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Best Classical Radio Program

The Open Road

Miami: heat, entropy, and the concomitant disintegration of form. We love it. Want to love it more? Try a little dramatic tension. Have some bona fide sonic structure with your sweltering decomposition, and meet the people who can give it to you. For the steamy drive home, tune in to WTMI's The Open Road, weekday afternoons 3:00 until 7:00 p.m. Hosted by baritone vocalist Mark Hart, it is the show to put on to keep a cool and thoughtful head, especially if your air conditioner is busted. Broadcast from various locations about town, the Road not only doles out a daily dose of the tradition's staples, it also showcases interviews with South Florida's classical talent. Deborah Voigt, soprano for the Florida Grand Opera; Judy Drucker, director of the Concert Association of Florida; and world-famous baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky have been recent guests.

Best Musical Nostalgia

Night Train

The shrill whistle, the rumble of the engine rolling down the tracks. It's 8:00 on a Sunday night. Ted Grossman takes his usual seat as conductor of the Night Train on WLRN. As he has every week for 25 years, Grossman leads a four-hour journey through his deep collection of vintage jazz recordings. There's no chronological restriction to what he'll play -- he might spin a tune from the 1920s followed by a track released in 1989 -- but WWII-era music dominates. Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and perhaps Bing Crosby as Dick Tracy in a radio play culled from Grossman's archive of Armed Forces Radio Services broadcasts. In his distinctive foggy voice, and with his awesome selection of crooners and swing stylists, Grossman reminds his loyal listeners that not all musical memories in this town emanate from Havana.

Best Lounge Act

Nathaniel Reed

Whether playing a Gershwin song or Madonna's latest hit, pianist and singer Nathaniel Reed is always in tune with his audience. Perched atop the one-foot-high stage at the Piccadilly, Reed's baby grand piano faces the restaurant's main entrance. The entertainer, who can be heard weeknights from 7:00 to 11:00 p.m., often punctuates his many sets with greetings to new and familiar faces. No musician in Miami is more adept at handling a request than Reed, whose playlist pretty much spans all of the Twentieth Century. His musical experience also is wide-ranging. Although not inclined to speak of it, Reed is a polished veteran who has sung with Stevie Wonder, Patti LaBelle, and other notable talents. That breezy chatter you will hear between songs, accompanied by an irrepressible Louis Armstrong-like enthusiasm, is the product of years of hard work as an L.A. studio musician and a brief stint as a Caribbean cruise-ship piano man. Many is the patron moved to dance when Reed digs into his stockpile of R&B classics and begins swaying his head from side to side while stomping his feet to the rhythm. Saturday nights, beginning at 7:30 p.m., catch him at da Ermanno ristorante, 6927 Biscayne Blvd.

Best Salsa Scene

Salsa Lovers Dance Studio

It all began here in 1993: salsa classes on Monday and Wednesday nights at the spacious and charmingly down-at-the-heels Blue Banquet Hall. By now the place is packed four nights a week, and Salsa Lovers is a huge enterprise, having expanded to two more locations. But the West Miami-Dade scene has a festive, nightclubby quality all its own, and it just keeps getting hotter (sometimes literally; the AC is erratic). Monday through Thursday a large and varied crowd descends on the hall, everyone from senior citizens to families to middle-school students, though the 20- to 30-year-old crowd dominates. The sheer energy generated by hundreds of slaves to the salsa rhythm is irresistible. Some people skip the classes and instead hang out, flirt, or practice moves with a partner. Between classes (three levels, each one hour long, beginning at 7:00 p.m.) the DJ spins a "practice song," and a gigantic circle of couples fills the entire main dance floor, so big the instructors have to call out the turns on a microphone. Oscar D'Leon blares from the speakers, and pretty soon everyone's in a whirl -- dile que no, dame una, hips going and fondillos shaking, abrázala, abanico, arms rising and feet pivoting, montaña, balsero, and sometimes the lights will dim and the tacky disco balls will turn. For seven dollars (price per lesson) you get all this, and you might even learn the paseo por el parque.

Best Local Electronica Release

Ko-Wrecktion EP

Turntablist extraordinaire and reigning DMC champ DJ Craze dropped by the home studio of Edgar Farinas (a.k.a. Push Button Objects). The end result is this abstract meeting of the hip-hop minds: an odd blend of off-kilter beats suffused in a crunchy timbre that attains a head-nodding forward motion almost in spite of itself. With so many elements floating in and out of the mix (a windshield-vibrating bass line, a disembodied bellowing Guru vocal, Craze's own frenetic vinyl scratching), songs like "Behavior" and "I Can't Understand You" shouldn't cohere. But like the best experimental electronic sounds coming out of South Florida these days, Farinas and Craze don't just reveal their hometown influences; they transcend them.

Best Punk-Rock History Lesson

Killed by Florida

"I gave you Quaaludes/I held your cock/We spoke in diphthongs/ Clubnite!" Update the drug of choice in this bitter early Eighties anthem from West Palm Beach punkettes Sheer Smegma, and it's clear some things haven't changed in South Florida's nightclub scene. "Clubnite" is just one of dozens of singles released by Floridian punk outfits in the darkest days of the Reagan era, artifacts from a time when looking weird and sounding weirder were solid bets for getting your ass kicked, rather than being a good musical career move. Some mysterious soul over at the La Republica Libertariano de Florida label (don't bother looking for a phone number) has thoughtfully gathered up twenty of these forgotten obscurities, blown the dust from their grooves, and lovingly pressed them up as a bootleg album under the appropriate moniker Killed by Florida. Appropriate because, with the notable exception of the Eat and the Trash Monkeys (whose members can still be found haunting the stage at Churchill's) and Charlie Pickett (last spotted practicing -- ahem -- law), most of the bands compiled here literally have been destroyed by their home state, their members missing in action. But boy did they know how to kick up a racket. Whether you hear the Front's "Immigration Report" as a finely nuanced satire on the Mariel boatlift or as puerile thrashing; whether you hear the Essential's "Turn Off Your Radio" as a trenchant critique of blandness on the FM dial or as an anguished cry for a skilled mental-health professional, it's hard not to want to throw on a battered leather jacket and hit the pit -- at least for old time's sake.

Best Local Jazz Artist

Keshavan Maslak

Whatever you do, don't refer to saxophonist Keshavan Maslak as an avant-garde musician. "You know what an avant-garde musician is?" scoffs Maslak. "It's somebody who's starving!" That may be the reason Maslak finally bailed on his adopted home of New York City in 1986 -- despite a résumé of playing that read like a who's who of that city's left-field music scene, jamming with figures ranging from John Zorn and Philip Glass to Rashied Ali and Sam Rivers -- and headed for South Florida. To signify the break, he even adopted a new name (the purposely show-bizesque Kenny Millions). Still, Manhattan's loss is our gain, and you can now easily find Maslak ensconced in the corner of his own pan-Asian restaurant, Hollywood's Sushi Blues Café, happily honking away in a blues mode. For an earful of Maslak's famed outside jazz playing, be prepared to travel: He reserves that facet of his muse primarily for out-of-town gigs and high-profile European festivals. "People come to my restaurant to eat and relax," he wryly explains, not to turn their brains inside out. For that the curious are advised to take a listen to last year's Without Kuryokhin, a live tribute to departed friend and master pianist Sergey Kuryokhin. Recorded in Russia alongside Japanese turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, the album showcases the two musicians bouncing ideas back and forth, trading squealing licks and trilling notes, and ultimately expanding the boundaries of jazz and (better whisper it) avant-garde sonic exploration. It's thrilling stuff: challenging at times, never academic, always engaging. Maybe one day this massive talent will give audiences in his own back yard a little taste.

Best Street Preacher

James Kendrick

The fallen in search of a strong dose of that old-time religion should skedaddle posthaste to a particular stretch of strip mall in Hialeah. It's there on most Saturday afternoons, near the corner of East Tenth Avenue and NW 62nd Street, outside the Flamingo Plaza, that you'll find James Kendrick. Respectfully bow your head as he straps on his accordion, assembles his back-up singers, and then proceeds to summon the Holy Spirit. Musicologists might scratch their heads over just where Kendrick picked up his blissfully singular take on the gospel (the accordion isn't exactly a staple of the genre), though a looping flourish with which he often ends songs sounds vaguely New Orleans-ish. When Kendrick hits his stride, however, forcefully pumping away and soulfully imploring, "I want to talk to you, Lord!" the only real response is: "Amen, brother!" Should a particularly loud truck rumble by, well, just sing along a little louder. And, hey, don't forget the collection plate.

Best Latin Rock Band

Pepe Alva and Alma Raymi

Latin rock veteran Pepe Alva and his band Alma Raymi ("soul celebration" in Quechuan) spent much of the past year in the studio, working on the follow-up album to 1997's Pa' Mostrarte Mi Amor (MATT Entertainment). With a new disc tentatively titled Comprometida (Engaged), Alva makes a bid for the big time, hiring top-flight producers and stellar New York session musicians to bolster his local six-piece ensemble. On Comprometida the rock-and-Andean-rhythm fusion Alva and his brother Carlos have experimented with since 1990 is carried into the mainstream. "Our music has a little more attitude now," Alva says. "At the same time, it's a little more commercial." While many of Alva's tunes could be anybody's altrock, other songs emanate a distinctive sound thanks to Peruvian instruments such as the quena, the Andean flute; charango, the world's smallest guitar; and zampoña, bamboo panpipes, which the Incas used as a form of communication. Listen for the new songs at Latin-rock hot spots the Grill and Club Millennium.

Best Caribbean Band

Hal Anthony and the Millennium Band

Chances are if you've heard any of the big-name Jamaican toasters or crooners in concert here, then you've heard Hal Anthony and his Millennium Band backing them up. The ensemble of choice for visiting vocalists holds up quite well on its own. Playing regularly for the past two years at South Florida venues such as Bayside in Miami and Alligator Alley in Sunrise, the six-piece outfit brings on real roots reggae with two keyboards, drums, bass, and two guitars. The group mixes soul-stirring original tunes like the praise song "Blessings" with innovative arrangements of reggae standards. A recent tour took the Millennial sound to 44 U.S. states and a number of Caribbean islands. The recent release of their CD Cool It means fans still can groove to the righteous rockers even when the band is out of town. Always true to the roots philosophy, the members of the Millennium Band say their motivation to play comes not from money but from love for their listeners, which is why we love them, too.

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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