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 Sound Judgment
'Buena Vista's' Social Director
Makes a Return Trip to Cuba for 'Mambo Sinuendo'
By Richard Harrington
Washington Post
" I'll never forget it."
Ry Cooder is talking about his first encounter with a guitar, more than
50 years ago. The guitar was a three-quarter-size four-string tenor.
Cooder was 4 years old, well into a yearlong recuperation from an accident
that had cost him his left eye.
"
I was lying in bed one night, and the man who brought it over was a violinist
who was a friend of my parents," Cooder recalls, and suddenly it's
the night before.
" He comes into the bedroom and he sets this thing down on my stomach,
as you would if somebody's lying in bed on their back, and he strums
the strings . . . and that was all you need to know. Because there's
something about a wood box, especially the figure eight . . . You know
there's something going on here.
" I couldn't tell you what I thought, but I can remember the feeling of
it."
That feeling of discovery mixed with mystery has resonated and reverberated
throughout Ry Cooder's career. The virtuoso slide guitarist, multi-culti
mixer and film scorer extraordinaire has traveled a six-string highway
from cult-level solo work to the Buena Vista Social Club, the biggest
phenomenon in the history of world music.
Yet Cooder has always been discomfited by the spotlight. He toured minimally
to promote his own albums, and the man who brought together the venerable
coterie of aging Cuban musicians was, by choice, barely noticed as the
Buena Vista Social Club traveled the world. Sitting and playing guitar
in the back row of the orchestra, next to his drumming son Joachim, Cooder
was eventually introduced each night, but almost as an afterthought.
Ry has that enormous confidence that certain people have that is totally
masked in modesty," says director Walter Hill, eight of whose films
have been scored by Cooder since 1980. "He's genial and deferential
and many times plays down his own efforts. . . . Ry's aware how good
he is, but he doesn't feel a need to shout about himself."
That's not unlike Cooder's playing, which has always been marked by restraint
and subtlety, reflecting a rare sensitivity to the notion that the notes
you don't play may be more important than those you do. At the same time,
Cooder is blessed with a wonderfully loose sense of swing and syncopation
that imbues his music with a genial warmth and emotional depth lacking
in much popular music. It's what has made Cooder one of the most respected
musicians in America -- even if his profile isn't commensurate with his
stature.
Until this week's release of "Mambo Sinuendo," a mesmerizing
collection of electric guitar duets with legendary Cuban guitarist Manuel
Galban, he hadn't released an album under his own name since 1993's "A
Meeting by the River." That album, improvisations with Indian virtuoso
V.M. Bhatt (who created the mohan vina, an instrument with a sitar neck
on a guitar body), won a Grammy for best world music album, just as the
Buena Vista Social Club album would a few years later.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Cooder is seldom eager to wander far from the
Santa Monica area, where he was born in 1947; he's pretty much always
lived in the neighborhood he grew up in. Yet that has not prevented him
from three decades of cross-cultural collaborations.
 What Cooder is doing with Manuel Galban is typically eclectic, what he
envisioned as "the cool world of mambo-jazz, somewhere between Perez
Prado and Henry Mancini," a small combo playing "ultra high-grade
jukebox music" with a '50s ambience. Galban, who supplied twangy
guitar (electrics are a rarity in Cuban music) and musical direction
for Los Zafiros, a 1960s doo-wop group in Cuba, is as much a maverick
in Cuban music circles as Cooder is stateside, which makes for some marvelous
guitar soundscapes in this largely instrumental collection.
In truth, "Mambo Sinuendo" is not far removed from Cooder's
first such venture, 1976's "Chicken Skin Music," which melded
the Hawaiian slack-key guitar of Gabby Pahinui and the Tex-Mex accordion
of Flaco Jimenez with some stylish R&B vocalists and Cooder's exquisite
guitar playing. That title came from a Hawaiian expression for "something
that gives goose bumps" -- an experience, and a goal, central to
Cooder's work ethic.
"
When I was a little kid, I can remember records [like "Mambo Sinuendo"]
that I used to hear on the radio," Cooder said during a recent Washington
visit. "It's the sounds of the instruments and the idea that people
were together and something rare was happening. But I felt that I was
missing it because it was always going on in the wrong time and I couldn't
get there. In order to have the experience, to play a certain way and
feel a certain way, you have to go make it up."
" The sad thing for me is, I'm 55 now and I've spent all my time either
trying to find the instruments that make the sound, whatever they were,
then trying to locate individuals who are somewhere; and they're dwindling
and generally tend to be someplace else now. And if that's the case,
you have to go where they are . . .
"
So you have to say, 'I want to learn something,' " Cooder continues. "You
have to say 'I have the records, and I've listened and I love this stuff
and I think about it, and I'm going to go learn it.' . . . You have to
build a little at a time, build some rapport and, I suppose, credibility
-- friendship, perhaps.
" And then, maybe, there's a slight chance, that you could make it believable
and acceptable."
Method in the Madness
As a youngster, Ryland Peter Cooder would hang out in Los Angeles folk
and blues clubs, catching traveling performers, seeking them out at their
motel rooms for lessons that were less technical than spiritual. At 17,
he formed a band with another country and blues junkie, Taj Mahal. The
Rising Sons set quickly (an album that came out 25 years after the Sons
broke up confirms that they were still ascending the learning curve).
At 18, Ry Cooder was a studio musician, recording with groups as disparate
as Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Little
Feat (that's his slide on "Willin' ") and the Rolling Stones.
He taught Keith Richards to play slide, and the open G tuning favored
by John Lee Hooker. Richards once said, "I took Ry Cooder for everything
I could get," a compliment that may explain the fact that the money
lick in "Honky Tonk Women" is pure Cooder-by-way-of-Hooker.
Cooder's first solo album came out in 1970, and by mid-decade he was
ready to begin what he calls "a method, chemically trying to jam
these things together. Today, I look back and I can't believe I did that.
I got better at doing it."
"
He's a guy who loves music," says Jim Keltner, the veteran drummer
and Cooder collaborator. "Ry loves the eras when people played with
great dynamics and feeling. He's always been a great admirer of people
who know how to touch the instrument rather than strangle it or manhandle
it."
Recalling his initial session on Cooder's 1971 album "Into the Purple
Valley," Keltner notes, "the first thing that happened was
-- and it still happens today -- he's very intense in a low-key manner.
When you're playing or listening back, he listens like you can't imagine.
He's got massive ears, hears things that other people don't."
Scores Galore
Between 1970 and 1980, Ry Cooder made nine albums for Warner Bros.; though
critically acclaimed, they never sold particularly well. (Two more followed
during the '80s.) Never fond of leaving home to pursue public performance
-- for him, the least rewarding end of the music business -- Cooder eventually
found haven in a different medium: film.
Having worked on the soundtracks to movies like "Performance" (including
the slide on Mick Jagger's "Memo From Turner"), Cooder hooked
up with director Walter Hill, who was preparing to film "The Long
Riders," 1980's epic retelling of the James Gang saga.
"He was wearing a big pith helmet, a T-shirt and shorts," Hill
recalls, still amused. "The studio, of course, didn't want him.
Everybody knew Ry was a great musician, but the idea of him doing a score
was kind
of daunting."
Cooder validated Hill's faith with a haunting and historically authentic
score consisting of polkas, square dances, waltzes and other tunes played
by a small ensemble -- a sound distinct from the orchestral scores usually
favored in big westerns. Hill used Cooder scores for seven more films,
utilizing his vast knowledge of musical Americana to capture historical
and geographical, as well as psychological, settings.
Hill says that Cooder's tastes "are so wide and his ability to go
into areas and somehow grab the essence of them and use them have got
Ry a reputation of being an assimilator, which is partially true. But
he takes these things and he makes them his own somehow . . .
"Ry doesn't, in the traditional sense of Hollywood, underscore the
dramatic moment as much as he fills the environment and the atmosphere," Hill
adds.
 Consider Cooder's celebrated score for Wim Wenders's 1984 film "Paris,
Texas." Its atmospheric acoustic bottleneck slide guitar sound --
Cooder's homage to Blind Willie Johnson -- has been so widely copied,
from other film scores to commercials, that it's hard to remember how
utterly original it was less than 20 years ago.
"
Wenders must have thought that he had a film that was so fragile and
so delicate that if anything too much happens in the music, the film
is going to tip over," Cooder remembers. "I think he was thinking
something atmospheric but minimal, small, that would stay out of the
way of these characters that he was trying to depict and the tempo of
the film."
In the '80s, the majority of Cooder's albums were scores and soundtracks. "I
just loved it," he says, "because the record thing drove me
insane -- I couldn't figure it out. I knew I wasn't connecting and I
finally had to stop making these damn solo records because they just
didn't happen. Something was missing, and commercially it was useless
anyway, pretty much nonviable."
Which is why Cooder's '90s albums tended to be small-label, cross-cultural
collaborations headlined by others, like "A Meeting on the River," or "Hollow
Bamboo" with Indian flutist Ronu Majumdar, or "Talking Timbuktu" with
Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure.
The Cuban Connection
In 1996 Cooder went to Cuba to record what was supposed to be an encounter
between African and Cuban musicians. When passport problems prevented
the Africans from traveling, he shifted the focus to Cuban veterans who
had been pretty much forgotten at home: among them, then-89-year-old
guitarist Compay Segundo and a pair of seventy-somethings, pianist Ruben
Gonzalez, who no longer even had a piano, and vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer,
who was shining shoes for a living.
Cooder had first visited Cuba in 1976 with a clandestine jazz tour featuring
Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Earl Hines. Ever the collector, he'd brought
home trunks full of music, but opportunities to work with Cuban musicians
were always thwarted by the U.S. ban on travel there. In fact, Cooder's
1996 visit would result in a $100,000 fine, later reduced to $25,000;
he hadn't applied for a license because he believed cultural exchanges
were exempt. That would cause major problems when Cooder tried to go
back to record follow-ups to the three albums that launched the Buena
Vista revolution: "The Buena Vista Social Club," "Introducing
Ruben Gonzalez" and "A Toda Cuba le Gusta" by the Afro-Cuban
All Stars.
Of course Cooder had already made great albums with obscure musicians
from varied cultures and seen them disappear. "Every time those
. . . records would get made," he recalls, "I'd sit there and
I'd think they're missing all of it, and it bothered me a lot."
Enter Wim Wenders, for whom Cooder was then scoring "The End of
Violence." Cooder sent him a rough demo tape of the ballads, boleros
and sons he'd recorded in Havana. Wenders, like so many others later
on, promptly fell in love with the music.
"
I knew there was a story there," says Cooder. "I simply said
to Wim Wenders, 'These people are incredible, vivid characters, very
poignant. I want you to come down and just check it out.'
" And of course the film taught everybody what was in the music that they
wouldn't have seen, wouldn't have known. Most folks don't hear things
like they see them."
Wenders's film would go on to become one of the 10 highest-grossing documentaries,
as well as an Oscar winner. Sales of the soundtrack topped 8 million
(more than Cooder's 11 solo albums combined) and transformed the lives
of many of its musicians, notably Gonzalez, Ferrer (whose new Cooder-produced
album comes out in March) and now Galban.
But Cooder was almost blocked from making the new Ferrer and Galban albums.
In January 2000, he applied for permission to return to Cuba; federal
authorities turned him down. A second unlawful trip would have subjected
him to higher fines and possible criminal penalties.
As a last resort, Cooder appealed directly to the White House and, as
one of his final acts in office, President Clinton granted Cooder and
his American band members a one-year exemption from the travel ban. Soon
Cooder was on his way with his portable rhythm section: Keltner, one
of the greatest drummers of all time, and Joachim Cooder, who's played
with his father since the age of 10.
Also aboard were two dozen cases of instruments and recording equipment
for making both the Galban album and the second Ferrer album. The massive
collection provoked laughter from Galban the first time he walked into
the studio.
"
I was truly amazed, truly in awe," Galban says from Havana through
a translator. "I thought, what is all this for?"
"
You need everything," Cooder insists. "If tone and sound is
your goal, then you must have things to produce this. For instance, in
the drum department, my God, we had all this stuff you've never even
seen, all sorts of esoteric junk that Keltner and Joachim have and electronics
and bizarre variants and all kinds of found stuff. I brought my pedal
steel and all my guitars and amps and weird devices. It's nothing you
buy in the store, it's all collected and doctored and worked over and
hot-rodded.
" You lay this out and sit there and say, 'Well, we will approach each
tune from its nature, and I hope I have the right thing.' The other thing
is, in Cuba you can't get anything. . . . You might as well be on the
moon, see."
"
Mambo Sinuendo" and Ferrer's "Buenos Hermanos" are the
first two projects on Cooder's new Perro Verde label (distributed by
Nonesuch). "I have drawers full of all sorts of music I love and
want to put out," Cooder says.
The next will be close to heart and home: the soundtrack for a documentary
inspired by photographer Don Normark's "Chavez Ravine, 1949: A Los
Angeles Story," a study of that largely Mexican American barrio
community before it was displaced by the building of Dodger Stadium.
Cooder is working with Lalo Guerrero and Don Tosti, both in their eighties
and pioneers of Chicano music, on what he calls "a real L.A. story
of corruption and greed."
The thing you're not likely to see is an old-fashioned Ry Cooder album.
The last one to carry just his name was 1987's "Get Rhythm," and
you sense he has no interest in adding to the 11 albums that constitute
his pop discography. Don't look for another Little Village, either. That
was the 1992 semi-star project that brought together Cooder, John Hiatt,
Nick Lowe and Keltner.
Taking its name from a Sonny Boy Williamson tune, Little Village was
meant to be a creative democracy of mutual writing and shared credits,
and it did garner critical acclaim. But you sense it was Ry Cooder's
last commercial accommodation.
"
Those songs are good . . . wicked songs," he says of Little Village's
one album. "The good part of it was the song creation. The rest
of it wasn't fun at all.
" I give up on pop music. As far as a commercial entity, as far as pop
music goes, I quit, I absolutely throw in the towel. I can't handle it.
I can't do it. I can't be what they need you to be."
© 2003
The Washington Post Company
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