Related Content

• Blog | Miami Music Matters

Coldplay gets cozy with fans at West Palm Beach's Cruzan Amphitheatre

It's no small accomplishment to make a sea of 16,000 people feel like an intimate audience in a small club, but that's what Chris Martin and Coldplay did at West Palm Beach's Cruzan Amphitheatre on Friday night. Joking, charming, and leading blissful singalongs, Martin and company made the opening night of their U.S. tour into a celebration of the feel-good power of pop music.

The sentimental peak came when the group ventured into the middle of the crowd to lead them in an acoustic version of The Monkees' I'm a Believer , teasing at and enjoying the song's innocent "I'm in love, ooooohhhh, I'm a believer" enthusiasm. "People in the back are you in love?" Martin asked, and got a ringing affirmation.

Given that the British rock group just finished another U.S. tour, also in support of their hit 2008 album Viva La Vida , last November, with a stop in Sunrise that same month, the size and enthusiasm of Friday night's crowd was an impressive demonstration of Coldplay's popularity.

Songwriter Jacob Jeffries attracts South Florida's savviest musical tastemakers

Jacob Jeffries is onstage at the Transit Lounge, pounding the keyboards, channeling Billy Joel, and Elton John, and the Beatles, and Ben Folds, and the 14 years of songwriting he's packed into his own 21 years of life. This Thursday night got off to a bumpy start -- the Brickell-area club had booked another party, which ran almost an hour into the start of the release party for Jeffries' latest CD, . . . waiting for the piano movers . . .

But at 10:30 p.m. the stage is finally his, and Jeffries is in full swing, lost in the music, leading a crowd that ranges from former high school buddies to fellow musicians to local music industry heavyweights, in a happy, clapping, arm-waving singalong. ``You've got some nerve,'' Jeffries wails exuberantly, ``to ask if I believe in love.''

There are plenty of people in South Florida who believe in Jeffries, one of the most talented and most watched musical artists on the local scene. A songwriting prodigy who's been composing since he was 7, Jeffries has attracted

Classics rock on: Why golden-age oldies dominate concert scene

They say rock 'n' roll will never die. Neither, apparently, will the careers of many rockers, at least to judge by the concert scene.

``I never thought I'd be around this long, much less playing these kind of shows,'' says Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, 58, amazed that he's still rocking stadiums more than 30 years after hits like Dream On and Walk This Way .

Acts like Fleetwood Mac and AC/DC filled the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise last winter, while Bruce Springsteen heads there on Sept. 13 and Leonard Cohen kicks off his U.S. tour there on Oct. 17.

Juanes in Havana:`This is the power of music'

As a sea of revelers jammed Havana's Plaza de la Revolución, Puerto Rico's Olga Tañon opened the controversial Peace without Borders concert Sunday with a sentiment that, despite all the debate on both sides of the Florida Straits, simply could not be disputed:

``Together, we are going to make history!'' she yelled. And the multitude, wearing white and hoisting colorful umbrellas that did little to alleviate the punishing heat, cheered. Then Tañon kicked off her performance with a merengue that, at least in Miami, seemed to carry a double meaning.

`` Es mentiroso ese hombre ,'' she sang. That man is a liar.

Memories of Woodstock, 40 years later

Memories of Woodstock, the rock-'n'-roll festival he helped create, haunt Artie Kornfeld still: the cops opening fire on the crowd of stunned hippies, body parts flying everywhere, the dying screams of musicians as the stage burst into flames, the rapes and the looting of the dead.

Of course, that Woodstock only happened in Kornfeld's raving, mushroom-besotted brain, a hellish daylong hallucination triggered by a dose of psilocybin. Only a countervailing shot of Thorazine administered by festival doctors enabled him to stagger out to the edge of the stage to see the transcendent climax of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix's soaring sunrise performance of The Star-Spangled Banner .

``There were a lot of good trips at Woodstock, but there were some bad ones, too,'' admits Kornfeld, sprawled comfortably across a couch in a gated Delray Beach subdivision a thousand miles and more light-years away from the mud and the dope and the music and the wonder of Woodstock.