65 Years and Still Smoulderin': Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder

Happy Birthday Ry Cooder! Today you celebrate your 65^th year on this earth, for about 40 of which you have made some of the most amazing guitar music. Thank you!  I cannot imagine the last 35 years of my own life without your records to keep me smiling and ever amazed at the ephemeral but rock solid beauty you squeeze out of those six wires.

Over to the New Yorker magazine for this succinct summation of the best living guitar player’s career.

For more than forty years, since Cooder released his first record, “Ry Cooder,” in 1970, he has been a musician other musicians have followed closely, and no popular musician has a broader or deeper catalog. He has played songs so simple that they are hardly songs, and songs so complex that they would tax, if not overwhelm, the capacities of most lauded guitarists. He had quit making rock ‘n’ roll records sixteen years before Rolling Stone, in 2003, named him the 8th greatest guitarist on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (three of the seven ahead of him are dead guys). Even so, his influence has been felt more than his records have been heard, with perhaps one exception: the group of elderly Cuban musicians whom he assembled and recorded in 1997 and called the Buena Vista Social Club.

Cooder’s guitar playing is expressive, elegant, and rhythmically intricate. It frequently has a pressured attack that he has described as having the feel of “some kind of steam device gone out of control.” His sense of phrasing was partly imprinted in his childhood by a record of brass music made by a group of African-American men who found instruments in a field left by Civil War soldiers during a retreat, and played them according to their own inclinations. If you wonder what his sensibility sounds like when applied to rock ‘n’ roll—one version of it anyway—the most widely known example I can think of comes from the period when Cooder had been hired to augment the Rolling Stones during the recording of “Let It Bleed.” He was playing by himself in the studio, goofing around with some changes, when Mick Jagger danced over and said, How do you do that? You tune the E string down to D, place your fingers there, and pull them off quickly, that’s very good. Keith, perhaps you should see this. And before long, the Rolling Stones were collecting royalties for “Honky Tonk Women,” which sounds precisely like a Ry Cooder song and absolutely nothing like any other song ever produced by the Rolling Stones in more than forty years. According to Richards in his recent autobiography, Cooder showed him the open G tuning which became his mainstay and accounts for the full-bodied chordal declarations that characterize songs such as “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Start Me Up,” and “Brown Sugar.” The most succinct way I can think of to describe the latticed style that Keith Richards says he has sought to achieve with Ron Wood is to say that for thirty-five years the Stones have been trying to do with four hands what Cooder can do with two.

Cooder might have been heard more widely except that he doesn’t like to perform. He doesn’t care for being watched so closely or having to entertain. “I couldn’t go out there anymore and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, and especially you ladies,’” he says. The people who like the applause should have it, he feels, but he says he doesn’t care for it. After performing, he used to feel like a withered balloon under a chair on the day after a child’s birthday party. He grew up in recording studios and is more at home there, privately trying to capture something ephemeral and elusive—“the big note,” a friend of his has said, the one that makes all the other concerns fall away. In the last few years, he has toured briefly in Europe and Japan and Australia, with his son, Joachim, playing drums and Nick Lowe playing bass—but not in North America.

For most of Cooder’s career he arranged songs from other writers and various historical sources ranging from Depression era songs, to Bix Beiderbecke’s repertoire, to folk and drifter and cowboy songs, miner’s songs, work songs, surf songs, jukebox songs, calypsos, roadhouse and dance hall songs, protest songs, and songs from the registry of rhythm and blues—but in 2003 he began recording albums of his own material. (My own introductory list of highlights from Cooder’s earlier period: “Great Dreams from Heaven,” “How Can you Keep on Movin’,” “Get Rhythm,” which has a fantastic video, “In a Mist,” “Ditty Wah Ditty,” “Smack Dab in the Middle,” “Tattler,” “France Chance,” “Little Sister,” “Dark at the End of the Street,” “Maria Elena,” “I Think It’s Going to Work Out Fine,” “The Very Thing That Makes You Rich,” and I’ll stop, but I could keep going happily.) The recent records formed a kind of Los Angeles trilogy. The first, “Chavez Ravine.” was inspired by black-and-white photographs of the hill town community inhabited by Mexicans and destroyed to build Dodgers Stadium. The second, “My Name is Buddy,” concerned a red cat named Buddy and his adventures during the most virulent period of anti-workingman and anti-communist feeling. One of the songs he sings is “Red Cat Till I Die.” The third record, “I, Flathead,” is a desert narrative about salt-flat drag racers and an alien racer entangled in a complicated moral dilemma. (New Yorker)

To commemorate this Holy Day the Washerman’s Dog has collected together 35 (one for every year I’ve been a fan) favorite cuts from all phases of his career.  Including a few guest spots with other friends like Ali Farka Toure, Mavis Staples and Shoukichi Kina.

                  Track Listing:

                  01 Wildwood Boys

02 3rd Base, Dodger Stadium

03 I Think It's Going to Work Out Fine

04 Patricia

05 Simple Tools

06 Candion Mixteca

07 I Can't Win

08 Footprints In The Snow

09 A Married Man's A Fool

10 Go Home Girl

11 Isa Lei

12 Chinito Chinito

13 13 Question Method

14 Farm Girl

15 Caballo Viejo

16 Amandrai

17 Filipino Dancehall Girl

18 Subete No Hito No Kokoro Ni Hanna O

19 The Very Thing That Makes You Rich (Makes Me Poor)

20 I Knew These People

21 Steel Guitar Heaven

22 Tattler

23 Echale Salsita

24 Los Chucos Suaves

25 Jesus is on the Mainline

26 Three Chords And The Truth

27 The Long Riders

28 Ganges Delta Blues

29 Across the Borderline

30 Johnny Cash

31 John Lee Hooker for President

32 Denomination Blues

33 No Banker Left Behind

34 Ai Du

35 Women Will Rule the World

Listen here.

Okinawa Roots Folk Pop Country: Shoukichi Kina

Peppermint Tea House: The Best of Shokichi Kina is a strangely adorable record. Exuberant, upbeat, almost hillbilly music from Japan’s southern island of Okinawa, most famous for American military bases (and scandals) and the martial art, karate.  The ‘roots-music’ feel is enhanced by the glorious guesting of guitar genius Ry Cooder!   

The Okinawans are of different ethnic stock than mainland Japanese and speak a different language and have a history that has been influenced by China and Thailand as much as their national neighbors to the north. That their language is distinct from Japanese was made clear to me when I asked a Japanese friend to translate some of the lyrics of this record. She furrowed her brow and squinted. Listening intently. After a few minutes she said, “Have no idea.”

Sanshin

Sanba

The musical instruments on this record (in addition to Cooders’ heavenly slide guitar work) include the sanshin a three stringed banjo like instrument related to the Chinese sanxian. When it’s plucked with a bamboo plectrum it produces a strong clear twang which is perfectly suited to lively dance music. There is also evidence of the sanba a hand held percussion instrument that makes a clicking castanet sound.  High pitched, slightly pubescent female singing moves the music forward in a way that at first listen is outlandish but that is easy to warm to.

As for the main man himself here’s what a Japanese pop music website says about him: 

Shoukichi Kina

Shokichi Kina is to Okinawan music what Bob Marley was to reggae: The Man. Kina, born in Okinawa in 1948, is perhaps best known as the composer of Subete no Hito no Kokoro ni Hana wo (Blooming Flowers in the Hearts of All), an undisputed Japanese pop-music classic that's best-known simply as Hana. Kina and his backing band, Champloose, first became known in 1972 when they scored a hit with Haisai Ojisan (Hey Man). In 1980 Kina and Champloose released Blood Line, one of the best ethnic/rock fusion albums ever to come out of Japan. That album featured Ry Cooder on four tracks, by the way, including a heartbreakingly beautiful slide-guitar solo on Hana. Like Marley, Kina has tremendous natural charisma and a strong political/spiritual outlook that in Kina's case is expressed in his opposition to the continued U.S. military presence on Okinawa and in his outspoken advocacy of Okinawan independence from Japan. Over the years Kina has continued to work with musicians from other parts of the world, including African and Caribbean musicians, and in 2004 he was elected to the Japanese parliament's House of Councillors under the Minshuto (Democratic Party) banner.  (http://nippop.com/artists/Shokichi_Kina/)

Enjoy. I’lll be surprised if you don’t put a couple of these songs (Jing Jing and Subete no Hito no Kokoro ni Hana wo are my favorites) on your iPod favorites.

         Track Listing:

01 Jing Jing

02 Hana No Kajimaya

03 Celebration

04 Mimichiri Bozu _ Danju Kariyushi

05 Don-Don Bushi

06 Zorba De Buddha

07 Basha-Gua Suncha

08 Crazy Kacharsee

09 Subete No Hito No Kokoro Ni Hanna O

10 Haisai Ojisan

11 Eternally Ecstasy

12 Lyunu-Pri

13 I-Yah Hoy!

14 Track 14 (Bonus Track)

Listen here.

Rajasthani Slide Guitar: Kabra and Bhatt

Brijbhushan Kabra

I referred to these two artists in a recent post as being the very early pioneers of Hindustani blues.  Not  many sonic links with southern United States can be discerned in their music. But both men, like the many giants of the American Blues, have mastered the art of playing slide guitar. In this instance an appropriately (to the Hindustani classical musical scale) modified Hawaiian guitar played, like a pedal steel, face up, and resting on the lap.

The Call of the Valley came out in 1967. I remember a thick EMI India vinyl copy appearing in our small family music collection around 1970. I loved it from the first time I heard it. Indian classical music to me was still a mysterious, esoteric and not very interesting world. But this album was something different. It didn't pander to 'pop' or 'western' tastes and maintained its basic classical music integrity. But it was far more accessible than Ravi Shankar. The flute sounded like the ones I heard played by locals in the lonely mountains where I attended boarding school. The record introduced me to the santoor which has, along with the oud,  remained one of my favorite instruments ever since. The third instrument I mistook for a sitar. Only many years later did I learn that it was in fact one of the first mainstream recordings of Brijbhusan Kabra India's slide guitar pioneer.

Call of the Valley has gone on to reach an 'iconic' status. Bob Dylan and other rockers are said to be fans.  The authoritative online font of all musical knowledge, All Music Guide, advises: If the newcomer buys only one Indian classical recording, it should be Call of the Valley.

Track listing

1.  Ahir Bhairav/Nat Bhairav

2. Raga Piloo

3. Bhoop Ghara

4. Raga Des

5 .Raga Pahadi

6. Ghara/Dadra

7. Dhun Mishra Kirwani

8. Bageshwari

Listen Here.

Meeting by the River came out in 1993 and won a Grammy Award.  And indeed, like Call of the Valley, this is a classic.  Vishwamohan Bhatt took the slide guitar of Kabra to the next level by modifying its strings and body (slightly) to create the mohan veena.  Ry Cooder, one of the world's most accomplished and elegant and inquisitive guitarists teamed up with Bhatt to record this amazing duel simpatico.  The four tracks give each guitarist ample opportunity to express themselves and weave an intricate and ornate recital. The final track, Isa Lei is one of the most beautiful pieces of string bending you'll ever hear. Promise.  

Track Listing:

1. Meeting by the River

2. Longing

3. Ganges Delta Blues

4. Isa Lei

Listen HERE.