Fine, live music is not hard to find in Miami. Venues like Ball & Chain, Lagniappe House, Gramps, Wynwood Yard, and El Tucán play on and on till the break of dawn. You just gotta find it and stay dry.
Way, way back Woodstock when, the Jacksonville-based Allman Brothers Band released their first album, bending blues, jazz, and R&B genres. With Duane Allman’s pedal-steel guitar, a pair of drummers, and his brother on a Hammond b3 organ, the band went viral. That organ playing brother, Gregg Allman, whose singing blended blues, roots, soul, and country into something legendary, went on a 45-year run, surviving member losses along the way before Gregg’s death a few weeks ago. Just before hearing about his death, I caught a few fascinating musical performances oddly connected.
Perhaps you have never heard of Wolfgang Grajonca. Born in Berlin in 1931, he won mambo dance contests at Manhattan’s Palladium before getting drafted to fight in the Korean War. Troubled that no one could pronounce his name properly, he changed it to Bill Graham. Later he ran the Fillmore East where the Allman Brothers were fixtures, and the Fillmore West, where he sponsored Santana and the dancers were catching butterflies, not dancing salsa. The Palladium, with its Latin focus, and both Fillmores, with their psychedelic ones, would be at home in Miami today.
The craziest concert by far was the Tromboranga insanity in Hialeah Gardens, way out Okeechobee Road past the turnpike in the woods at a place called El Rancho or El Rancho Campestre or Club Campestre – it’s aliases like Hollywood or the Mafia. The doors opened at 9 for a concert I was told would start between 11:30 and midnight. Every clave in Cali was there along with brother maracas and cowbells. Several hundred folks in expensive sneakers and Abercrombie tops feasted on Bandeja Paisa and bottles of $100 rum while salsaing incessantly until the Barcelona based band breezed in with a U-Haul around 2:30am before rushing on stage and murdering it! On till the break of dawn. Look up Charrupi.
A day earlier, after peeling off from the end of yet another well-policed Critical Mass ride, JUke’s Eric Garcia was jamming on the harmonica like Magic Dick from the J Geils Band inside the front of tightly-packed, wine bottle-laden, now long-running Lagniappe House.
Suddenly he sang like Savoy Brown. Then guitarist Evan Lamb got like Hendrix. Respite, space, and sustenance are abundant in the softly lit, rummage sale/bric-à-brac out back. If you miss JUke again on June 10, catch Electric Kif there on Saturday June 17. They are playing all over the East Coast these days. In the past, steel guitarist Roosevelt Collier has sat down with them as well. JUke, Electric Kif, and Collier’s bands would have been quite at home with the Allman Brothers in 1970.
Bill Graham would have been comfortable with both the Allmans and our prevalent Latin sentiment. Slick El Tucán presents Angel Yos y La Mekanica Loca on June 22. Yos is Cuban, centered mostly in France, and playing all over the world. El Tucán previously brought in salsa superstar Alexander Abreu y Havana D’Primera, and along with La Scala in the Four Ambassadors, is holding down Brickell’s high end music scene. Yes, lots of suitcases of cash money in Brickell these days.
Ball & Chain features bands up-front and out back all the time – mixing categories. Tony Succar and quasi-house band Mixtura might play up front on a Thursday while Miami’s salsa dancers cut the air like Oddjob’s bowler, or out back on the Pineapple Stage with room and sweat for hundreds.
Other places, like the pop-up, emerging Acme Lounge near the Omni, Jada Coles in the Gables, Bardot (if there is not a DJ), and the Wynwood Yard are also likely to have something going on whenever the thunder stops.
