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.
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
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).