Review: Ry Cooder - Chavez Ravine

Ry Cooder has a way of preserving the past, an ability to rekindle the soul of a fading legacy in music, immortalising it with the kind of romantic affinity one would normally hold for our own private memories. Chávez Ravine, technically Cooder's first solo album in nearly twenty years, is a work dedicated to the timbre of life in a neighbourhood long gone, a Chicano district in 1950 L.A. bulldozed in favour of giving the Dodgers baseball team a new home. The fifteen songs within are snapshots of that time, recreating the sounds and thoughts of the Chávez Ravine area through the sand of songs new and old, scenes and characters recollected and sung by legends of that era –
some of whom have only passed away recently.

Chávez Ravine is as diverse as it is brilliant; whether it's the Red fear of the McCarthy-era ("Don't Call Me Red"), the perspective of a spacecraft-riding alien ("Poor Man's Shangri-La" / "El UFO Cayó"), or a mother-daughter conversation about style and property ("Muy Fifí"), the album becomes a melting pot of fragmented nostalgia as faded black-and-whites are spread between the song introductions of the booklet's sepia-toned pages.

"Los Chucos Suaves," "Chinito Chinito," and "3 Cool Cats" (the sixth, seventh, and eighth tracks, respectively) form an excellent run together. The first is a steamy dance floor groove sweated out in a shanty neighbourhood club nearly sixty years ago, while the second is a Latin-flavoured tale of a Chinese laundryman rattling his change box as he walks through the streets. The third is a simple moment of three cats in a pick-up truck dividing up a candy bar as they catch sight of three passing chicks, wagging their hips…a dog's barking and a cop's siren are blended into the sounds as if you're there, watching on from a bedroom window adjacent to the fire-escape above them.

Article Author: Cian Traynor

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