Ry Cooder
 |
Radio: Bio of Ry Cooder
July 31, 2005
|
|
Guitarist/producer Ry Cooder's new album is "a magical-realist street opera celebrating the life and death of the barrio that the Dodgers killed," says Mike Davis, the author of "City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles."
Ry Cooder's "Chávez Ravine" &ndash a post-World War II-era American narrative of "cool cats," radios, UFO sightings, J. Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball &ndash was released by Nonesuch/Perro Verde Records on June 14, 2005. The record is a tribute to the long-gone Los Angeles Latino enclave known as Chávez Ravine. Using real and imagined historical characters, Cooder and friends created an album that recollects various aspects of the poor but vibrant hillside Chicano community, which was bulldozed by developers in the 1950s in the interest of "progress;" Dodger Stadium ultimately was built on the site. Cooder says, "Here is some music for a place you don't know, up a road you don't go. Chávez Ravine, where the sidewalk ends."
The musical strains of Los Angeles, including conjunto, corrido, R&B, Latin pop, and jazz, conjure the ghosts of Chávez Ravine and Los Angeles at mid-century. On this fifteen-track album, sung in Spanish and English, Cooder is joined by East L.A. legends like Chicano music patriarch Lalo Guerrero, Pachuco boogie king Don Tosti, Thee Midniters front man Little Willie G., and Ersi Arvizu, of The Sisters and El Chicano.
A Los Angeles native, Cooder has been working in Cuba since 1996, producing The Buena Vista Social Club, Ibrahim Ferrer, Ferrer's Buenos Hermanos, and Mambo Sinuendo-all Grammy winners. Three years in the making, Chávez Ravine marks his musical homecoming.
"Los Angeles was paved over, malled up, high-rised, and urban-renewed, as fortunes were made, power was concentrated, and everything got faster and bigger," comments Cooder. "But there is a lot I miss now. The texture of certain older neighborhoods, like Bunker Hill, a rural feel in urban places, like Chávez Ravine and the timbre of life there, and just peace and quiet," he says.
Year-End Roundup with Robert Dreyfuss, James Ridgeway, Julia Whitty, and Others
Robert Dreyfuss, Mother Jones correspondent
|
