[DudeAsInCool]

It's been almost a decade since this respected American guitarist and songwriter started recycling old Cuban music under a global brand name, the Buena Vista Social Club. But while Buena Vista brought him new popularity, it also eclipsed his own voice and vision.

His new, non-Cuban CD (due in stores Tuesday) once again finds the curious Cooder exploring musical history. Or, in this case, history through music.

His latest topic keeps him close to home — the 1950s destruction of Mexican American barrios where Dodger Stadium now stands. And Cooder comes through loud and clear on this evocative and valuable work.

Read more here:

http://www.calendarlive.com/music/cl-ca-ra...-music-features

[Kooperman]

It arrived here at my house on Tuesday night.... :good job: :good job:

[method77]

Great release! Thanks for the heads up dude

[the70mphshit]

Rye Cooter?

[KiwiCoromandel]

RY COODER, Chavez Ravine (Nonesuch/Warner)

Ry Cooder's new album is a fascinating attempt to re-create the exuberance and multicultural diversity of the Los Angeles music scene in the 1950s. He has taken a specific event (the destruction of the Mexican area of LA known as Chavez Ravine and the subsequent building of the Dodgers baseball stadium on the cleared land) and crafted it into a cycle of interconnected songs designed to evoke a distant era and tell a story of greed, political manipulation and the maltreatment of the oppressed.

The lyrics are unambiguously political. The music, almost as a counterpoint to the sentiments of the lyrics, is pure, joyful Latino dance music.

The creative process, which took more than three years and involved the rediscovery of such tyros of the 1950s LA-Mexican scene as Lalo Guerrero, Don Tosti and Little Willie G. (William Garcia), has yielded a clever mixture of the old and the new. Ry Cooder has written four songs and collaborated with his son Joachim and Little Willie G. on four others. Three have been written by the legendary Guerrero, who died soon after recording was completed, and there are three 1950s pop songs - the bouncy Chinito Chinito, Leiber and Stoller's Cool Cats and one by Guerrero's niece Rita Arvizu, Ejercito Militar.

The result seems a natural evolution from his Buena Vista Social Club project. Once again, Cooder, the tireless explorer of Latino music of the 1940s and '50s, has created a glorious and vibrant celebration of a world where the bands played with an exuberant urgency and the excitement leapt from every note.

Listening to the sheer joy in songs such as Los Chucos Suaves and Chinito Chinito (a hilarious song about "a pidgin-Spanish-speaking Chinese laundryman") is to be reminded just how bland and manufactured so much modern popular music is. This music sizzles.

source:smh.com.au/review:Bruce Elder

Attached File(s)

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  Number of downloads: 3

[method77]

:good job:

[DudeAsInCool]

Ry Cooder will appear live on KCRW on August 2 at 11:00

http://www.kcrw.com/cgi-bin/db/kcrw.pl?sho...tmplt_type=show