Ry Cooder appears on screen in one film, as himself, and is heard in a good many more. His slide guitar is the sound of Walter Hill's and Wim Wenders' America; in front of the camera he is a modest man who explains slightly too much.
Fi1m perspective
Ry Cooder rides through Havana in a motorcycle sidecar in Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club (1999), looking like a man who has agreed to be in a film and is not sure he should have. He is the reason the film exists. Two years earlier he had recorded an album in the city with a group of elderly Cuban musicians, most of them long out of work, and in 1998 he went back, with his son Joachim Cooder on drums, to make a record for the singer Ibrahim Ferrer. Wenders went with him. It is the only film in which Cooder plays a part, and the part is himself, and he is in it more than he would probably like.
The rest of his film work is heard rather than seen. He began as a session guitarist in the 1960s, playing with Taj Mahal and Captain Beefheart, made solo albums of American roots music from 1970, and turned to scoring in the early 1980s. The Long Riders (1980), for Walter Hill, was the first major job; Hill kept asking him back, eight films in all. Paris, Texas (1984), for Wenders, built its score on Blind Willie Johnson's 'Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground' and is the work people mean when they say his name. Crossroads (1986) put his guitar inside a story about blues mythology. Cooder has said that a soundtrack is glue, and that is what he writes: slide guitar that holds a picture of a place together and does not ask to be noticed.
On screen, the modesty that makes the scores work becomes a small problem. In Buena Vista Social Club he plays slide, he rides about the city, and he tells us what the musicians mean, and every time he explains them we would rather they were speaking. Compay Segundo, ninety and smoking a cigar the size of a rolling pin, does not need an interpreter. Ferrer was shining shoes when Cooder found him and says so himself, without bitterness, and that one sentence moved us more than anything said about him by anyone else in the film. Cooder's gift is knowing whom to point at. The camera simply serves him less well than a studio does.
His own records have stayed a cult matter, praised by critics and bought by rather fewer people, and there is something fitting in that. He has spent a career making other people sound more like themselves, whether a Cuban singer of pensionable age or a Wenders road film. If you want to know what Cooder does, put on Paris, Texas and listen. If you want to see him, there is one film, and he spends much of it trying to get out of the way.
Biography
Ry Cooder is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter and film score composer. Born in Los Angeles, he began playing guitar as a child and worked as a session musician in the 1960s before releasing solo albums exploring American roots music.
He has composed scores for numerous films, including Paris, Texas (1984), Streets of Fire (1984), Crossroads (1986), Dead Man Walking (1995) and My Blueberry Nights (2007). He also produced the Buena Vista Social Club album (1997) and contributed to its related documentary.
Cooder has collaborated with artists including the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Captain Beefheart and Ali Farka Touré, and formed the supergroup Little Village with Nick Lowe, John Hiatt and Jim Keltner.
