Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder
a.k.a. Ryland Peter Cooder

RISING SON

Ry Cooder on the Return of the Buena Vista Social Club
It's been three years since Ry Cooder ignited a frenzy for Cuban music. In 1996, the globe-trotting guitarist went to Havana, assembled a band of long-forgotten Cuban musicians - silver-throated Ibrahim Ferrer, master pianist Rubén González, feisty 92-year-old singer Compay Segundo, and others -- to cut the Grammy-winning BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB. Now Cooder and his club are back in the spotlight -- with a film by Wim Wenders and a brand-new album, BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB PRESENTS IBRAHIM FERRER. Capturing the timeless sound that fueled BUENA VISTA, Ferrer's disc -- call it a Social Club sequel -- returns to the bolero, mambo, son, and pristine country tunes of prerevolutionary Cuba. Mark Schwartz caught up with Cooder to talk about Cuba, Ferrer, and his experiences with his exclusive club.

barnesandnoble.com: Why have Cuban music and the Buena Vista Social Club been so well received?

Ry Cooder: I've always thought that if you take a beautiful musical form, and play it very well, and preserve all its qualities, people will hear it and they will like it. Now, I'm an expert in how that can easily not work -- in terms of the timing, of the taste, or the moods of people. But then we've had the luck of doing this at a time when people are open -- they're not put off that it's in Spanish, they're not put off that it's not in 4/4 time. The audience has changed gears.

bn: And there's the issue of Cuba chic.

RC: Well, you need that too. Otherwise no one pays attention. There has to be all these things in place: There has to be this vogue on, and the media has to want to cover it, and then people get to hear it.

bn: What's the reaction been to BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB in Cuba?

RC: It's just recently available. The first time they found out about it was when it won the Grammy. That was big news. What I hear from Cubans is a thankfulness for restoring this music to prominence. Because even though it was socially incorrect for a bunch of years, it didn't die off, and these people aren't forgotten.

bn: How has life changed for the musicians themselves?

RC: When Compay Segundo rides down the street and five-year-old kids are following him yelling "Chan Chan! Chan Chan!" [the title of Segundo's hit song] you know things have changed. They've made some money, they've all prospered. Compay's almost always on tour now, and they're connected to an audience again, which makes a huge difference to a musician. And everyone's got a record deal. I've never seen anything like it. We had a blues revival in the '60s, but this happening in two years, it's like a bomb going off.

bn: Seems like a great time to be a senior citizen in Cuba.

RC: Yeah, except there's a guy I know, a guitar maker, about 75, who told me that over at the senior center, where he has a band, that the younger musicians have gotten angry at the older musicians for getting so much attention. They complained to some bureaucrat, and the bureaucrat told my friend not to come around anymore. And that's a sad story. So there's gonna be some resentment.

bn: The new record obviously spotlights vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer. What were you trying achieve for his solo album?

RC: He's a bolero singer, and that music requires a certain kind of voice that seems to be the rarest these days. That romantic high tenor. It does something for the music, it seems to illuminate it. If it's done right. If it's not done right, bolero sounds like schmaltz, like nightclub singing. And that's what I think happened to this music. It went down the same road that Hawaiian music went down, where the romantic quality became horribly distorted and it's just junk and nobody wants to hear it anymore.

The great thing about bolero and son and Cuban music is that it's not about power, it's not something that comes at you. It's something in the air, and you sort of sit within it. It's not linear, it's not directed, it's not a polished surface. That's what so much music is nowadays -- which eliminates texture, which is where the emotional qualities live. That's what touches people. Then you've got something living, something working for the listener. Which is why we're making these records.

bn: What was the difference in making this record and BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB?

RC: BUENA VISTA was an improv. Here you have horns and string sections -- 25 strings is not normal in Cuba, I don't know if it's ever been done. So the tunes are harder. You're trying to nail something; they require the formality of arranging. We had Generoso Jiménez, Beny More's arranger, come down with the original horn charts for "Como Fue."

bn: In the film, you refer to Ibrahim Ferrer as "the Nat Cole of Cuba."

RC: Nat Cole, he was this Zen-like figure. He sang from within. There was no mistaking it, it was something that you respond to immediately. But where do you ever hear something like that? So at this point, there are no more singers like that. Ibrahim was preserved in some strange way.

bn: Ibrahim literally came off the street for BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB. Were there other discoveries on this recording?

RC: [Coproducer] Nick Gold found Manuel Galbán. He was guitarist for Los Zafiros, a Cuban doo-wop group from the '50s. He's not very old at all, he's 60-something, looks younger than I do. He really is something. He plays an electric guitar tres-style -- the Duane Eddy of Cuba. On this record, he's doing what I would do if I could do it. It's not the chords, or the notes, it's the touch. He really kicks it.

bn: How would you characterize your musical contribution to the Buena Vista Social Club?

RC: It's a production job, kind of like a crossing guard. I want everyone to get across, let's all move together, come with me now and do this. And you don't have much time to do it, you don't have five years to plan it. Then you need to be lucky. What they have with their open-heartedness and generosity, and what we have with our determination, then you just need luck to settle in and make it all work nice.

bn: With all the collaborations you've done, do you think this could have happened somewhere else? Could you have gotten this deep with, say, Ali Farka Touré in Mali?

RC: That was Ali Farka's record, and he plays the same if it was me or it was Joe Blow. That record was interesting and fun, but this is like a way of life all of a sudden. For me, there's a place to go and be that's just personal. I've always loved this music. The chance to do it, to be within it, is a kind of fantasy. Since the '70s, when I first went to Cuba, I've felt like, "Jeez, you got to get down there, this is what you need to do, pick up on this stuff." Just shows you that there's a right time for everything.

Mark Schwartz