ry Cooder

My Name Is Buddy: Another Record by Ry Cooder is the thirteenth studio album by Ry Cooder. It is the second social-political concept album by Ry Cooder. Cooder has described it as the second in a trilogy that began with Chávez Ravine and concluded with I, Flathead. The album is packaged in a small booklet that includes a brief story and drawing to accompany each song. Both the songs and the stories relate tales from the viewpoint of the characters, Buddy Red Cat, Lefty Mouse, and Reverend Tom Toad. The liner notes ask listeners/readers to join them as they "Journey through time and space in days of labor, big bosses, farm failures, strikes, company cops, sundown towns, hobos, and trains… the America of yesteryear".

EXCEPTIONAL BROADCAST RECORDING FROM AN OCCASIONAL QUARTET John Hiatt’s Bring The Family album, released in 1987, introduced the veteran minstrel to a new generation of fans. Choc- Full of supreme compositions, it also featured one-hell of a line-up. Hiatt of course did most of the singing and strummed a sad acoustic, the mighty Ry Cooder handled electric guitars and a little sitar on one number, Nick Lowe played his signature bass and the man who banged the drum for everyone from Bob Dylan to The Manhattan Transfer, , the wholly underrated Jim Keltner, kept time superbly. The easy way this quartet clicked was what led to the album Little Village in 1992, but the group’s one and only album together, while it didn’t take off commercially, certainly hasn’t dated since. In the album’s wake the Villagers hit the road; veterans to a man of the live circuit, the shows were a magnificent spectacle.

COODER AND LOWE BACK TOGETHER AFTER ALMOST 30 YEARS Their first collaboration since the early 1990s when, alongside John Hiatt and Jim Keltner, they were, collectively, one half of the short-lived, supergroup Little Village, Ry Cooder and Nick Lowe s tour of Japan, Australia and New Zealand in 2009 was something of a revelation. Performing cuts written by each, a number of choice cover versions, plus the co-composed, One Of These Days, You re Gonna Pay , the duo s show at The Orchard Hall in Tokyo on 11th November was possibly the finest concert these two mavericks performed together during this welcome jaunt. Featured in its entirety on this new CD and available here for the first time, this broadcast recording is certain to become a must-have release for fans of this pair of old - perhaps - but quite perfectly matured, timers!
From A Live FM Broadcast Recorded At Orchard Hall, Tokyo, Japan, 11th November 2009.

Ry Cooder's I, Flathead is the culmination of his ambitious and fascinating "California Trilogy," the last of three albums in which the singer and guitarist journeys through the real and imagined history of mid-20th century, multi-ethnic California, sampling the sounds of its barrios and byways, its nightclubs and honkytonks. The CD functions beautifully on its own, but also serves as a sort of soundtrack to the book equivalent. Abetting Cooder in his story telling is a veritable repertory of players who've appeared in the previous discs in the trilogy, among them drummer Joachim Cooder, Jim Keltner, Flaco Jimenez, Jon Hassell, Juliette Commagere and Gil Bernal.

Ry Cooder's exceptional Paradise and Lunch takes a popular precept – music as the common denominator across all languages and styles – to extremes few artists have envisioned let alone fulfilled. Considered by many diehards to be the California native's finest hour, the 1974 set unfurls with rarified levels of joyousness, ingenuity, and sophistication. A prime contender for any Desert Island list and an album that repeatedly restores your faith in the inimitable effects experienced upon listening to special performances, Paradise and Lunch is an eternal "musicians' musician" record – an adventurous, ambitious, soulful leap down roads well-traveled and paths less known. Such eclecticism, virtuosity, and ebullience resonate with unmatched verve on our hybrid SACD. Mastered from the original master tapes and strictly limited to 2000 numbered copies, this audiophile reissue boasts dead-quiet surfaces, superb transient response, front-to-back soundstaging, and an organic immediacy that heightens the enjoyment, character, and craft of the arrangements.

Live in San Francisco is a collaborative live album by Ry Cooder and Corridos Famosos released in September 2013 by Nonesuch Records and Perro Verde. The album was recorded in 2011 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, California. Cooder produced Live in San Francisco and recorded with members of Corridos Famosos, which included vocalists Juliette Commagere, Terry Evans, and Arnold McCuller, Joachim Cooder on drums, Robert Francis on bass, Flaco Jiménez on accordion, and the ten-piece Mexican brass band La Banda Juvenil. It was his first live album since Show Time (1977), which Cooder also recorded at the Great American Music Hall with Jiménez and Evans.

Ry Cooder’s multi-genre style mostly spans blues, country, gospel, folk, and calypso but ultimately knows no boundries. The late 60’s saw Ry as a session man and collaborator to many talents such as The Rolling Stones, Randy Newman, and Lowell George to name just a few. He is even rumored to have shown Keith Richards his 5-string open G tuning that Keith lives by now during these late 60’s sessions. The main portion of the disc was recorded at The Bottom Line in New York and features a solo performance that comes from an excellent crystal clear soundboard recording. A master of fingerstyle and downright dangerous with a slide, only his vocal lacks a bit but is good enough to accomplish exactly what he was after.

Rhino presents a retrospective boxed set with seven CDs that focus on Cooder s work in the Eighties and early Nineties: The Long Riders, Alamo Bay, Paris, Texas, Blue City, Crossroads, Johnny Handsome and Trespass. RY COODER: SOUNDTRACKS will be available on September 29th. A digital version will also be available.
The music is presented in a clamshell box that features new artwork by Tornado Design, the group behind the distinctive look found on several of Cooder s recent studio albums, as well as Rhino s 2008 anthology, The UFO Has Landed.
After Cooder worked on soundtracks for Watermelon Man and Performance (starring Mick Jagger), he began producing soundtracks on his own. He started in 1980 with The Long Riders. It was the first of many soundtracks that Cooder would record for the film s director, Walter Hill. Many of them are included in this set: Crossroads, Johnny Handsome, Trespass, and Blue City, a film Hill produced.

STUNNING ALL ACOUSTIC BROADCAST FROM RY COODER AT CAMBRIDGE IN 1979 Bop Till You Drop, Ry Cooder's eighth album, was released in July 1979 and remains the first digitally recorded major-label album in popular music, recorded as it was on a digital 32-track machine built by 3M. The album consists almost entirely of covers of earlier rhythm and blues and rock and roll classics, including Elvis Presley's Little Sister and the 1965 Fontella Bass-Bobby McClure hit Don't Mess Up a Good Thing , on which Cooder duetted with soul star Chaka Khan. Khan also performed on the only original track on the album, Down in Hollywood.