Editor's note: Organizers of this festival canceled it Jan. 6 because of the spike in coronavirus cases. Percussionists are often an afterthought for band leaders who are putting together musicians for recording or live performance. From pop music to jazz, most think that having vocalists and a guitarist, bassist and drummer, plus perhaps a keyboardist and/or horn players, … [Read more...]
Appreciation: South Florida jazz master Lonnie Smith kept surprising his listeners
Dr. Lonnie Smith wasn’t an actual doctor, and didn’t play one on TV. But when he manipulated the keys, pedals and drawbars of his Hammond B-3 organ, as he did publicly and on more than 70 albums from the early 1960s through the late 2010s, he was a soulful jazz surgeon. Smith died Sept. 28, at age 79, at his home in Fort Lauderdale after a long battle with pulmonary … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2021-22: The season in jazz
“Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny,” Frank Zappa announced during the performance of his dizzying, bop-infused composition “Be-Bop Tango (of the Old Jazzmen’s Church)” on the 1974 live album Roxy & Elsewhere. Hopefully, his satirical words about the genre’s decay aren’t proving prophetic nearly a half-century later. The COVID-19 pandemic altered the second half of … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2021-22: The year in pop
One of the first popular music shows of the 2021-2022 South Florida concert season was scheduled to be by Dead & Company this week. The group canceled, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s been a long, strange trip to get here over the past two years. The COVID-19 pandemic reared its ugly head in the middle of the 2019-2020 season, altering both the second half of … [Read more...]
Bumblefest music gathering returns after COVID hiatus
You can’t keep a good area music promoter and PureHoney magazine publisher like Steev Rullman down. After the success of his fourth annual Bumblefest in 2019, with 37 musical acts over two nights to celebrate his print and online publication’s eighth anniversary, Rullman — along with the rest of the world — hit a COVID-19-induced snag in 2020. Yet Bumblefest 5 will … [Read more...]
West Palm’s RATM tribute band lauded as ‘must-see’ act
Amid a sea of tribute acts to unworthy subjects, providing acid for the masses by giving the gullible what they think they want but perhaps can’t afford actual tickets to, one occasionally proves legitimate. Such is the case with a West Palm Beach-based Rage Against the Machine tribute called Products of Rage (www.facebook.com/productsofrage). That’s because Rage, despite … [Read more...]
Suddenly, Old School Square becomes major concert venue
A strange thing happened within the South Florida live music scene during — not after — the COVID-19 pandemic, especially between the fall of 2020 and summer of 2021. The outdoor Pavilion at Old School Square, the 3,500-person-capacity amphitheater in Delray Beach, charted an unlikely renaissance and became a major concert draw and destination. Yet the seemingly overnight … [Read more...]
In Delray concert, King Crimson continues to astonish
Nearly 52 years after its first-ever show in South Florida, King Crimson again appeared before a capacity crowd at the outdoor Pavilion at Old School Square in Delray Beach on July 23. And while the performance wasn’t as historic as that of guitarist and guru Robert Fripp’s original lineup -- which included future Emerson, Lake & Palmer vocalist/bassist Greg Lake and … [Read more...]
Prog rock legends King Crimson to play Delray
When it comes to historic progressive rock royalty, only one band wears the crown. King Crimson formed in London in 1968 and emerged with its groundbreaking 1969 debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, which reached the Top 30 on the American album charts, the Top 5 in the U.K., and even replaced The Beatles’s Abbey Road at No. 1 in Japan. The group has since … [Read more...]
New brewpub brings good karma to Lake Park
If you could go back in time to pick a worse date to open a new business than May 2, 2020, Coastal Karma Brewing proprietors Charles and Sara Chase would like to know what date that would be. The married couple had little choice but to open their Lake Park brewery as scheduled just as the COVID-19 pandemic was cresting. Which meant only cautious, temporary attendance that … [Read more...]