Best known as a guitar virtuoso, Ry Cooder is a complete musician whose singing, selection of material, arranging and sensibility are as much a part of his art as his command of his instrument. Classed as a folk artist, he has a wholeness of approach separating him from such inferior purveyors of similar material as Dave Bromberg.
Cooder is devoted to the elimination of the gratuitous assertion of personality in music. He is in perpetual pursuit of the magic note: the right sound at the right time. Like the art of illuminated manuscripts, the power of his work comes first of all from the accumulation of so much brilliantly shaped and controlled detail.
from the tension he generates between past and present. He culls his material largely from folk, blues, old rock 'n' roll, West Indian and jazz sources. His ear for the antique and quaint may mislead some into thinking he is merely peddling sophisticated musical nostalgia. But Ry Cooder uses the past as an arena in which he can present a range of emotions, styles, feelings, even ideas, unavailable to him in most of contemporary pop music.
Like his three other solo albums, Paradise & Lunch doesn't idealize the past so much as suggest the fullness of human experience available through some of its traditions. He doesn't find that range in contemporary pop, where so much music seems so emotionally thin.
Not that Cooder ever sounds in awe of the past. He is no archivist preserving dying traditions for the sake of history — nor does he simply sing songs from and about the past. Like the Band on The Band, at his best he becomes the past. When he sings about the Depression, he sounds like one of its survivors. By embodying traditions with such grace, he becomes one with them. And they then speak as much through him as he speaks through them.
Musically, Cooder is unobtrusively eclectic. He conceals the enormous effort that goes into the conception and execution of every cut: He neither revels in his expertise, nor shows it off. His goal is to elicit our feeling for the finished work.
Rather than merely interpret, Cooder fulfills the intentions of the older songs. He isolates and then emphasizes or de-emphasizes particular elements in them, according to his vision of how best to do justice to their spirit. In so doing, he almost invariably sidesteps the usual comparisons between the older and modern versions. His "One Meat Ball" doesn't lead to a comparison with the Josh White (an early influence) original; Cooder's version is complete by itself.
"One Meat Ball" is on Ry Cooder, his first and to me still his best album. He moved effortlessly from the rock 'n' roll and shattering slide guitar of "Alimony" to the heartbreaking Depression-era "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live." On the latter, he introduced strings where none would have been used 40 years ago, and revealed that his respect for the
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