Restless spirit

Singer-guitarist Ry Cooder. Photo / Supplied by DeLaunay Enterprises

Nick Lowe offers a telling insight into the personality of Ry Cooder, his long-time friend with whom he is currently touring. They first came together in 1987 when John Hiatt asked Lowe if he'd like to work on an album which subsequently became Hiatt's much acclaimed Bring the Family.

"I managed to get Ry, who said he'd come along for a day and see if he liked it. But if he didn't, he'd clear off again."

Ry Cooder, a man in a hurry and - if a slightly flinty 15 minute conversation with someone who rarely gives interviews suggests - someone who doesn't like to waste his time. He tells of making the '93 album A Meeting by the River with Indian slide guitarist VM Bhatt in two hours, the '94 Talking Timbuktu with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure in three days. "Barely."

"But in that time, if you can conjure up something then you can say, 'at least we have a record and we moved towards something from his side and my side ... and then we moved on'. That's what musicians do habitually."

Cooder, now 62, has enjoyed a long career of moving on: he played with Captain Beefheart and he played slide guitar on the Stones' Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers in the late 60s; recorded a series of much admired solo albums in the 70s which explored regional American music (Hawaiian, Tex-Mex, gospel) as well as blues and jazz; and spent most of the 80s recording soundtracks, among them the haunting music for Paris, Texas and Walter Hill's western The Long Riders.

The soundtracks have fallen by the wayside and Cooder is blunt about why: "I hate films, films make me sick now and if something makes me sick I back off. They call you, you don't call them. Walter Hill used to call me and we were friends and understood one another, but there aren't any Walter Hills anymore."

As much as you can identify any thread in a musical career which has seen him explore so many different styles in a variety of company - from John Lee Hooker and Mavis Staples to Ireland's Chieftains and Cuban guitarist Manuel Galban - it is that he moves on fast.

"It appears to you this way but it's like this: I can't play Indian music to save my life and I can't play African music very easily either. But these things are like stops along the way because you are moving along your path. So although you meet somebody, the path stays the same."

A significant stopping-off point was the Buena Vista Social Club in which Cooder went to Havana to oversee musicians from Mali record with Cuban players. "But when the Africans couldn't make it we said, 'let's just get all the cats we can find'. So we just put everybody together to see if they could relate and come up with something, since they weren't normally going to be found playing with one another.

"For instance [singer] Compay Segundo and [pianist] Ruben Gonzalez never would have recorded together because in Cuba they have these distinctions. But me coming from Santa Monica, you don't make them and learn not to.

"You say, 'okay you can do this, I insist. Plus we are we are going to make it sound good'. Everybody loves it when it sounds good. So you go from there and achieve some rapport. It could easily not have happened."

However, as much as Cooder moves through genres, collaborators, projects and other cultures, it has been his hometown of Los Angeles which has pre-occupied him recently. He has completed an ambitious trilogy of conceptual albums which have explored the Hispanic music of East LA (Chavez Ravine in 05); Depression-era America (My Name is Buddy, 07) and the car culture of the 50s (I, Flathead, 08). For a man who moves quickly these seem complex, long-term projects - somewhat contrary to his restless spirit?

"No. This business of Chavez Ravine was always there. I was looking at Don Normark's photographs [of LA in the 40s] one day and I thought, 'man, I know [Mexican-American singers] Lalo Guerrero and Don Tosti are still alive but not for very long. If you wait, these cats are going to evaporate and there ain't no more'. And it was true. I worked on it for three years, both of them died during the process.

"If you wanted to put your hands down on a sound or musical concept that is peculiar to Los Angeles you have to have the people who did it. I like things, but I can't represent these people, they have to be there. The old people are gone in 60 seconds. My greatest mistakes were always made when I got lazy and didn't try hard enough and someone was lost."

In Europe recently he was having an email conversation with folk singer Mike Seeger about banjos, then everything stopped. When he got back home he learned Seeger had died. "And this knowledge is lost and that person's not there to chat or learn something from."

Other than the attritions of age, like eyesight, Cooder - who practises every day - feels he is playing better now than ever. "You have more understanding and comprehension and more ability to coax interesting sounds from the thing. We were just in Europe and I was improvising and it sounded nice. I was feeling fine."

For someone who is such a repository of music, Cooder - currently also working with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains - is hard to pigeonhole, but you wouldn't dare refer to him as "a musicologist" as many have done.

"That's just idiocy to me, that's so facile and just tossed away by people who just don't understand."

Musicologists study and academically understand music, musicians are more intuitive: "We do this out of feeling and some kind of quest, that has nothing to do with scholarship.

"I appreciate they feel I'm a guy who knows things. But I don't, I just make it all up. It's just some kind of crazy fantasy world, that's what it's always been. But if you stay aware you'll learn things and that helps you gain resonance in the things you do.

"If you just sit there and twang you'll reach a limit. But if you learn about other people and other experiences then you broaden your horizons."

LOWDOWN

Who: Singer-guitarist Ry Cooder. With singer-guitarist Nick Lowe, drummer Joachim Cooder and singer Juliette Commagere.

When: Monday November 16, Civic Theatre, Auckland

Trivia: The famous Buena Vista Social Club project came about by accident. The original idea was to have musicians from Mali work with the Cubans but when the Africans didn't turn up in Havana, Cooder started to work solely with various locals.