Cooder, Ry

▪ 2000

      Charming melodies and seductive, throbbing rhythms, played by veteran Cuban musicians, pulsated throughout the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club. This music, long forgotten as a result of changing fashion in Fidel Castro's postrevolutionary Cuba, was revived in 1996 when American guitarist-record producer Ry Cooder sought out original performers of the sound to revive the songs and styles of their heyday for an album. The band they formed and the album they recorded were named for the Buena Vista Social Club, a long-defunct Havana nightclub; the album sold 1.4 million copies and won a Grammy Award. Cooder also performed in Buena Vista Social Club, not a surprising occurrence for a musician noted for taking his slide guitar music across international, as well as generic, boundaries.

      The movie documented Cooder's 1998 return visit to Havana to record a sequel, featuring Ibrahim Ferrer, a singer of boleros (traditional ballads), accompanied by Buena Vista members such as octogenarian pianist Rubén González and nonagenarian guitarist Compay Segundo. As filmed by German director Wim Wenders, Cooder and the musicians, one by one, talked about their lives and music; interspersed were film clips of the recording sessions, of the colourful but crumbling city of Havana, and of the band's only two concerts, in Amsterdam and in New York City's Carnegie Hall.

      Born Ryland Peter Cooder on March 15, 1947, in Los Angeles, Cooder was originally inspired by blues guitarists and in his teens played in blues acts. Appearances in local clubs quickly led to extensive work as a guitarist in recording studios in sessions featuring Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton, among others. Meanwhile, he began recording his own albums in 1970, at first using songs by Woody Guthrie and by early black guitarist-singers, including Blind Willie Johnson and Sleepy John Estes. By the mid-1970s Cooder was performing reggae settings as well, but he was also moving farther away from rock. He merged his stylings on albums with those of Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui and Tex-Mex accordionist Flaco Jimenez in Chicken Skin Music (1976), then offered interpretations of 1920s traditional jazz in Jazz (1978). In Bop till You Drop (1979) and two successor albums, Cooder played rhythm and blues. His instinct for fusing diverse styles took him into Indian music with stringed instrument inventor-adaptor V.M. Bhatt in A Meeting by the River (1993) and into Afro-pop music on Mali singer-guitarist Ali Farka Toure's Talking Timbuktu (1994).

      Cooder also created film sound tracks, beginning with Walter Hill's The Long Riders (1980). Composer credits for four more Hill films followed, as well as ones for films directed by Tony Richardson, Louis Malle, and Wenders. Cooder was noted for his gift for setting moods, often using unusual but just-right instrumental combinations, and for playing a variety of instruments, including accordion, koto, and lute. While making the music for Wenders's film The End of Violence (1997), Cooder talked so enthusiastically about his first Havana journey that he inspired the director to create the Buena Vista documentary. Cooder's life was dramatically changed by the Buena Vista project, and he was determined to reinvent himself for a whole new career—reviving traditional Cuban music.

John Litweiler

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▪ American musician

Introduction

in full  Ryland Peter Cooder 

born March 15, 1947, Los Angeles, Calif., U.S.

      American guitarist and singer whose influence far outweighed his limited commercial success.

      Introduced to the guitar at age 3, adept at the instrument by age 8, and a teenage habitué of the Los Angeles blues scene, Cooder formed the Rising Sons with Taj Mahal and played in Captain Beefheart's Magic Band before setting off on one of the most interesting career journeys of his generation. Having worked occasionally as a session musician in the 1960s, contributing to albums by the Rolling Stones (Rolling Stones, the) and Randy Newman (Newman, Randy), he commenced a series of albums under his own name in 1970 for Reprise that amounted to an exploration of American roots music, starting with country (country music), gospel (gospel music), and blues and moving through jazz and rhythm and blues to Tex-Mex and Hawaiian music. In an era of virtuoso instrumentalists and self-sufficient singer-songwriters, Cooder was preoccupied with subtleties of tone, texture, and feel and mostly recorded other people's material. Rarely content simply to re-create a past recording, he restlessly searched for new rhythmic arrangements to showcase the emotion, wit, or pathos of each lyric.

      His most noteworthy albums were Paradise and Lunch (1974) and Chicken Skin Music (1976), the latter of which helped to introduce the Texas accordion player Flaco Jimenez to an international audience. Despite performing live in support of each album, Cooder never reached beyond a cult audience, and in the 1980s he switched his attention to sound tracks. He composed scores for several Walter Hill films but made the greatest impact in Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas (1984), the vast panoramas of which provided the perfect visual counterpoint to Cooder's moody, reverberating slide guitar.

      In 1992 he resumed his recording career via collaborations with musicians from other countries. A Meeting by the River with Indian guitarist V.M. Bhatt won a Grammy Award for best world music album of 1993 and was the recording debut of Cooder's son Joachim as a percussionist. Two years later father and son took part in the Los Angeles recording sessions by Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré, and the resultant album, Talking Timbuktu, became one of the best-selling world music albums of 1994 and won that year's Grammy. By that point a substantial audience trusted Cooder's judgment and skill, and they followed him in even greater numbers when he joined a group of veteran Cuban musicians convened by the British label World Circuit for a week in Havana recording The Buena Vista Social Club (1997). That album and the subsequent Buena Vista releases Buenos Hermanos (2003) and Mambo Sinuendo (2003) earned Cooder a trio of Grammy Awards (Grammy Award). His later works included the concept album Chavez Ravine (2005) and the folk-fusion recording My Name Is Buddy (2007).

Charlie Gillett

Representative Works

Ry Cooder

● Paradise and Lunch (1974)

● Chicken Skin Music (1976)

● Original motion picture soundtrack, Paris, Texas (1985)

Ry Cooder and V.M. Bhatt

● A Meeting by the River (1993)

Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder

● Talking Timbuktu (1994)

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