It’s 1976 and a cruise ship sets sail for Havana carrying some of the world’s finest musicians – Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Earl Hines. On arrival, the Cubans are so ecstatic that they carry Gillespie from the ship. But it was another of the musicians on board who was to return 20 years later to help bring about an astonishing rebirth of the island’s music.
Ry Cooder, then a young Californian with four eclectic albums to his credit and who had worked with everyone from Jackie de Shannon to Taj Mahal, Gordon Lightfoot and the Rolling Stones, had heard news of the cruise and was determined to take the opportunity to meet the musicians he had heard only on rare tapes of a radio programme. He contacted the tour director. “I said, ‘I have nothing to offer but I can come and play something,'” says Cooder, sitting now in the Spitfire Cafe beside Santa Monica airport, just a few blocks from where he grew up. “I said: ‘I’ll play in one of the little lounges, I don’t care, just give me a stateroom for me and my wife,’ and he did.”
For security reasons – the US regarded Cuba as a red menace – the passengers were not told of the destination until they were at sea: “Some people thought they were going to Montego Bay and they said, ‘What the hell are we doing going to a communist country?’ There were all these heavy jazz cats and me. It was absurd, but I thought then, ‘that is really the place to go and the thing to do’.”
It was to be the last cruise of its kind. A bomb was planted on the ship in New Orleans just before it set off for its next visit and the trips became frozen in the ice of the cold war.
Cooder returned to LA, his son Joaquim was born and he started doing soundtrack music so successfully that he was able to give up touring.
“All the time I thought about Cuba and I thought, ‘I’m missing the parade’. We never went back.” Until 1996, when he went to Cuba with traditional Irish band the Chieftains and started a remarkable excavation process that has led to a clutch of wonderful and wonderfully successful CDs and now a film, Buena Vista Social Club. Directed by Cooder’s old friend and collaborator Wim Wenders (on films such as Paris, Texas and The End of Violence), the film tells the stories of Cuba’s forgotten musicians and follows them to concerts in Amsterdam and, triumphantly, New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Wenders had his ear bent by Cooder while they were working on The End of Violence. The director suggested that the two of them go to Cuba and see what happened. The film is already in the top 10 of highest-grossing documentaries ever, has been critically acclaimed, and has transformed the lives of musicians such as pianist Ruben Gonzalez – “a cross between Thelonius Monk and Felix the Cat”, says Cooder – and singer Ibrahim Ferrer, who emerge as two of the show’s stars.
Cooder, who talks in the same rolling, infectious way he sings and plays slide guitar, likened the music he encountered to a strange island ecology that had not been touched by predators or foot traffic. He was sure that there was an audience for it.
“When I was on Warners, years ago, I used to tell the executives: ‘The rest of the world has their music that they’re very interested in. You guys know something about American pop music but that’s all you know. Herb Alpert has sold millions of records and called it Tijuana Brass, and Latin people bought it and their money’s just the same. So what’s the matter with you guys, why do you have to sit there and say we only know pop music? If money is what you want – which is what they want – well, now, of course, all these companies are trying to establish world music labels hand over feet. It’s like a piranha-feeding frenzy. In Cuba, anybody who can walk and talk and play an instrument gets signed. Which is great – they get a job out of the deal.”
The reaction from Cuban musicians, both inside and outside the country, has been warm. He had just been to a record release party for some LA-based Cubans. “These musicians said: ‘Thank you – you put this thing back on track.’ It’s an amazing affirmation to get from people like that who live completely apart, who don’t mess with white people and it’s truly heartfelt; it’s not that they have to blow smoke at me. That, for me, is a great pay-off.”
Some American reviews had been critical of the film for not being critical of Cuba and Castro: “We only know what we see, but we don’t live there. We set out to tell these people’s story. What purpose could it serve to be overtly political? So much of it has been said, mostly inaccurately. Most of these people who are criticising the film don’t know fuck-all about the history of Cuba, period, end of discussion.
“If they did, they’d shut their mouth. Because what people have no concept of is what went on there historically. There are issues dating back to the Spanish-American war that are paramount. Well, hell, I’m a musician. We go and do music. If we’d have been political we’d have been on the wrong side of somebody’s fence. That’s another movie.”
He believes there is a simple explanation as to why the CDs and film have been so successful: “People love it because they get to see something that they never see any more – artistry and music which is nothing to do with money. It’s not a money-based, power-based culture. Everybody feels connected to something humanistic and that’s very hard to achieve. What can you look at that isn’t saturated with commerce?
“Every note you hear on the radio is saturated with commerce. I hear it in the way people play their snare drums, I hear it in every guitar note that’s played. It’s nobody’s fault. It can’t be helped, it’s been coming since the first world war or at least the second, so it’s the last chance to hear something that reflects a different viewpoint which is going to change over night.”
Young Cubans are stepping out of their culture as fast as they can, says Cooder, enticed by the commercial music on their airwaves. “You open a door and shine a bright line on something, you change it. What are you going to do? It’s worse to ignore it.”
The success of the adventure has prompted people to urge him to look for buried treasure elsewhere. He says that people tell him he’ll now be going to the Congo or “Tierra del Fuego to film the penguins with their nose flutes”.
He is uncertain how much of such music there is. “You can go into a culture that’s hidden and forgotten but is the music any good? Is the music of Bhutan any good or does it go ‘ding dong, ding dong’? I don’t know.” But he will be heading out to Hanoi early this year to work with a blind musician whose music he finds original and remarkable.
“Everbody’s rocking, which is OK, but when everybody starts rocking what happens is the little groove they used to do is immediately replaced with this rocking groove,” says Cooder.
“As John Lee Hooker once said: ‘Everybody rockin’.” He never again played the same way, he never again hit that greasy lick like he did in 1949. Nobody does. It’s true of every goddam human being with the exception of this guy in Hanoi [Kim Singh], Ruben Gonzales, Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo. They stay with what they got.”
The Western hybrid of other cultures’ music has a distinctive appeal: “People can identify because it’s got a bit of the rock thing – when I say rock I use the word as a word, I don’t mean rock’n’roll. If you hear the drummers of Burundi whispering into their one-strings it sounds like someone’s getting their balls torn off and that’s a little frightening to the white middle-class but if you get a little beat going or a little drum or a little guitar it immediately draws everybody in and makes everybody more money
“Kim Singh, he plays guitar now, Africans do, Hawaiians do. Traditional instruments were thrown away because they were too quiet.”
There is the hum of Santa Monica traffic as a busload of students arrive and small aircraft take off from the adjacent runway. “The human race gets louder because there are more of us so we have to make more of a racket. In the old days, you went into a temple or a cave. We live in these noise factories now so the music had to keep track.”
Given all of that, hasn’t the success of these elderly, unworldly musicians been an even bigger surprise? Cooder reckons timing was all. “Ten years ago no one would have given a shit. They were busy with Bruce Springsteen or whatever they were busy with. But now is the time. It’s just the blind luck of being there when the train pulls in and you’ve got the weird two-headed dog that everybody wants to see.”
And, boy, did they want to see it. Tickets to the Carnegie Hall concert that is the climax to the film were selling outside the doors for $2 000 and those lucky enough to get inside were treated to a once-in-a-lifetime show. Cooder, no stranger to wowing an audience when his was the only name outside the theatre, said he had never seen anything like the reaction.
“It had nothing to do with money, power or fame. That is what usually motivates audiences into reactions but that’s phoney, it’s bought and paid for. You went there to scream so you scream. That’s OK. I understand that. But it was amazing to sit at the back of that stage.” In fact, the concert was a final addition to the original plans for the film only because Wenders felt that with the footage he had so far “there wasn’t enough gas in the tank”.
As for the future, there are concerts with the Cuban musicians in the US and a much-postponed trip to Vietnam, which he has never visited. His son Joaquim, now 20 – who features on drums in the film and has his own band, Speakeasy – has also been uncovering some half-forgotten music, adding the 1960s classic When You Walk in the Room bolero-style (it’s by Jackie de Shannon, one of the artists his dad worked with in the 1970s) to the band’s repertoire. His father believes the song was part of a golden era in pop music, produced by some wonderful and under-appreciated musicians: “I could go find some of them!”
Buena Vista Social Club opens in South Africa on January 28