Vote for the best in San Antonio music

Are you ready for this? The San Antonio Current's Music Awards ballot is officially open for your votes. Yep. It's approaching the time of the year when some of you will invariably bitch about how the Current forgot this or that artist or how we dared saying that such-and-such is the best local band when they suck and, actually, this band is better. As if we had done the voting. To that I have the perfect antidote: Start voting now. It's time to make your statement.

We pushed back the awards to make way for a bunch of new categories recognizing the best musicians (drummer, bassist, guitarist, and keyboardist), keyed in room for the Most Overrated and Underrated bands, Best CD Package/Design, Best Instrumental Band, Best New Band, and even broken what had been simply Best Latin Band into Best Latin Alternative/Rock (rock en español) and Best Latin Orchestra (any dance combo that plays Latin jazz, salsa, merengue, or other Afro Caribbean rhythms). Finally, we fined-tuned the rock categories as well: you can now vote for Best Indie Rock, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, and Hardcore band. The ballot has a total of 29 categories to be chosen by the readers between now and March 7 at sacurrent.com/musicpoll. Only one category winner will be chosen by the Current: the Rammy Award given to the "best in show," whoever we feel has been the most relevant person or persons in the local music scene in the last year. The rest is totally up to you. Now get voting!

In January, we gave you Third Root's "Winter in America," the first single off the new collaboration between MoJoe's Easy Lee and Mexican Stepgrandfather's Marco Cervantes. The second single is "Call Me Black" and you can also download it for free at www2.sacurrent.com/music/ThirdRoot-CallMeBlack.mp3 (to download the 3.3 MB file, right-click on the link and select "save linked file as"). The full album comes out in May but, until then, once a month you'll be able to download one song for free at sacurrent.com until the official release.

"Call Me Black" was produced by Greg G and Groove Ology, and features Stic.Man of dead prez.

"Chicano history is black history, and black history is Chicano history," Cervantes told the Current. "So call me black and I'm proud. Third Root represents a paradigm shift in the way we perceive each other. There's African roots in Mexico and Spain, but this history isn't taught. So we teach it in song."

One song's not enough?

After you bag Third Root's latest, download the Saturday Night Satellites' debut EP, Drop City, at etiprecords.com. If you like what you hear, catch them live Friday, February 17, at Moses Rose's Hideout next to the Alamo.

> Email Enrique Lopetegui