Carlos Nuñez, gaitero There is more to Carlos Nuñez than being “the Jimi Hendrix of the bagpipes,” or the “the 7th Chieftain,” making him an honorary member of the legendary traditional Irish band. But if you happen to be the modern master of the gaita, the bagpipe of Galicia, a region in the Northwest …
Carlos Nuñez on Bagpipes, Rock, Roots Music, and The Chieftains Read More »
In Besieged, the new film by Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci which closes the Miami Film Festival Sunday, a peculiar love story plays out over a profound cultural chasm. Jason Kinsky (David Thewlis), an English classical musician living in an old house in Rome, falls, hard, for Shandurai (Thandie Newton), his housekeeper, an African medical student, …
Bernardo Bertolucci And The “Other” (Miami Herald) Read More »
Gospel superstar Kirk Franklin The song starts in the low register, like a rumble. It rises in pitch and volume ever so slowly, growing from a murmur to a visceral roar. Then shadings in the harmonies become lighter, luminous, dusk turning to dawn. Someone cries out in praise. Others stand up, eyes closed, palms up. …
Haitian drummers in performance in Miami Music is not a universal language. It cannot be. We might be the same under the skin, but the fact is, we sound different — and we should. Music is about a specific experience of life. It expresses someone’s ideas of beauty and truth, shaped by history and geography, …
Drummin’ Sessions Highlight the Diversity of Miami (Miami Herald) Read More »
Santa Evita a novel by Tomás Eloy Martínez. Translated from the Spanish by Helen Lane. (Alfred A. Knopf) Eva Perón has long been a character in search of a novel. A modestly talented actress of humble origins, María Eva Duarte worked, hustled and intrigued her way up in the Argentine society of the 1930s and …
Compañero: The life and death of Che Guevara by Jorge Castañeda. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed on October 9, 1967, by the Bolivian army, after a brief, disastrous guerrilla campaign. It was only the last in a string of failures. Yet the fascination with Guevara has remained strong if at times disconcerting, ranging as it …
It’s a late Friday morning at Britto Central on Lincoln Road and a casually elegant couple is being led around the gallery by an attendant, price list in hand. In the small office in the back of the gallery, the phone rings nonstop. Sitting in a second-floor studio, oblivious to the employees frantically moving …
By the time he was captured and killed in Bolivia, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was shadowed by failures. His last was leading a small leftist guerrilla group in the Bolivian mountains on a campaign to spark a continental war of liberation. Taken wounded after a battle with the Bolivian army on Oct. 8, 1967, Guevara was …
Tourists in Buenos Aires don’t take pictures of auto inspection garages in Floresta, a working-class neighborhood, but I was not exactly a tourist and I knew this place as something else. I had seen it before — if only in photographs more than a decade old. It looked changed. “Hey, what are you doing? Come …
Picking cotton near Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1939. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. Wikimedia This is the heart of the Delta, a brooding, magnificent plain in northwest Mississippi that runs south to Vicksburg, east to Mississippi’s central mountain range, and spills over into Arkansas to the west and Tennessee to the north. The blues were …