 | | Reviews | | |  RY COODER AND MANUEL GALBÁN
Mambo Sinuendo
Nonesuch/Perro Verde 7599-79691-2
Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club project brought Cuban music to the world and a $100,000 fine to Cooder for breaching America's embargo against the communist regime. Permission for this latest - and probably last - Cuban/RC collaboration took a year of lobbying the US government: thank the orishas (substitute deity of choice) for Ryland's obsessive pursuit of gifted stylistic explorations, for the world would be much poorer without this album.
Together with Cooder, Havana guitarist/arranger Manuel Galbán recreates Cuban popular music 1950s-style. Featuring a sextet comprising two electric guitars (Cooder and Galbán), two drum sets (Jim Keltner and Joachim Cooder), congas (Miguel "Angá" Diaz) and bass (Orlando "Cachaíto" López), it's an unusual record for this electric guitar-shunning country and marks a welcome reprise of RC's own slide guitar virtuosity, recently absent from CD grooves.
The result is phenomenal. From the languid surf-washed opener Drume Negrita to María La O's sweetly rhythmic pulsations, it's a slow promenade through a world of twangy guitars and sleepy congas, sultry dance-halls and melting Latin afternoons. A few choice guests add to the already-superb core personnel: Herb Alpert's trumpet weaves around the title track's perky, sinuous beat; Monte Adentro starts with the spookily atonal coro of Juliette and Carla Commagere, whose spiky vocals spice up a track or two. Throughout, the two guitars echo, glide and flick, rhythms perform sneaky u-turns, a saggy bass rumbas louchely with its arm around the tumbadora …
It's cult music: a mambo-jazz mix of nostalgia and innovation, Twin Peaks on the Malecón with mojitos. It's also Cooder's debut release for his own label Perro Verde (Green Dog) on which he plans to record "all sorts of music which I love, but which is absolutely useless commercially". If this is a taste, can't wait for more. Pour me a Cuban Breeze, Gretchen.
Mel McClellan - April 2003
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Folk & Acoustic
