Digging Up New Roots

It’s probably appropriate that Ry Cooder, who has been poking around the sources of music from around the world for most of his life, experienced his musical epiphany on a side street in Havana.

Traveling to the still-isolated Caribbean capital early last year to record an unusual combination of Cuban music and African high life, Cooder had to reconsider his options when passport problems prevented the musicians from arriving from Mali.

“But when the project fell apart,” explains Cooder, “I said, ‘Great, that gives us more focus to work with music from here. So let’s dig in.’ ”

The result was three albums on the World Circuit label--”Buena Vista Social Club,” “Introducing Ruben Gonzalez” and “A Toda Cuba le Gusta”--by the Afro-Cuban All Stars. The first two, produced by Cooder, brought him into contact with two legendary Cuban artists: singer-songwriter Compay Segundo, 89, and pianist Gonzalez, 77.

All three albums have been released in Europe to choruses of praise from music critics and encouraging sales figures (approaching 200,000 units collectively). Currently available in the U.S. as imports, they will be in this country on Nonesuch/World Circuit in September.

“And we got lucky with one other performer,” Cooder says. “Ibrahim Ferrer, who sings in the traditional sonero, almost literally walked in off the street. Somebody said, ‘Oh, look, there’s Ibrahim, get him in here. He’s pretty good.”

There’s a certain irony to the fact that Cooder, 50, is discussing his Cuban adventures in the super-modernistic conference room of his Beverly Hills attorney. Graying slightly, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, Cooder--wearing a bush jacket, an old T-shirt and sandals--slouches back in his chair and shrugs.

Pointing toward a wall filled with gold and platinum albums by the attorney’s clients, he simply says: “It’s a different world, Cuba and the U.S. A very different world.”

But it’s changing fast.

Cuban music is starting to heat up in the record business, and some of the larger labels are scrambling to make deals with artists from the socialist island nation despite the fact that U.S. citizens are forbidden to do business with Cuba. (Cooder, who declined to discuss details of his trip, produced the sessions for World Circuit, an English recording company.)

But unlike the rush by record labels to tie up performers such as young salsa star Paulito Fernandez, Cooder’s involvement is an extension of his long-term fascination with roots music.

“It’s something I’ve tried to do for quite a while--just get together with this thing, this real thing,” he says. “I’ve looked for it--for this kind of musical honesty, for music that’s untouched by greed or by commerce--all my life. But I’ve never found it anywhere but in Cuba. Everywhere else I’ve been, I’ve seemed to come in on the tail of things. But you go down there and you feel, ‘Hey, it’s still here, and I can be a part of it.’ ”

Cooder has been a musical traveler for most of his professional life, dipping into traditional American music, blues, Tex-Mex, Hawaiian, gospel and country. Mixing genres freely in albums such as “Into the Purple Valley” (1971) and “Chicken Skin Music” (1976), he also has solid credentials as a rocker, a slide guitarist and a composer of film scores, including “The Long Riders” (1980) and “Paris, Texas” (1984).

But he has been most intrigued by his quest for roots and the continuing possibilities of unusual musical combinations.

“This ‘fusion’ thing is a bad word,” he says. “But it means something. Because good music can very often come from very weird hybridizations when it’s handled properly and you know what to look for, how to work.”

Before his Cuban experience, Cooder’s weird hybridizations took some unusual turns. A spur-of-the-moment teaming with Indian guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt resulted in an unusual album on the small, Santa Barbara-based Water Lily Records.

“A friend of mine owns the company,” Cooder says, “and he asked me to come up and play with this guy. Well, north Indian music is so hard, and so complex, but he said, ‘Let’s try.’ So I went up and we sat down and played some little tunes. Forty minutes later the guy got bored and wanted to go on and play ragas. And I said I was going to the hotel because I can’t play ragas. And that was it.”

That was it, except for the fact that the album earned a world music Grammy in 1993.

An even weirder hybridization turned up for the soundtrack to Tim Robbins’ “Dead Man Walking” (1995), on which he played.

“Man, talk about cut and run,” Cooder says. “Here’s Eddie Vedder. He’s got a song. And here’s Nusrat [singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan] and his guys. So Eddie plays his tune, this little sad song about losing a friend. And Nusrat sits there and goes into a trance, with his finger up his nose, completely tranced out, just waiting.

“Meanwhile, Nusrat’s harmonium player sits there listening carefully, figuring it out. Suddenly, he decides, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got one like that.’ So he nudges Nusrat out of his trance and says something like, ‘It’s this song--it’s No. 10,000.’ And they take off, doing it their own way.”

But the Cuban experience, for Cooder, was the real thing.

“Who knew what we’d find down there?” he says. “These are artists who are proud of their accomplishments, but they’re not measured in terms of dollars and cents and cars and clothes and things.”

Still, in a paradoxical way, the attention brought to Segundo, Gonzalez and the others by Cooder’s recordings will almost inevitably provide a prominence that differs--and might eventually pull them away--from the convivial social club atmosphere they now enjoy. Both have subsequently toured internationally, and plans are in the works for U.S. appearances.

Cooder shrugs again when asked about the visibility that the recordings may bring.

“It’s true,” he says. “But I like to think it works both ways. I really feel people will be enriched when they hear this music. And then if you can open them up a little--and I do think the music will have that effect--maybe they’ll be less reflexive and less brainwashed.

“Maybe they’ll get to the point where they’ll say, ‘How can I hate and fear these Cubans we’ve been taught to hate and fear?’ Because it just isn’t possible after you hear this music.”