Friends, his touring improv comedy show. Although he unfortunately hails from the wasteland of Orlando, Brady nevertheless defends the soulless heart of the Disney empire. “You have to move on at…
Despite losing all his studio equipment and the only masters for his upcoming album to a robbery while he was away in London over Christmas, trance pioneer BT soldiers on. The DJ, keyboardist, guitarist, composer, and all-around musical whiz kid headlines a show at Orbit on Friday. In all, 16…
Heavy metal’s scatological answer to Spinal Tap arrives at Orbit on Wednesday, Jan. 23, in the midst of a tour to promote its latest piece of filth, Violence Has Arrived. It’s more of the same from the boys who gave us such endearing numbers as “I’m in Love (with a…
With bluegrass now more than 60 years old, you’d think there’d be nothing new under the sun when it comes to the high lonesome sound that Bill Monroe fashioned in the mid-1940s. The rock-bluegrass hybrid is at least 30 years old itself, tracing its roots back at least to the…
Billed as a celebration of women in music, Calliope Fest features an assortment of female performers, nearly all of whom fall into the singer/songwriter, “I’m a gal with a guitar and something to say” category that has become oh so popular since the rise of antifolk in the 1980s. Thirteen…
White boys doing reggae can get ugly. Even though white people co-opting black music is nothing new, this latest example seems particularly cringe-inducing. But Princes of Babylon breaks the mold. It takes a primarily reggae sound, pulls it in half-a-dozen different directions, and emerges with something far more original. The…
While crippled, old horses are usually put out of their misery, crippled, old rock bands never die. Still, it’s strange when the oldsters wind up at a horse track. Gulfstream Park opened its season last week, and, as usual, the horses were only part of the entertainment. Bryan Adams began…
Rory Block lived the first year of her life in a cabin in Neshanic, New Jersey, with no plumbing, a well outside, and an outhouse. After moving to New York City as a toddler, she left home at age 15 to start a life on the road, playing guitar from…
The Gold Coast Jazz Society has carried out its stated mission of presenting, preserving, and perpetuating jazz over its ten years of existence, and the society gives itself a pat on the back this Wednesday with a Founders’ Dinner and Concert. Having fomented a variety of concerts, a jazz festival,…
The Beale Street Blues Boy comes to Pompano Beach this Saturday by way of Melbourne, and a road behind it that spans an average of 250 concerts a year for the past 55 years, beginning with a 1956 road trip that included a staggering 342 one-night stands. But it wasn’t…
Circus ties are ties that bind. The current producer of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Kenneth Feld, took over from his father, Irvin Feld, who bought the circus from the Ringling family. They, in turn, had bought it from James Bailey, who had taken it over from…
A common tendency among bluesmen today is to gain credibility by claiming that one’s father was good friends with Muddy Waters, that one played guitar with Son House for a few months in the Delta, and so on. But why check out the namedroppers when you can see an original?…
“I looked in my turn, and could not repress a gesture of disgust. Before my eyes was a horrible monster, worthy to figure in the legends of the marvelous. It was an immense cuttlefish, being eight yards long. It swam crossways in the direction of the Nautilus with great speed,…
The supermarket-turned-concert venue called Orbit has a problem, and it’s not just the acoustics. It’s the dilemma most venues in South Florida face, and it is this: Not a whole lot of people go to concerts. So how does one make money? Well, down here in the Land of the…
Although it was once known as underground art, the cartoonish world of lowbrow art has stepped into the limelight in recent years, mainly thanks to the work of a Los Angeles-based group of artists including Todd Schorr. But Schorr feels he may have created a monster — which is ironic,…
Aventura-based businessman Andy Rothman, who boasts a large and impressively diverse CD collection, had an idea. In an effort to alleviate the mind-numbing ennui of hospital stays and promote healing, he thought, why not equip hospitals, especially children’s hospitals, with a CD library? After all, music heals the soul, and…
Florida’s New Rock Alternative, as it calls itself, cooks up a festival of piping-hot alterna-rock goodness with the Buzz Bake Sale this Saturday. The daylong concert, benefiting the American Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund, is brought together by Smirnoff Ice and Buzz 103.1 FM and offers a lineup of 17…
Two schools of thought thrive in the wild and woolly world of Southern rock. First, you can pull the Lynyrd Skynyrd approach and get a little more country than rock ‘n’ roll but still keep the boogie that country lacks. A whole slew of bands have pulled this off with…
Robert Schimmel tries to take everything lightly. It is, after all, his job. Luckily, almost everything can be humorous, even cancer. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, to be more precise — the particular strain from which Schimmel is currently recovering. “The last time I went [to the doctor] I had to do a…
Oftentimes, the people who attempt to turn photos into art fail miserably; witness most attempts at photographic surrealism or abstraction. Instead, it is often the documentarian who, through the perfect vision of hindsight, is revealed as the one who was artsy all along, simply by telling a story. Take the…
