Word: cooder
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Upcoming 'certs: Jimmy Cliff will have the Charles River to cross when he hits the Orpheum on the 19th of November. The Doobie Brothers and the Alpha Band'll be at the Music Hall November 5--where will you be? Taj and Ry (Mssrs. Mahal and Cooder) will double-boogey into town for a date at the Orpheum on November 14, and Robin Trower will hit the Music Hall on the 18th; that's the night before Jimmy Cliff will be at the Orpheum, in case you forgot. Now Aerosmith, with special guest Rich Derringer, will be featured...
...with Led Zeppelin, complains that "everybody in the business knows a new era has got to come, but they're too busy cashing in on the old one to help it along." Some are helping, either by working their own personal territory (like Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Tom Waits and James Talley) or, like Simon, Dylan, Bruce Springsteen (TIME cover, Oct. 27) or The Band, trying to make their private property public. There are superb performers (like Linda Ronstadt), and wizardry writers (like Jackson Browne) who are learning the tricks of showmanship. But finding spirited new directions for music...
...Cooder is not bound to reproduce old music intact. He sometimes uses orchestration and can find new emphasis in a tune by changing the usual arrangement. Thus a World War II song called Comin' In on a Wing and a Prayer, which he sings low and slow, loses its Tin Pan Alley patriotism and becomes plaintive, full of battle fear. An old calypso tune, F.D.R. in Trinidad, is delivered with careful ingenuousness, and Cooder brightly, as if inadvertently, stresses the irony that time has worked on the lyrics: "Mr. Cordell Hull in attendance/ They took part in a peace...
...Cooder discovers his songs through friends or, as he himself puts it, "by keeping my ears open and my memory running back to the days when I was starting out." His record collection is small, running mostly to comparatively obscure ethnic labels like Arhoolie and buttressed by Harry Smith's three-volume Anthology of American Folk Music on Folkways, which he calls both "a terrific collection" and "a good place to turn for a little juice." Studiously avoiding the heavy-rock social scene, Cooder lives with his wife Susan in a roomy house in Santa Monica, Calif., with studios...
This month Cooder began an eight-week tour round the U.S. with his friend Randy Newman; after that, he will get down to serious work on his next album. The contents remain uncertain, but Cooder is currently fascinated by the work of a Tex-Mex accordionist named Flaco Jimenez. He has also just returned from a trip to Hawaii, where he and some Hawaiians spent two weeks making and taping some music of the islands -"not really antique stuff," he says, "just Hawaiian drinking-and-good-time songs from before the war, the kind of thing you never hear back...