WLRN Culture

When Merlin Oehrke walked into that diner last summer, he couldn't have guessed that his lunch would come with a side order of answered prayers. The 89-year-old retired musician still doesn't know why he ended up in that particular diner – it wasn't one he normally went to. He sat down at the counter and spotted a teenage boy and middle-aged man nearby, going over some sheet music – his kind of music. “A violin score. It looked like a violin concerto," he says. "I said, 'Lord, I think this is the person.'" Oehrke walked over and asked the boy if he was a violinist. The teenager, Gabriel Esperon, replied that he was. Esperon, 17, recalls what happened next: "He said, 'I've been waiting over 20 years for God to send me a violinist to bestow my violin to.'" That day at the diner, Esperon and his coach had been perusing some music over lunch and going over a game plan for future studies when Oehrke approached them. The teen had been playing seriously since he was about 12 years old and his

Miami Herald photographer Carl Juste has been capturing life in Cuba for 30 years, on assignment and on his own time. He, along with a group of award-winning photographers from Miami and Washington, D.C., traveled to Cuba in March 2019 on a five-day journey and took moving images of prominent Havana neighborhoods. The photos are a varied collection of bright, colorful time capsules that juxtapose life on the communist island to here in Miami. The images will be on display at the Iris PhotoCollective, 225 NE 59th St. in Little Haiti, as part of the exhibition called “Cuba: Paradise Lost in Nostalgia,” which runs Aug. 24 to Oct. 12. “When you go to Cuba, nostalgia is everywhere,” said Juste, the lead photographer and curator of the exhibit, on Sundial. The exhibit is a part of a bigger project Juste has been working on called “Havana, Haiti: Two Cultures, One Community,” a book he says will speak to the dynamic of Havana and Haiti. It is sponsored by the Knight Foundation and the Green

For the last 12 years, Marisol Blanco has been fighting against numbers. Specifically, she has been hard at work dispelling the notion that dancing Salsa is about counting steps and following a mechanical style. "That's just atrophying the brain of dancers," she says. For this Havanera , who hails from the the culturally rich Guanabacoa neighborhood, it's all about understanding the African history of Cuban music, how it has created its percussion and steps. Then the rest – and the body – just follows. “If you know where you come from,” Blanco says. “You know why you manifest yourself this way.” Blanco is one of the dancers and instructors who will be participating in the Miami Salsa Congress and offering a Master Class workshop. The annual event, which will take place from July 26 to 28 at the Eden Roc Hotel in Miami Beach, features Latin dance workshops with local and international experts, top-of-the-line showcases, and huge dance parties late into the night. Blanco, who leads the

The Portuguese word saudade [pronounced sau-DAH-jee in Brazilian Portuguese] has no translation in English or any other language. It’s described as a deep, sad longing for that which has been lost indefinitely or for a time – a loved one, a place, a feeling. On July 6, Brazilians in South Florida – where a significant portion of Brazilians live in the United States – felt saudade for João Gilberto , the founder of what is arguably Brazil’s largest cultural export: Bossa Nova. Gilberto, a guitarist and singer, passed away at 88 after a musical career spanning over 50 years. As a 27-year-old from the state of Bahia, considered the birthplace of Afro-Brazilian culture and Samba, Gilberto recorded 12 songs that transferred the loud, hectic rhythms of Samba onto softer, quieter tones on his guitar. The result was his 1959 album “Chega de Saudade,” considered a defining moment for Brazilian music. He continued his musical innovations with his recordings of “The Girl From Ipanema,”

For the last several weeks, Chicago-based composer and percussionist Ben Wahlund has been a resident artist at The Studios of Key West, absorbing the island and its people, both the tourists and the service workers who provide the only-in-Key West experiences for them. Wahlund's observations and encounters have been transformed into a dozen musical compositions that he's calling "Mile Marker Zero." WLRN's Nancy Klingener talked to Wahlund about his work and got a preview of some of the pieces he'll be performing on Saturday, July 13, at The Studios of Key West .