Music Organizations

The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences revoked Milli Vanilli's 1989 Grammy for best new artist on Monday, marking the first such action in the 33-year history of the recording industry award. The Burbank-based academy's board of trustees took action after admissions last week by Milli Vanilli performers Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan and their German producer, Frank Farian, that the photogenic pop duo did not sing a note on their album, "Girl You Know It's True."

It's only 10 years old, but the San Diego Dixieland Jazz Festival has come of age. Whereas its organizers once scoured the country for great new bands, they now sift through more than 100 tapes sent from musicians all over the world. Through Sunday, 25 bands invited to this year's festival will present a veritable orgy of the seminal jazz at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley. Continuous music will be heard in 10 rooms, ranging from intimate to the 1,200-capacity Presidio Room.

John Frankel has come to the Ojai Festival for the past 20 of the musical event's 45 seasons. He brings his wife and their friends every year for the music, which continues today at Libby Bowl in Ojai. But Frankel also enjoys the grassy outdoor theater, where a canopy of oak trees filters out the hot sun and people spread blankets to loll over picnic baskets between concerts.

Shattering records as well as eardrums, 1.4 million pierced and painted techno music fans bobbed along to the beat of Berlin's 11th annual Love Parade on Saturday, as the world's largest rave took place amid greed, acrimony and the threat of exile. The summer celebration that began in 1989 with a few dozen dancers and a rickety Volkswagen bus has become Euro-Generation X's yearly answer to Woodstock--as well as an image-boosting moneymaker for a city keen on shaking its sinister past.

Call it Country-palooza. The third annual country music extravaganza at the Fairplex in Pomona returns Thursday for four days--this time with a new name. Now titled "Country Music Television's Starfest '96," the event is expected to draw a total of 40,000 people, said Bob Alexander, president of Starfest Inc., a Beverly Hills firm that stages musical and fan-driven events.

There will be something old, something new and something blue tonight at Barnsdall Park, though it's not a wedding. More a coming-out party, in the form of the concert debut of eXindigo!, at the Gallery Theater. The organization is old in the sense that it has its roots in the dormant Ex Indigo Singers, new in that it has been reconstituted and refocused, and blue as in "out of the blue," which is how eXindigo! artistic director Ted Peterson interprets the unconventional polyglot name.

Has the time finally arrived for an arena-sized festival of Spanish-language rock 'n' roll to succeed in a region of more than 3 million Latinos? The organizers of a 10-hour Festival de Rock en Espanol concert Sunday at the Los Angeles Sports Arena hope so. Felix Mejorado, a Mexican-born singer who has fronted a Los Angeles-based rock band for more than a decade, likes to think the event will open a new era for the Spanish-language audience and groups such as his.

The second annual Latin Grammy Awards, an event that was relocated from Miami because of anti-Cuban protests and then put on hold in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, were finally announced Tuesday at a low-key news conference at the Conga Room in Los Angeles. Spain's Alejandro Sanz was the big winner with four awards, including best album, record and song. Colombian singer Juanes won three awards, including best new artist.

The hopes of promoters to create a Southern California tradition with the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival appeared to be wilting in the desert sun on Saturday, but a surge in attendance on Sunday created new hope for the sprawling event, which is fashioned after European rock festivals.

For the past two years, new music aficionados of many different stripes have been known to flock to the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica. In a region not known for embracing the cultural fringe, the lounge has become a home for the homeless, a haven for experimental, category-defying musicians who graze the idioms of left-field jazz, progressive rock and free improvisation but belong nowhere in particular. There's nothing quite like the sense of sweet vindication in proving cynics wrong.