music

While the EDM and light shows were going off Sunday at Ultra, a string quartet at the Gale Hotel in South Beach played alongside a DJ and composer.

Backed by DJ Benji B and composer Grant Windsor, The Deviation String Quartet from London re-interpreted songs by artists like Drake, Sampha and Pepe Braddock.

The concept started in 2011, when Benji was asked to DJ at the London Eye, the big wheel overlooking the Thames River in London.

The jam session at the Penny Lane Music Emporium in Fort Lauderdale is probably one of the few musical gatherings in South Florida where senior citizens and teenagers play out of the same songbook.

About 20 people of all ages stand or sit in a circle, strumming ukuleles. Each of them has one eye on the sheet music, the other on their host, Ty Olopai.

"Beginners, when they pick it up, learn music in a minute,” says Olopai.

Ultra Music Festival and Winter Music Conference bring to Miami the beats and bass of electronic dance music, or EDM. But if you don't get what all the noise is about, here we bring you an explainer, and below that, a short tutorial on making the beats so many are crazed for.

HOW TO MAKE ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC:

1. You start off with a simple four-beat bass drum. This is the basic head-nodding element.

If you wrote a play about road rangers or made a quilt from fallen mattress, or glued together a Fabergé-style egg from pieces of shattered headlights, then for the love of highway please contact us.

Miley Cyrus planted twerking in the national consciousness last year when she shook herself onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards. But since the pop prodigy performed in Miami last weekend, at the AmericanAirlines Arena, she should know the provocative dance was born in this city.

Saturday, the MDC Live Arts series will present the live documentary "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller." It's a live doc because director Sam Green will live narrate the presentation while indie-rock band Yo La Tengo will lend its musical notes to the score.

Holiday rerun: This story was originally published March 19, 2014.  

"We will run out of resources!
Miami drivers all stink!"

The young men and women are standing in a practice room in Florida International University’s School of Music, singing a whole string of gripes and lamentations.

A litany of complaints, as it were.

"People don't know to turn right on red!
They never use their turn signals either!"

South Florida’s Jazz in the Gardens festival kicks off this weekend at SunLife Stadium. Now in its ninth year, the festival has a line-up of mostly funk, hip-hop, and R&B artists.

So the event is hardly about jazz and not in a garden. 

But the city of Miami Gardens originally launched the festival as a purely jazz event.

According to the festival’s senior operations director, Ula Zucker-Williams, that idea lasted exactly one year:

Mike Levine is the composer behind the Topical Currents and South Florida Arts Beat theme music.  His biography from www.mikelevinemusic.com:

02/28/14 - Next time on South Florida Arts Beat, Harvey Burstein, founder of MiamiArtZine.Com, South Florida’s online arts and culture magazine, talks about their very informative site, and its new look. The 8th Annual Festival of the Arts Boca is previewed by Charles Greenfield and Charlie Siemon, its Chair and Co-Executive Director.

Julio Iglesias spends much of his time in the air these days, crisscrossing the globe in his private plane to sing in concerts from Singapore to Transylvania. But for the several months of the year he is at his home in Indian Creek, an exclusive island enclave just off Surfside, his circle is much smaller.

02/14/14 - Next time on South Florida Arts Beat, Sobe Wine and Food Festival founder and director, Lee Schrager, shares his excitement about this year’s 13th edition. Charles Greenfield speaks with the executive director of The Chopin Foundation, Jadwiga Gewert about enticing upcoming performances.

02/06/14 - Next time on South Florida Arts Beat, Johnno Potts of the Virginia Key GrassRoots Festival previews the world music, dance and art festivities for all ages.