Ry Cooder

To say that Ry Cooder is an extremely gifted musician is not only an understatement, but misleading as well. Certainly, Cooder has achieved an extraordinary level of technical proficiency in his playing, but what truly makes his music exceptional is the degree of stylistic expertise he has attained. Simply put, Ry Cooder can play damn near anything, from slide guitar to mandolin to banjo, saz, or tiple, or any style, be it gospel, folk, blues, calypso, Tex-Mex, or Hawaiian slack-key guitar. But if Cooder's ability is unquestionable, his taste is not. Despite credentials that include studio work with Taj Mahal, the Rolling Stones, Captain Beefheart, and Eric Clapton, Cooder's own work ranges in quality from the intriguingly experimental to the utterly embarrassing.

Why this is the case isn't entirely clear, but it must have to do with the guitarist's willingness to try anything. That seems to be the undoing of his debut, Ry Cooder. Although the album has its moments, including Randy Newman's acrid "Old Kentucky Home" and a delightfully unadorned mandolin version of Sleepy John Estes' "Goin' to Brownsville," it also ends up lumbered with the overwrought arrangements of "One Meatball" and Leadbelly's "Pig Meat." Fortunately, Cooder scales back for Into the Purple Valley, and the music improves immensely. Cooder still can't help tinkering with the arrangements, but this time around, the unexpected touches -- for instance, the celesta in "Denomination Blues" -- work in his favor. But the best moments, like the traditional "Billy the Kid" or his slide guitar rendition of Woody Guthrie's "Vigilante Man," are generally straightforward, presenting each song with minimal ornamentation.

Both Boomer's Story and Paradise and Lunch proceed in a similar vein, with minor variations and occasional cameos. Cooder brings in Sleepy John Estes for a version of "President Kennedy" on Boomer's Story, although that album's highlight is probably Cooder's slide guitar treatment of "Dark End of the Street." For Paradise and Lunch, Earl "Fatha" Hines is on hand to add stride piano flourishes to "Ditty Wah Ditty." But Chicken Skin Music takes this guest-star strategy to new levels by bringing in two exceptional and distinctive players: Tex-Mex accordion legend Flaco Jimenez and Hawaiian slack-key guitar whiz Gabby Pahinui. It's marvelous enough when the music is geared to their specialties, but when Cooder changes the context -- by using Jimenez for a rendition of Ben E. King's "Stand By Me," say -- the results are stunning. Sadly, Jazz (1978) doesn't quite meet Chicken Skin Music's standard. Even though it includes tunes by Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke, Jazz isn't a jazz album. Nor does Cooder intend it to be, since he's far more interested in showing parallels between Morton's habaniera and the Bahamanian guitar style of Joseph Spence. And it makes for a fascinating lesson, if a tad too pedantic to be truly entertaining.

With Bop Till You Drop, Cooder makes a serious wrong turn, applying his rootsy eclecticism to material culled from rock and R&B. It's not a particularly novel approach for him -- Purple Valley, for instance, included a version of the Drifters' "Money Honey" -- but it brings out the worst in his music. Bop, at least, is able to balance its excesses with refreshingly rootsy instrumentals like "I Think It's Going to Work Out Fine"; Borderline, on the other hand, goes completely off the deep end. "Down in the Boondocks," "634-5789" and "Crazy 'Bout an Automobile (Every Woman I Know)" are songs that barely needed to be remade, much less reinvented as false nostalgia. Cooder downplays that tendency on The Slide Area, offering a blues shuffle treatment of "Blue Suede Shoes" but otherwise sticking with more modern material like the Little Feat-ish "I'm Drinking Again" or "UFO Has Landed in the Ghetto." But Get Rhythm finds him fiddling with the oldies again, slogging through an overblown boogie makeover of "All Shook Up" and a version of Johnny Cash's "Get Rhythm" done as imitation doo-wop.

Uneven as those albums are, Cooder was still making great music during this period -- he just happened to be doing it for movie studios instead of record companies. Cooder was no stranger to soundtrack work, having contributed to both Performance and Candy before cutting his first solo album, but it wasn't until he provided some Southwestern atmosphere for Walter Hill's The Long Riders that his soundtrack career truly got into gear. Ironically, Cooder actually wound up making better rock records for movies than he did for himself; compare The Border to The Slide Area or Get Rhythm, and it's obvious that the focused demands of film-scoring bring out the best in his playing. Alamo Bay is impressively protean, with selections ranging from the sweetly harmonized "Quatro Vicios" (featuring David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas from Los Lobos) to the punkish "Gooks on Mainstreet," while Paris, Texas is eloquently atmospheric, conveying a palpable sense of the town's barren landscape. Neither Blue City, which tends to predictable rock & roll, nor Crossroads, which is too heavy on overstuffed blues, are terribly impressive, but Johnny Handsome gets everything right, from the ominous quiet of the "Main Theme" to the jaunty good mood of "Clip Joint Rhumba." A Meeting By the River is a fruitful collaboration with Indian multiinstrumentalist V. M. Bhatt. Much of Cooder's work in the late '90s was dominated by one of his most commercially successful projects, Buena Vista Social Club. Mambo Sinuendo is another old-time Cuban music project in the same vein with Buena Vista alumnus Manuel Galban. (J.D. CONSIDINE)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide