The Cooder blockade

"I can’t go back to Cuba anymore. This record is a resolution of the whole Cuban experience for me."

Ry Cooder, guitar virtuoso, session player extraordinaire and production genius has closed the book on one of his most successful ever collaborative projects. After six years of travelling back and forth to Cuba, the man behind the Buena Vista Social Club album/tour/movie/phenomenon now says that he has been forced to make his final record in that country.

"I just don’t have any legal way of going back again," he explains. "The embargo that the United States imposes on Cuba is specific and very comprehensive. It means that legally, you can’t produce product with a Cuban national. I had to get a special licence to make these two records – this one and the new Ibrahim Ferrer record, which I’ve just finished. But that’s it – I can’t go back again. It makes you realise that there’s a lot more to it than turning on the amp and playing."

The album in question, Mambo Innuendo sees Cooder joining forces with Manuel Galban, guitarist and arranger with legendary 1960’s Havana doo-wop quartet, Los Zafiros (The Sapphires). A mainly instrumental record and the first of his Cuban albums to give Galban equal billing, it harks back to the pared-down, electric band sounds of the late ’50s and early ’60s when, according to Cooder, bands like this were all the rage in Cuba.

"I listened to Los Zafiros before I made this record and it sounded strange and mysterious to me," he says. "I mean, who ever heard of four-part vocal harmony in Latin music? Galban has told me there were a lot of such groups in Havana in the ’60s – Omara Portuondo was in one at the time. It was very popular and somewhat of a hybrid – sort of an imported style. Then it died out completely like it did everywhere."

The band featured on the record includes Cooder’s son Joachim and his long time sidekick drummer Jim Keltner, with a cameo from Herb Alpert on the title track. But it’s the guitar textures that dominate on a range of familiar-sounding Latin melodies including Perez Prado’s ‘Patricia’ and the old Doris Day hit ‘Secret Love’.

"It’s the sound of two instruments almost combining into one," Cooder explains. "It’s not about trading solos back and forth. Galban as a player is more like me although there is no real precedent for his guitar playing. I’ve seen only one or two people down there with anything like an electric guitar style that we would call ‘world electric’ rather than a traditional Cuban style. They don’t have the electric guitar in the traditional Cuban ensemble – what we take for granted as electric guitar music and all the people we know as players, down there they’ve never heard the stuff.

"We stuck to a simple small band and not too much fancy arrangements so that you feel and understand the atmosphere of the tune and the melody. It took a lot of time to get right; the band had to have a certain identification as a cast of characters."

Having started out in the late 1960s playing with Taj Mahal and Captain Beefheart, Ry Cooder quickly became known as one of the most innovative guitarists of the era. He divided his time between his own solo career and playing sessions with almost every significant artist of the 1970s, including Randy Newman, Little Feat, Maria Muldaur, the Doobie Brothers, Gordon Lightfoot, Emmylou Harris and Van Morrison.

One of the earliest and most celebrated Cooder sessions was with the Rolling Stones when he appeared on their 1969 classic Let It Bleed. He was even touted as a replacement for Brian Jones at one point.

Cooder’s own records were nothing if not eclectic, exploring the long-forgotten roots of American music. On albums such as Paradise And Lunch and Chicken Skin Music he almost single-handedly brought back to life American classics like, ‘Goodnight Irene’, ‘Smack Dab In The Middle’, ‘He’ll Have To Go’ and ‘Always Lift Him Up’. Rolling Stone magazine said of him at the time that he sounded "more like a Smithsonian project than rock and roll."

"I grew up listening to all that stuff and I always said that if I ever made records I would try and come up with a viable way of doing it," he says. "Of course I couldn’t have picked a worse time. Nowadays it’s everywhere and we have this thing called Americana but in the early ’70s it was professional suicide."

He finally broke into the mainstream with his 1979 album Bop ’Till You Drop which spawned his unique take on the old Elvis hit ‘Little Sister.’

"I was passing the time waiting for something better to happen, trying to figure out how to survive without having hit records when I did that one," he explains. "You say it was a big album in Ireland and maybe it was but you would be surprised just how little airplay and sales that album had in this country if you went back and looked at the statistics."

Bop Till You Drop was also significantly one of the first records to be recorded digitally.

"Don’t remind me about it," he laughs. "It was horrible. Digital sampling was still in its infancy and they decided it was applicable to recording technology. What they didn’t have was enough of a sampling rate to make it work. The goddam thing would drop out all the time – you’d have big holes in your sound. I thought to myself if that’s the way recording is going, I quit. I started using old vintage analogue equipment again but I had to learn it myself. I went back into the lore of recording and had to learn how to make sounds I liked. Digital recording is much better today – I use Pro-tools all the time which works fine."

Disenchanted with the direction his career was taking Cooder turned his talents to film soundtracks, working on as many as fifteen movies including classics such as Paris Texas, Southern Comfort, and Crossroads.

"It was an essential move for me at the time," he says. "This is where I got better at figuring how to get good sounds and put them down on tape. And above all how to do it quickly. In film work no-one will pay you to sit around and take hours to get started. Rock and roll bands have the luxury of long lunch breaks and plenty of time off to figure out what to do. In film work you hit the ground running at 9 in the morning – if you don’t have something good going at 9.30, you’re in big trouble. Before that I was way too slow and way too indecisive and I had to learn to get out of that."

He returned to mainstream music in the late 1980s and following the success of John Hiatt’s album, Bring The Family on which he performed, Cooder went on to form the short-lived Little Village with Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner. After that he turned to world music – arguably the genre which gave him his greatest success to date.

His first project, Talking Timbuktu, a duet album with African guitarist Ali Farka Toure, won the 1994 Grammy for Best World Music Recording. Then he embarked on his Cuban odyssey where over the last five years he has effectively acted as mid-wife to the surging popularity of Cuban music, working on albums by most of the musicians that made up the Buena Vista Social Club. The success of that album led to worldwide tours and a major movie. Does he envisage touring to promote his latest and final Cuban project?

"We have to figure it out," he says. "It’s small scale. I think little jazz clubs would be ideal but the economics would work against that. This band is a really good band, a very versatile unit but we’ll have to wait and see."

He rules out ever playing as a solo artist again.

"I can’t think of anything duller," he says. "I’ve done all that before and I’m not going to do it again. It’s painful; it’s just you all the time from beginning to end. Maybe Segovia could pull it off but not me."

Ry, Ry Again

Not only can Ry Cooder pluck almost anything with strings – from slide guitar to mandolin, banjo to bass but he can turn his hand to almost any style he fancies be it gospel, folk, blues, Latin, Tex-Mex, calypso or Hawaiian slack-key guitar...
Here are just some examples of Cooder's fretboard mastery.

SOLO ALBUMS
Chicken Skin Music
Paradise & Lunch
Get Rhythm
Bob 'till You Drop

SESSIONS
The Monkees: Head
Rolling Stones: Let It Bleed
John Hiatt: Bring The Family
The Chieftains: Long Black Veil

SOUNDTRACKS
Paris Texas
Southern Comfort
Alamo Bay
Dead Man Walking

WORLD MUSIC
Buena Vista Social Club
Afro Cuban All Stars: A Toda Cuba Le Gusta
Ibrahim Ferrer: Buena Vista Social Club Presents
Ali Farke Toure: Talking Timbuktu