"My little Bill Clinton permission, license, variance to the embargo is finished, so I can't really do this unless something changes," he said.
But Cooder's historic Cuban odyssey at least comes to a climax with the most extraordinary album of the more than half-dozen he recorded in Cuba after he first walked into Havana's Egrem Studio in March 1996. "Mambo Sinuendo," to be released later this month on Nonesuch, is a glistening set of small-combo instrumentals recalling the succulent height of Cuban mambo in the '50. It features the great Manuel Galban, a guitarist who had never heard of Django Reinhardt but loves Duane Eddy.
"I don't know anybody who plays electric guitar in this sort of grand manner," Cooder said. "He's articulate, and he carries the aesthetic of this (era) around with him. That's the point of it for me. You have to build these little notions -- and this is a little notion -- build it upon somebody who is this thing. We all love this stuff -- mambo, Perez Prado sort of stuff -- but I don't know anybody who's doing it. He's it. He is this. He grew up with this, played it. There he sits."
Galban supplied the twangy guitar and musical direction for Los Zafiros, the immensely popular Cuban doo-wop vocal group of the early 60s (whose classic recordings were collected in the 1999 Nonesuch release "Bossa Cubana"). Cooder brought him to play behind Buena Vista Social Club vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer on some old Zafiros tunes for Ferrer's 1999 solo album.
"He was a tres player, like anybody would be in Cuba," said Cooder, referring to the three-stringed instrument prominent in Afro-Cuban music. "Somewhere along the line he switched to electric and started playing the same kind of stuff on the electric. But he made an interesting conversion because tres is a crazy instrument -- it really is a blind alley. It's not so clear how you might adapt over to six-string and do it with the kind of force and punch that he saw in this thing. He figured it out instinctively. He saw that the tres is a rhythm instrument, that riff kind of stuff. You play the drum pattern, but you give it melody -- that's tres. So on guitar, he does this, but he does it in a kind of full chordal way, running these ninth chords up and down and taking these tres solos all the time."
Cooder said Galban, 72, is a large man who dyes his hair and commands attention when he walks into a room.
"He's got huge hands, like a blues player, and a lot of physicality that works," said Cooder, 55. "Not everybody can do that with their body, and especially on a solid-body electric. It's just not dynamically possible. But he gets this great big sound out of that thing. His strings are real heavy. Most people would bleed all over these things."
As on all his Cuban records, guitarist Cooder takes a backseat to his subjects as a record producer.
"He sort of lays it out and I play with him, do a few things in terms of texture and stuff and sort of come in with him, so that the effect might even be of one instrument, but there are two people. I don't really like where folks trade solos. I never cared for that. I thought that was kind of boring. But to play the tune as a tune, you've got two drummers interlocked so that the microphones almost perceive it as one. You've got two electrics almost in an arranged sense, so that there's a pyramid structure. There's a lead and there's all this other stuff. What happens in the song, you can't just jam. This isn't jamming music.
"The idea of simple orchestration is the heart of the matter, as far as I'm concerned. That's the key to it. You can't do this in blues very easily. Rock is sort of about something else. But these kind of pop musical statements, to me, it gives you what you want. It gives you a sense of where we're going. We start here, we end up there, some little events along the way. Something happens. A mood is set and even a story is told, if you're good at it. If you're not good at it, of course, it sounds like background music. But this is high-grade jukebox music, which I think is a great thing."
Galban also played piano and organ on the sessions, to Cooder's surprise. "He plays the same s--- on the organ that he plays on guitar, same sort of broken-field runner, tres kind of stuff, and it's fantastic. I don't know if there are organs down there -- I didn't see any that work."
Cooder's 1997 million-selling, Grammy-winning album, "The Buena Vista Social Club" (and the subsequent Wim Wenders documentary), may have done more to spread Cuban culture than anything else outside of cigars since Castro took power more than 40 years ago. But Cooder barely made it back to cut his last two albums in Cuba, the Galban collaboration and a second solo album by Ferror, "Buenos Hermanos," due in March.
"We got busted," he said. "It wouldn't have happened if the thing had not been so tremendously successful, with the film and all. Then other people said, 'Well, I want the Cooder license, whatever he had.' And the State Department said, 'What are you talking about? It's a 40-year embargo -- we don't have any variance. There is no exception. Who is this guy?' So we had to get lawyers and lobbyists and get ourselves out of whatever bind we found ourselves in and then apply and ask for essentially a license, a variation, to do this again."
The Treasury Department fined Cooder $25,000 in 1999 for violating the Cuban trade embargo. A second violation would have meant even steeper fines, and his application for travel the next year languished until President Clinton stepped in. The musician left to begin recording as soon as the State Department processed the order.
"It was a complicated procedure," Cooder said. "I said, 'I've got two records I want to do. I aim to do this. I can't pass this up. It's important work. Plus I like to do it here. We're rocking here.' We got some real good help from some people, but in the end it was Clinton who did it. The day before he left office he sent some memo and the memo said, 'Give this guy what he wants.' The State Department wrote me out a license for a year, only a year. They put some limitations on it, of course, but I said, 'A year's good -- I can handle that.'"
Cooder brought session drummer Jim Keltner and his son, Joachim Cooder, who has played drums on most of the Buena Vista sessions. It was the younger Cooder who invited the bata drummers to the studio to record with Galban, creating the sort of multicultural dialogues that have been a hallmark of his father's career. Ry Cooder has recorded with Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui, African guitarist Ali Farka Toure, and Indian musician V.M Bhatt, among others. The bata is a traditional Yoruban double-headed ritual drum played exclusively in 6/8 time.
"We're playing an E funk thing," Cooder said. "We're staying in E. That's all I can think to do. They get locked and I make everybody stop, and I tell them you have to have a beginning. You can't just play. It has to start and it has to stop. They look at me, these bata guys, like, 'What do you mean, start and stop? Uh-oh, some crazy white thing now.'
"I said, 'I'm going to hold my hand here and we must have an actual beginning. Then I'm going to say diminish. Each person stops and leads to the next person and it will decrescendo down to a cowbell thing and quit. But you've got to watch me.' Oh, brother. This was the hardest thing. But it happened. Desperately trying to conduct this thing from my chair -- on video it's very funny to watch. You're going, 'Please watch me,' but they don't. It's funny.
"But this is how you do this. This is how you capture something exciting, I think. It's partly the desperation of it all. By that, I mean the unlikeliness of it all. Because if it was easy to do, it would sound routine. Who wants to do that?"
San Francisco Chronicle, 1 February 2003
John Fahey, Inventive Guitarist, Remembered
Muddy Waters biography
Live Blues Dying"I believe
in God, but the devil, he's got power, too," said Jones, who, with
Davis, Ford and a scattering of others, is among the last of the Delta
bluesmen who still live in the cradle of the blues. "Most of what you
sing about is suffering." .
