Demolished

Tonight I am lev­elled, floored by this awe­some new album by Ry Cooder. Here’s the blurb on Amazon.com, and you’ll know why I already liked it even before I heard one track:

Album Descrip­tion

Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine is-a post-World War II-era Amer­i­can nar­ra­tive of “cool cats,” radios, UFO sight­ings, J.Edgar Hoover, red scares, and baseball.Using real and imag­ined his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters, Cooder and friends cre­ates an album that rec­ol­lects var­i­ous aspects of the poor but vibrant hill­side Chi­cano cum­mu­nity, which was bull­dozed by devel­oped in the inter­est of “progress.”

Ry Cooder might have been tempted to bill this as the Chavez Ravine Social Club. After gen­er­at­ing such pop­u­lar and crit­i­cal inter­est in Cuban music of decades past with the Buena Vista Social Club, Cooder applied a sim­i­lar approach closer to home, extend­ing his fas­ci­na­tion with the Mexican-American cul­ture that flour­ished in 1940s and ‘50s Los Ange­les. The result is an CD that sounds like it’s aspir­ing to be some­thing far more ambi­tious: a DVD, a the­atri­cal pro­duc­tion, even a time machine. Cooder and a cast of sem­i­nal Chi­cano artists present a song cycle that con­jures an era of UFOs, the Red Scare, and polit­i­cal machi­na­tions that lev­eled the Chavez Ravine bar­rio to lure the Brook­lyn Dodgers to Los Ange­les. In his cel­e­bra­tion of a vibrant com­mu­nity that doesn’t know it’s on the verge of dis­place­ment, Cooder enlists Thee Mid­nighters vocal­ist Lit­tle Willie G. (whose song­writ­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with Los Lobos’s David Hidalgo on “Onda Calle­jara” high­lights the album). and Pachuco patri­archs Don Tosti and Lalo Guer­rero, with the lat­ter reviv­ing his dance­floor favorite “Los Chu­cos Suaves.” The accor­dion of Flaco Jimenez adds con­junto fla­vor to “Bar­rio Viejo.” Through­out the album, Cooder plays a typ­i­cally taste­ful, under­stat­edly vir­tu­osic gui­tar, assumes a vari­ety of vocal roles–including a cool Chet Baker homage in duet with pianist Jacky Ter­ra­son on “In My Town”–and pro­vides the provoca­tive social con­text. –Don McLeese

Onda Calle­jera from the album “Chavez Ravine” by Ry Cooder

Tech­no­rati Tags: music, chavez ravine, ry cooder