music

Just two blocks west of Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale, progressive metal band Neolythyc is rehearsing in a cramped, dark, converted garage.  The rehearsal space is just a stone's-throw from Holiday Park, the last known address of jazz legend Jaco Pastorius.

The four members of Neolythyc are all 17 years old, born nearly a decade after Pastorius's death in 1987.  But bass player Jerry Caceres refers to Jaco as "one of the old homies from down the block."

Forty-five-year-old Tammy Goss is sitting on a park bench in a small patch of green wedged between Dixie Highway and the FEC railroad tracks. Staring down from the southeast wall of the corner community center is a huge blue-toned mural of a man's face, his fingers curled around an electric bass guitar.  She knows his name.

“Jaco Pastorius, I think,” says Goss.

But that's all she really knows about John Francis Pastorius III.

Kurt Vonnegut fans have a lot to look forward to over the next couple of weekends. First, a performance of a chamber music piece with a libretto by the iconoclastic author, and then a discussion of a new book of his letters at the Miami Book Fair International.

The bassoonist Luciano Magnanini has been a fixture of South Florida's classical music scene for the past four decades. He has played around the world and performed under the conductors Leonard Bertstein and Zubin Mehta. In 1972, after arriving from Italy via Peru and Mexico, Magnanini began a 40-year teaching career at the University of Miami. He’s retiring in May, and this Sunday he performs a chamber concert celebrating his career.

On any given weekend, you might walk by The Old School Square parking garage in Delray Beach and hear the sounds of jazz or blues or classical music wafting from the ground floor.

It’s an innovative venue known as the 'Arts Garage' and, yes, the rest of the building is actually devoted to cradling cars.

But the ground floor is where all the action is.

No vehicles there, no take-a-ticket machines, no yellow lines, no parking attendants to be seen, mostly live music in a 5500 square foot garage.

Music teacher Mario Ortiz has been teaching classic salsa tunes to elementary and middle school students for 14 years.  Outside the classroom, Mario plays trumpet in a salsa group. He learned music from his father, who was also named Mario Ortiz.

The elder Ortiz was a well known salsa bandleader (for the Mario Ortiz All Star Band)  in Puerto Rico in the 1960s.  He died in 1999.

This hymn is the one you hear under our piece, “Faith in the Aftermath.” The original segment explores how parishioners at Notre Dame D’Haiti Catholic Church here in Miami leaned on their faith and on song after their country’s massive earthquake– to heal and to release their grief.