Ry Cooder via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
- Steps from Ry Cooder:
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
I'LL TAKE YOU THERE! ▶
- Steps forward by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Ry Cooder
- City: Los Angeles, California
- Country: United States
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Ry Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, record producer, and film score composer best known for his unparalleled skill on the slide guitar. Cooder has been the recipient of six GRAMMY Awards including Best World Music Album, Best Pop Instrumental Album, and the 1997 Best Tropical Latin Performance GRAMMY for his work producing the classic album Buena Vista Social Club.
His wide-ranging discography includes over 20 classic albums, such as Boomer’s Story (1972), Chicken Skin Music (1976), Bop till You Drop (1979), Get Rhythm (1987), Borderline (1980), My Name is Buddy (2007), Election Special (2012), and Live in San Francisco (2013), which was recorded during a two night stint at the famous Great American Music Hall and featured Joachim Cooder, Arnold McCuller, and Flaco Jimenez.
His collaborations with fellow musicians over the years have produced quintessential albums such as Little Village (1992), The Long Black Veil with The Chieftains (1995), Mambo Sinuendo with Manuel Galban (2003), and the aforementioned award winning Buena Vista Social Club, which saw the reunion of some of the greatest surviving musicians of the 20th century Cuban music scene.
Growing up in Santa Monica during the 1960’s filled Cooder with a profound appreciation for the deep roots of his community, reflected in his work through albums such as 2005’s GRAMMY nominated album Chavez Ravine, a tribute to the former Los Angeles Latino enclave of the same name as well as his 2008 album I, Flathead, based on the drag racing culture of the early 1960’s in the desert salt flats of Southern California.
Cooder’s skill as a musician and composer has translated into his scoring multiple film soundtracks for films such as Paris, Texas, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Streets of Fire, Last Man Standing, and Crossroads. An in-demand session musician, over the years Cooder has performed on albums by The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Nancy Sinatra, Kim Carnes, Randy Newman, John Hiatt, James Taylor, Warren Zevon, The Beach Boys, and Mavis Staples.
As a touring artist, Cooder has toured with performers such as Nick Lowe, Ricky Skaggs, and Sharon White and has toured all over the world, visiting countries such as Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The summer of 2018 will see him back on tour with his own band (featuring his son Joachim on drums), for the first time since 2009, visiting multiple cities in Canada and the United States in support of his upcoming album, The Prodigal Son, scheduled to be released worldwide May 11, 2018 on Fantasy Records.
Contact Information
- Email: rycooder@mfmgt.com
- Contact by Webpage: http://rycooder.com/contact/
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Management/Booking:
For Press Inquiries, please contact Alison Elbl, ID-PR: aelbl@id-pr.com
For Booking Inquiries, please contact Ron Kaplan, Paradigm Agency: rkaplan@paradigmagency.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Buy My Music (downloads/CDs/DVDs): http://rycooder.bandcamp.com
- ▶ Book Purchases: http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100553260
- ▶ Book Purchases 2: http://www.amazon.com/Ry-Cooder/e/B005CQJUEE
- ▶ Instagram: rycooderofficial
- ▶ Website: http://rycooder.com
- ▶ YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYJF7KEj65hjmihTwtL93Sw
- ▶ YouTube Music: http://music.youtube.com/channel/UCpVcS5v4aswxvZ2U_lwFDWA
- ▶ Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/album/6GbhRC2huYcTVGf4TOXVqd
- ▶ Spotify 2: http://open.spotify.com/album/0gLaTb6BP8pySUWwkiZjdD
- ▶ Spotify 3: http://open.spotify.com/album/77UqIYxZhslPXUTiq4vDrE
- ▶ Spotify 4: http://open.spotify.com/album/2MSgPFGGgIn5EqLezjLpt9
- ▶ Spotify 5: http://open.spotify.com/album/7Bbr1kphzvv9LEUoAFMmkj
- ▶ Spotify 6: http://open.spotify.com/album/6GQLj4tvPqK3jjqTt1Lt5L
- ▶ Article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/02/how-ry-cooder-stopped-being-other-people
My Writing
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Publications:
Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder is a collection of loosely linked tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America’s most iconic cities.
A Los Angeles Times and Southern California Indie Bookseller Association’s bestseller.
Los Angeles Stories is a collection of loosely linked tales that evoke a bygone era in one of America’s most iconic cities. In post-World War II Los Angeles, as power was concentrating and fortunes were being made, a do-it-yourself culture of cool cats, outsiders and oddballs populated the old downtown neighborhoods of Bunker Hill and Chavez Ravine. Ordinary working folks rubbed elbows with petty criminals, grifters, and all sorts of women at foggy end-of-the-line outposts in Venice Beach and Santa Monica.
Rich with the essence and character of the times, suffused with patois of the city’s underclass, these are stories about the common people of Los Angeles, “a sunny place for shady people,” and the strange things that happen to them. Musicians, gun shop owners, streetwalkers, tailors, door-to-door salesmen, drifters, housewives, dentists, and pornographers, new arrivals and hard-bitten denizens all intersect in cleverly plotted stories that center around some kind of shadowy activity. This quirky love letter to a lost way of life will appeal to fans of hard-boiled fiction and anyone interested in the city itself.
Praise for Los Angeles Stories:
“Taken as a whole, this collection offers a panoramic view of a rapidly changing Los Angeles and its immigrant communities, rich in period detail and idiomatic dialogue, sometimes based on Cooder’s own memories of growing up in the same neighborhoods in which the stories are often set.”
— Uncut Magazine
“Cooder shouldn’t stop making records. He should keep writing, too.”
— Rolling Stones
“The stories of Ry Cooder are a lot like his music: stately, precise, well constructed; they grab you by the throat, quietly, and never let go. . . . “
— Andrew J. Khaled Madigan, The Iowa Review
“The strict Los Angeles setting – the city’s highs and lows romanticised ceaselessly – make them like Raymond Chandler or Mickey Spillane.”
— Chris Johnston, Sydney Morning Herald
“In Los Angeles Stories, his first published collection of stories, Cooder pays homage to the jazz, the blues and the Latin beat of a bygone era. He also honors a cast of boisterous musicians, some murdered, others spared to tell their gritty tales of life and death. A few famous musicians – John Lee Hooker and Charlie Parker among them – make cameo appearances in these pages, but most of the guitar players, drummers and lounge singers are as unknown as the repossession men, waitresses and mechanics they entertain in forgotten bars and derelict nightclubs.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Format: Paperback
Nb of pages: 224 p.
ISBN-10 0872865193
ISBN-13 9780872865198
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artists via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius. In order to work for the children of the canecutters though, the mechanism must work for everybody.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging from the quilombos of Bahia to the favelas of Rio to the poorer quarters of New Orleans to the south side of Chicago to Harlem to Appalachia to Irish villages and Russian shtetls and even Mozart...put it like this:
"Where there's misery, there's music!"
So it's not just Brazil. And it's not just music.
