Ry Cooder Part 2: A Man of the World
(for context: the introduction)
Ry Week 18: A Citizen of the World emerges
(July 2nd, 2018)
There are those of us who learned about Ry Cooder in the 1990’s or later likely thought of him as some kind of “World Music” aficionado, or perhaps even somewhat of an ethnomusicologist. As we have gotten to know Ry in the past several months, it’s obvious this is not the case. Ry spent the first several decades of his career steeped in American blues, R&B, country, and folk, among other things. But in these next few weeks, we’ll see Ry morph from an icon of Americana into the man who won consecutive Grammy’s for World Music Album of the Year. And this was all before that whole Cuban thing…
Sometime in 1992 Ry heard a recording some Indian Classical music from Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, featuring instrument known as the Mohan Veena which Mr Bhatt is crediting with inventing. It is a hybrid of the Indian sorad and a slack key Hawaiian guitar* which features high-pitched sympathetic and drone strings (characteristic of many Indian stringed instruments) and several melodic strings which are played with a slide, in the style of a Hawaiian guitar.
Ry was into it. To make a long story short, a meeting was arranged and the two men, along with a tabla player and Ry’s 14 year-old song Joachim on dumbek recorded four extended, mostly improvised pieces of music less than 1 hour after first meeting each other.
The recordings were released as 1993’s A Meeting By The River on Water Lily Acoustics (the small label run by Kavichandran Alexander, who had recorded the session), and went on to win the aforementioned Grammy that same year.
The Wikipedia page for this album is quite extensive and very interesting. I must admit, I didn’t know this album existed until some time last week when I want to look something up at Talking Timbuktu (more on that next week) and realized it had a predecessor. As several reviewers noted, this is remarkable album in that it so successfully and seemingly effortlessly blends two fairly disparate musical traditions. The resulting music is not really of either tradition, but manages to not sound forced or contrived. It’s a document to two masters of their craft, conversing in a universal language.
I’m including two tracks here (the entire first half of the album) because they have such distinctly different vibes.
The opener (and title track) is bright and lively. The musicians are stretching their legs; finding some melodies and rhythms that they share in common and beginning to move with them.
The second track “Longing” is a darker more brooding affair. I prefer it honestly, though it takes a bit longer to develop. The two stringed instruments build a beguiling atmosphere while the percussion ominously punctuates the crescendos.
The third and fourth track are enjoyable too, but they feel a little less natural, to me at least. The whole album is pretty good listen though. Especially if you run some kind of tea house or fusion restaurant, or enjoy mild psychotropic journeying on occasion.
Next week we’ll see how this serves as more of a definitive dividing point, as opposed to a temporary diversion, in Ry’s career. Until then, lay back and enjoy the vibes.
S
* — footnote, those of you following along at home may remember that Ry dedicated about 2 1/2 songs on 1976’s Chicken Skin Music to Hawaiian music and the slack key guitar. This was his first real venture off the US mainland.
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Ry week 19th: Destination Timbuktu
(July 13th, 2018)
Sorry about my extreme tardiness with this one, especially because I’ve been looking forward to this album for some time. Previous to this journey we are currently on, I had always thought that 1994’s Talking Timbuktu was Ry’s first real cross-continental venture. It seemed a fitting entrance: the American bluesman reconnects with the African roots of the blues. In fact, half a decade later, Martin Scorsese and Corey Harris took the same trip for that explicit purpose and played with some of the same musicians. But as we’ve just learned, Ry already had a fresh-off-the-press World Music Grammy in his pocket when he wandered into the Malian desert in search of the blues.
Ali Farka Toure is one of the giants of 20th Century African music. A brilliant guitarist and a singer who performs in over 10 different languages, he is also a member of the Toureg tribe who has roamed the western Sahara desert for centuries. The musical tradition he comes from does indeed have deep connections to the American blues and you can hear them on almost every song on this album. From a technical standpoint, the pentatonic scale that most Cheeto-fingered white American teenagers learn as the “blues scale” is native to this West African tradition.
But on a deeper level, you can hear the same haunting lonesome spirit that was so prominent in Ry’s soundtracks for both Paris, Texas and Crossroads, and runs through most of the old Mississippi Delta blues of yore. I had a college professor describe these grooves as imitating the slow, rhythmic loping walk of a camel trudging through the desert sand. That’s just about right.
While I’m at it, I shouldn’t let this email go without mentioning that professor by name. Dr Heather Maxwell was not quite my first introduction to African music, but she certainly gave me my most comprehensive tour. She was a visiting professor at UVa for a few years in the early 2000’s and I took her class and then played in her Afro-pop ensemble, which morphed into a band (she’s a great singer and played a handful of awesomely bizarre traditional West African stringed instruments) that I played in for a few years after school.
Somehow she got wind that the Malian ambassador was coming to Richmond in late 2005 and talked her way into having our ensemble play at the reception dinner. We learned “Gomni” off this album and through some combination of us playing that song and Heather being Heather (likely more of the latter), she got us invited to come to Mali and play at the Festival Sur Le Niger, only a few hours drive from Timbuktu itself.
The stories go on and on when the subject drifts to “The Adventures of Heather” but we should get back on topic. This is really a great album all the way through and gives you a wonderful entre into the astoundingly rich world of West African folk music. I’ve already called out “Gomni” and I want to mention the gorgeous “Soukora” too because its lightness stands in contrast to the rest of the record. But I feel compelled to highlight a different tune here:
“Amandrai” has got to be the most god-damn camel-lopingest groove I’ve ever heard. Not to mention, it’s as good an example as any of the blues’ heritage in the Motherland. And also, I just love this shit. You can feel your skin tingle as the sun goes down over a distant sand dune and the temperature drops 20 degrees in a half hour. Soak it up.
S
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Ry week 20: CUBA!!!!
(July 22nd, 2018)
We have arrived at what undoubtedly became the defining moment of the second half, and for many people the entirety, of Ry’s career. There are many strange ironies in this fact, notably that a man who built a 30-year rep as a blues and rock guitar god would become best known for revitalizing Cuban folk music, and even more so with an album that he barely plays guitar on. But if I could articulate two principles that have guided Ry’s artistry throughout, they would be 1) a fascination with the intersection of “folk” music and “pop” music and 2) an unabashed love for great musicianship. This album scores extremely high in both those categories.
There is a vague legend surrounding this project that an American guitarist, a British producer, and a Cuban bandleader rediscovered a dozen or so brilliant singers and musicians who had all but disappeared several decades before and rescued them from eternal obscurity by putting them in the same room and turning on some microphones. This legend is not entirely dispelled in the (fantastic and highly recommended) film of the same name that documents the making of this album.
It also isn’t entirely untrue, although in reality, the project was the brainchild of British producer and World Circuit exec Nick Gold and looked very different in its inception than it did upon completion.
There was an interesting cross-continental musical reverse-diaspora* that happened with urban West African music in the second half of the 20th Century where many African musicians became influenced by the Afro-Caribbean music that was becoming very popular in the post-WWII era, in much the same way that American musicians like Harry Belafonte became enchanted with Caribbean sounds and rhythms. Gold’s idea was to bring some Malian musicians to Cuba and record a trans-Atlantic collaboration of sorts. He contracted Ry, who was hot off his Grammy-winning Talking Timbuktu (recorded in Mali with some local luminaries) to produce the album.
Unfortunately, the Malian visas fell through at the last minute and Ry and Mr Gold we’re in Cuba with a studio paid for and a handful of old-school Cuban virtuosos. They had contracted Cuban traditionalist bandleader Juan de Marcos Gonzalez for the project and somehow, with the time booked and players there, the idea morphed into Juan tracking down all the old-school badasses he could find, adding rum and coffee and microphones, and seeing what they could come up with. The sessions (which lasted less than three weeks in total) ultimately produced three albums, spanning a range of styles popular in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba.
The most famous of these three (the only one on which Ry is credited as producer) lent its name to both the ensemble that emerged from this experience, and the aforementioned documentary film: the Buena Vista Social Club. The Wikipedia page has plenty more details which I won’t bother to repeat here. I will say that it is really difficult to overstate the impact this album had on re-popularizing Latin music (and particularly Cuban music) in America and Europe. And we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is a pretty remarkable musical document.
This is another one where I definitely recommend enjoying the full record, but I had to highlight the opening track because it’s both the ensemble’s “signature tune” and just a great fucking song.
“Chan Chan” was written by Buena Vista member Compay Segundo** in the 1980’s (some 40+ years into his illustrious career).
If there’s any doubt whether this trip down memory lane resonated as much within Cuba as it did without, I also feel a need to include “537 Cuba” which is a remake of the song recorded only 3 years later by Orishas, who is one of the best known Cuban musical exports of their generation, and introduced me (and I’m sure countless other non-Cubans) to the power and vitality of Cuban hip hop.
Sit back and enjoy because we’ll be spending the next weeks in the Caribbean Sea.
Hasta pronto,
S
* — I can’t help but expand on this a bit because I think it’s fascinating and, more importantly, created some really great music. My favorite example is Orchestra Baobab from Senegal. They recorded a Cuban-African hybrid throughout the 70’s. The album “Pirate’s Choice” is highly recommended. I should also mention that this reverse-diaspora was not restricted to the Caribbean. Fela Kuti famously invented Afrobeat after hearing what James Brown (several hundred years removed from the folk music of Fela’s ancestral tradition) had done with the art of groove. If you don’t know about Fela, YouTube him immediately. “Water No Get Enemy” is as good a place to start as any, but you really can’t go wrong.
*.2 — While I’m at it, I should also note that Nick Gold did eventually realize his original goal of recording Malian musicians in Cuba, which was released as 2010’s AfroCubism. It’s a good album, and validates that Gold’s original idea had merit, but I can’t say it comes close to having the impact of these other recordings.
** — There is also a great, though much less famous, documentary on Compay that I stumbled onto on Netflix (or maybe it was Amazon Prime) one night. Quite a character.
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Ry week 21: Cuba, the sequel and the
(August 1st, 2018)
This is part 2 of Ry’s Cuban adventure. I should mention that in the intervening week Sarah and I watched the Buena Vista Social Club doc (you can “rent” it from YouTube for $3, which I didn’t even realize was possible on YouTube). It had been over a decade since I’d seen it and it’s better than ever. Some serious musicians and even more serious characters. Very worth your time if you’re bored watching season 3 of some Netflix dramedy.
You get a double shot this week, as I’m featuring the other two albums cut during the Buena Vista sessions. Ry played no significant credited role on either one, though he was reportedly a presence in the studio throughout.
A Toda Cuba le Gusta was the first record cut during these sessions and primarily the brainchild of musical director Juan de Marcos Gonzalez. While the Buena Vista session focused on the acoustic styles that had their heyday in 1940’s Cuba, this album is a showcase for the big band sound that ruled Havana night clubs in the 50’s. It’s a tribute to these musicians that so many of them were stars during both eras.
The track I’ll highlight of course is the only one that Ry actually plays on, and he takes a tasty solo to boot!
“Alto Songo” was written by Lili Martinez, one of three pianists who helped pioneer this style back in the day. After a typical brassy flourish to start things off, it settles into a lovely hypnotic groove that carries through the whole tune, leaving plenty of room for both the singers and musicians to take turns doing their thing.
And following Ry’s go, we get a characteristically brilliant solo from one of the other three of those pioneering pianists: Mr Ruben Gonzalez. It is worth noting that, on an album that features so many legends, the liner notes read “Dedicated to Ruben Gonzalez, the genius of Cuban piano.”
And that he was. Beginning in the 1940’s Mr Gonzalez helped invent this style of music, and made his living playing it across the Caribbean and South America (though mostly in Cuba) for the next half century. He retired in the late 1980’s, only to be coaxed back into the studio in 1996 (a month shy of his 78th birthday) for these sessions.
The story was that Ruben loved the piano in the studio so much that he would show up early to every session to get some time alone with it, and then begin jamming with whoever else showed up next (usually the bass player Cachaito). By the end of the Buena Vista session, there were two days of studio time left and it was decided that Ruben deserved his own record: Introducing… Ruben Gonzalez.
It is a stripped-down, loose affair with piano, bass, and minimalist percussion taking center stage. There is some trumpet and flute occasionally, as well as some chorus vocals, but the piano is the main event. The whole thing was recorded live in those two days with almost no rehearsal.
There are a lot of great tracks on this record (both of these records) but this one highlights one of my favorite things about the way these guys play, and I honestly don’t know how much of this is the style of music and how much of it is the fact that they’ve all been doing it for so long. They play with such confidence. They never feel like they’re in a rush to get to the next phrase. They never feel like they’re trying to fit in all their hot licks to impress you.
The trompetista Guajiro Mirabal is the one that originally keyed me into this, but they all do it. Just so relaxed and decisive, even when they’re exploring and improvising. All three of these albums feel like a gift to the world. A final definitive document of a brilliant musical tradition that almost faded into obscurity.
Be thankful and enjoy,
S
Ps- Ok, I had to post one more from Ruben. The last track on the album. Just a 78 year-old man and the instrument he loves. “Come Siento Yo”
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Ry week 22: Both Sides of the World
(August 9th, 2018)
I’ve got another double-shot for you this week. Neither of these records are proper Ry records, but they were both interesting enough to merit at least half a week, so I decided to let them share. They also serve as two sides of the coin, in the sense that Mr Cooder spent parts 1998 recording on two opposite sides of the globe, doing his thing in two very different musical traditions.
The first was another trip to India, and it was another one I didn’t even know about until about 9 days ago. Ronu Majumdar’s Hollow Bamboo was recorded and released by the same label that did Ry’s first Indian adventure five years earlier. Ry, his son Joachim, and visionary trumpeter Jon Hassell join Mr Majumdar and tabla player Abhijit Banerjee on 4 of the 7 tracks. It is a decidedly mellow and vibey affair. The tone of the bansuri (a low woodwind that I have to naively assume is made of hollow bamboo) is gorgeous and the Americans do their best to give it plenty of room to breathe while trying to add a little something that moves it away from “traditional” Indian music.
“African Queen” features the whole ensemble, with Ry finger-picking what sounds like a resonator guitar. If you like that, but wish there was less percussion and more spacey vibe, “A Day For The Trade Winds” is also a sweet track.
The other notable record from 1998 is the international debut album of Mr Ibrahim Ferrer.
Ibrahim is one the most compelling characters in the entire Buena Vista Social Club saga, and Ry is obviously smitten with him. All the Cuban scenes in the Buena Vista movie were actually shot when Ry returned to Havana to produce this album. (They clearly say that several times, but even I had forgotten it wasn’t the original session they were filming until I re-watched it.)
Mr Ferrer has a golden voice and an outsize personality to match. You can easily see how Ry (and for that matter, much of the Western world) fell in love with him around the turn of the Millennium.
I’m featuring “Silencio”, the recording of which is shown almost in its entirety in the movie.* It’s a sultry track. A hauntingly beautiful song with perfectly melodramatic lyrics. (The chorus loosely translates to “I can’t let the beautiful flowers see me crying, or they would die.”) Omara Portuondo, who also features prominently in the film, duets on this one and she’s brilliant. Also of note is the tasty electric guitar playing of Manuel Galbán. You’ll hear more about him next week, but this session is when he and Ry formed a bond that would last for years to come.
I read somewhere that Mr Ferrer had a series of hits in the 1960’s with up-tempo dance numbers, and so naturally his record execs** and bandleaders encouraged him to continue recording primarily that stuff, but that he always loved the boleros and ballads the best. On his debut album Ry let’s the 68 year-old croon to his heart’s content.
That’s it for this week. This is also as good a time as any to let you know that I put together a playlist a few weeks ago with all the featured songs up till now (I’ve cut it to one per album). I forgot to share it then, but now I’ve updated it and here it is for your listening pleasure.
I could end with some loose generalization to tie the whole list together, but I’ll just let the music do the talking.
Until the next,
S
*- It turns out this scene is on YouTube. It’s amazing. It also features a great voice-over intro from Ry saying (about Buena Vista), “I’ve been making records for 35 years and I can tell you, you never know what the public is gonna go for. This turned out to be the one they liked the best. I like it the best…” If you click on only one link in this entire 30-week journey, you should click on this one: https://youtu.be/0mStndtGGOE
**- one more aside that is still a little mind-blowing to me: by “record execs” here I technically mean “government ministers of culture.” Cuba was fully Communist through this whole period and the government ran all recording and releasing of music. EGREM Studios, where all these records were cut, is owned and operated by the Cuban government. Maybe I’m just too American, but when I think of 20th Century Communism, I think of work camps and famines and noble ideals being crushed by blood-thirsty dictators. I do not typically think of government ministers funding the recording of amazing dance music. Just goes to show…
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Ry Week 23: The Space Age Beckons
(August 19th, 2018)
I’ve been waiting for this album for awhile. I stumbled onto it a few years ago and it became my personal soundtrack for several weeks. 2003’s Mambo Sinuendo is one of those classic examples of a Ry record that manages to be both a nostalgic period piece, and a document of (in his son’s words) “a weird band that never existed.” I love that kinda shit pretty much across the board, but for some reason this one really strikes a chord with me. Just great music to vibe to in almost any situation that merits vibing.
Manuel Galbán is a Cuban guitarist who got moderately famous in the 1960’s with a group called Los Zafiros. He was not on the original Buena Vista sessions, but he’s in the movie because he features prominently on the Ibrahim Ferrer album that was being cut during the filming. Most importantly, he’s a total badass and represents a style of guitar playing that is essentially all his own; mixing the tone and atmospherics of 50’s space-age surf rock with Cuban melodies and sensibilities.
Ry described the album thusly: “Galbán and I felt that there was a sound that had not been explored in a Cuban electric-guitar band that could re-interpret the atmosphere of the 1950s with beauty, agility, and simplicity. We decided on two electrics, two drum sets, congas and bass: a sexteto that could swing like a big band and penetrate the mysteries of the classic tunes.” Our old friend Jim Keltner returns for the primary drumming duties, with Joachim Cooder augmenting. The congas are Miguel “Angá” Díaz* (who I was unfamiliar with, but who is unsurprisingly also a total badass), and Buena Vista veteran Cachaito López is on bass.
There’s really not much to say about this album except that I love it and it’s a great showcase of “real recognizing real.” Ry and Manuel have an obvious mutual respect and a mutual love for a certain kind of musicality and this record is just their tribute to both of those things.
I think my favorite track off the album is the opener, “Drume Negrita”. The vast majority of these songs are instrumental covers of tunes from 1950’s Cuban writers but somehow the whole thing feels strangely modern (or maybe just timeless) to my ears. Before I go, I also want to mention that Galbán is also a fantastic keyboard player, most notably the quirky sunglasses-in-the-nightclub style of organ playing that gets showcased on “Cabello Viejo”, which is my other favorite song on here. Really, the whole record is great though.
Ry has received six Grammy Awards in his lifetime, and all but one (in 1988 for Best Children’s Album, which I semi-inadvertently skipped) were in the 10 years between 1993 and 2003 when he released zero “Ry Cooder” albums. Two of those five were for Best World Music Album and the other three were for Cuban music. All that to say, after a full month in Cuba, we might finally be on our way back stateside next week… but then again we might linger for one more week. After all, we already skipped the Children’s Grammy, and we don’t want to skip another one, do we?
S
* — Angá Díaz tragically died in his 40’s of a heart attack, but his twin daughters have a futuristic R&B group called Ibeyi that is seriously cool. 21st Century Cuban vibes, direct from Paris France. Worth checking out.
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Ry Week 24: El Ultimo Adios a Cuba
(August 27th, 2018)
I thought about moving along this week but, much like Ry, I just can’t bear to say goodbye to Cuba. As mentioned last week, Ry won three Grammy’s for his involvement with Cuban records (he only won six total in his entire career) and this album was the final one.
If you’ve been paying attention for the past month or so, you’ve already met Mr Ibrahim Ferrer. If you’re just tuning in now, Allmusic.com has a great three-paragraph biography that’ll make you wonder why statues of him aren’t in every park in Havana.
2003’s Buenos Hermanos is notable because it marks the end of his several year collaboration with Ry, and by many accounts the high-water mark as well. It is also much more forthright about the fact that it is truly a “fusion” album, in the sense that it makes no claim to being “traditional” Cuban music, or really even “Cuban” music at all. It was recorded in both Havana and LA and features an array of great artists from both countries. “Perfume de Gardenias”, for example, substitutes The Blind Boys of Alabama for a traditional Cuban chorus, and “Mil Congojas” wraps Ferrer and Co. in a rich blanket of strings. In experimenting with these combinations, it gets closer to touching that nerve that Ry was so tuned into back in the 70's — mining deep into some particularly rich vein of folk music without ever attempting to “sound like” that music at all.
All that said, this is certainly not one of those “collaboration” albums, where featured artists come to pay tribute by singing duets with some legendary elder statesman. Ibrahim is the focal point throughout and maybe the most wonderful thing to behold is how he can sound so effortlessly Cuban, even when surrounded by this motley cast of characters. Perhaps because of this, for my featured track I was drawn back to one of the more purely Cuban tracks on the record.
“Boliviana” was written by legendary Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés, who also plays on most of this record. He first recorded it some 30 years earlier with his ground-breaking Afro-Cuban jazz group Irakere, but there’s something about this version that is just sublime. So lilting and beautiful and haunting all at once. I don’t know how these guys can make a song sound so bittersweet when the first line is “Boliviana come, let’s go to the beach.” It’s pure fucking magic.
And there you have it. This marks end of the middle period, in which Ry travels the world (and mostly a single island in the Caribbean) and sits down with every aging badass he can get his hands on. I don’t know about you, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Next week we’ll be back with the first album in almost 20 years to feature Ry Cooder’s name alone on the front cover. Don’t worry, it doesn’t get less weird from here.
S
PS- I couldn’t spill so much ink on Ibrahim Ferrer without mentioning that he did a song on the debut album of one of my other favorite what-genre-is-this? artists: Gorillaz. “Latin Simone” is the track and damn is it a good one. I once got recruited to sing this at a Gorillaz tribute at Rapture because someone* heard a Modern Med record where I sang in Spanish. Supposedly I lit a Black & Mild onstage during the song and afterwards the bouncer said “hey man, that was cool but you gotta get that thing outta here” and escorted me to the door. I can’t confirm or deny this story, but at least one person on this email chain was also onstage that night.
*- it was Travis Elliott.
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