{"id":10340,"date":"2022-03-15T16:51:04","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T16:51:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10340"},"modified":"2022-03-17T15:44:59","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T15:44:59","slug":"when-ry-cooder-discovered-the-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10340","title":{"rendered":"When Ry Cooder discovered the blues"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 Ry Cooder, who turns 75 today, told me that he knew \u00a0that he would be a musician when he discovered the blues as a kid. When I first heard his slide guitar, I imagined he came from from some swamp in Louisiana or Mississippi but I was wrong. The legendary guitarist, singer-songwriter and film composer Ryland Peter Cooder is a California boy from Santa Monica by the sea.<\/p>\n

\u2018When I was little, you couldn\u2019t go to Tower and buy all the records or get the books,\u2019 he said. We spoke in 1986, long before streaming changed everything. \u2018I knew some older people who would play me a Leadbelly or Woody Guthrie record,\u2019 he recalled. \u2018I didn\u2019t know what it was except that it was different from anything else I\u2019d ever heard. It wasn\u2019t Santa Monica. It was from someplace else, very exotic, very strange and very compelling.\u2019<\/p>\n

He knew it was something he wanted to learn how to play but those around him said, \u2018Well, this is the blues. These people are different from you and you can\u2019t play this music.\u2019 Cooder was around six or seven years old at the time. \u2018I said, well, I like it. I\u2019m gonna stick with this thing and do the best I can,\u2019 he told me. \u2018I\u2019m just a little kid. I don\u2019t know what the world is all about. I don\u2019t know about poor people in the South and picking cotton and chain gangs. Then I saw photographs of the dust-bowl, beat-up cars, and I thought, my God, what is this all about? I was curious about it and I didn\u2019t think that those people were different from me. I didn\u2019t see myself as being a white, middle-class kid from Santa Monica. I think it would have stopped me in my tracks, if I did.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of the most influential figures in the history of contemporary popular song and a multiple Grammy Award winner, Cooder has played with a great many artists including Captain Beefheart, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks and the Rolling Stones. His own eclectic jazz, blues and folk albums, the many soundtracks and such masterpieces as \u2018A Meeting by the River\u2019 with V.M. Bhatt, \u2018The Buena Vista Social Club\u2019, \u2018Paradise and Lunch\u2019, \u2018Borderline\u2019, \u2018Chavez Ravine\u2019, \u2019My Name is Buddy\u2019, \u2018I, Flathead\u2019, \u2018Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down\u2019, \u2018Election Special\u2019 and his most recent, \u2018The Prodigal Sun\u2019 in 2018 are essential in any album collection. Cooder’s scores for Wim Wenders’s \u2018Paris, Texas\u2019 and Walter Hill’s \u2018The Long Riders\u2019 and “Crossroads,” are must-have albums as well as the Warner Bros. double-album \u2018Music by Ry Cooder\u2019, which is the only place I know to hear his haunting tracks from Hill’s \u2018Southern Comfort\u2019 and \u2018Streets of Fire\u2019 and Louis Malle’s \u2018Alamo Bay.\u2019<\/p>\n

His entry into film music occured when, along with Randy Newman and Jack Nitzsche, he contributed to the soundtrack of the 1970 British crime drama \u2018Performance\u2019 starring Mick Jagger and James Fox directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>American film director Walter Hill was planning his western \u2018The Long Riders\u2019 when he heard Cooder\u2019s 1978 album \u2018Jazz\u2019. Instead of having a traditional, big orchestral Western score for the picture, Hil wanted something organic to the 19th century but not what a musicologist might find in old material. \u2018I wanted it to be reinterpreted in a way that would mean something to a contemporary audience, which is almost a complete definition of what Ry Cooder does,\u2019 Hill told me. \u2018He\u2019s fabulous at working with traditional forms of American music and reinterpreting them in such a way that they have a current, contemporary validity.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What Hill didn\u2019t know was how Cooder felt about \u2018Jazz\u2019. \u2018It turned out to be the album he hates the most,\u2019 the director said. \u2018He just shudders.\u2019 When I spoke to Cooder, he agreed. \u2018It was an honest effort but we weren\u2019t anywhere near the level at which that music has to operate to be truly good,\u2019 he said. \u2018It\u2019s awfully polite. I like parts of it. I don\u2019t care for the tempos; the instrumentation is too nervous. I love that music but it\u2019s very hard to get it right.\u2019<\/p>\n

Still, Hill said there were a couple of cuts on it that he thought had a sound that might be useful on his western. \u2018Ry came in and we talked and got on quite well,\u2019 Hill said. \u2018He understood what I wanted to do. We thought we could work well together as basically we use the same techniques. He didn\u2019t want full scoring sessions as you do usually with movies as that takes time and money. He used over-dubbing, which works very well because if I wasn\u2019t happy with something, he could change it instantly and it wasn\u2019t economically crippling. When you have the big orchestra, the composer will play something for you ahead of time but you never really quite know what it\u2019s gonna sound like. It\u2019s one person on the piano saying \u201cThis is where the brass comes in, this is where the percussion enters \u2026\u201d Working with Ry, you build as you go and you can change things and modulate. That\u2019s very good from my point of view.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Cooder said, \u2019I was pretty lucky there. Walter really helped me out. He saw a use for what I do. I always figured there was a use for it but I couldn\u2019t quite figure it out. If not enough people have a use for what you do, then what do you do? But being a practical man, Walter saw a use for the idea. He\u2019s not the only one but he\u2019s the main one. Nobody was welcome from the record business side for years. A very conservative branch of the film industry, is music; much more so than cinematography or acting in terms of style. But now you have younger people in the film business who expect to hear it. It\u2019s part of their life experience and their environment, and they can sell it.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Cooder and Hill\u2019s other collaborations were on \u2018Johnny Handsome\u2019, \u2018Trespass\u2019, \u2018Geronimo: An American Legend\u2019 and \u2018Last Man Standing\u2019. He also worked with Tony Richardson on \u2018The Border\u2019, Michael Manning on \u2018Blue City\u2019, Wim Wenders on \u2018The End of Violence\u2019, Mike Nichols on \u2018Primary Colors\u2019 and Wonk Kar-wai on \u2018My Blueberry Nights\u2019.<\/p>\n

Cooder observed that music reflects time and space: \u2018If you hear old blues music that came out of the Southern states, especially Mississippi, and you go down there and catch the way the place looks and smells,\u2019 he told me, \u2018you understand where the tempos are coming from and where the space in the music comes from.\u2019<\/p>\n

Music he heard as a chid made him see places he\u2019d never visited. \u2018When Woody Guthrie used to say, “I\u2019m goin\u2019 down the road feelin\u2019 bad”, you really saw it happening,\u2019 he said. \u2018I\u2019d listen to those records as a kid and I could see every foot of the road. I try to bring that to my pictures.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 Ry Cooder, who turns 75 today, told me that he knew \u00a0that he would be a musician when he discovered the blues as a kid. When I first heard his slide guitar, I imagined he … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,8,2257],"tags":[5182,5183,5181,1054,5180],"class_list":["post-10340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-music","category-recalling","tag-buena-vista-social-club","tag-chavez-ravine","tag-the-long-riders","tag-ry-cooder","tag-walter-hill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10340"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10353,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10340\/revisions\/10353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}