Ry Cooder
Chávez Ravine

Once upon a time, on the hills at the edge of Los Angeles, there was a suburb called Chávez Ravine, inhabited mostly by Latin Americans who lived between misery and the uncertainty of tomorrow. It was a true cathedral of poverty situated at the margins of the flourishing city of angels, whose luxurious neighborhoods and buildings, boldly reaching for the sky, were growing day by day. Contradictions... but it mattered little to the people of Chávez Ravine, who had made their land a small Shangri-la of the destitute, where every day unfolded with stories, alcohol, music, laughter, and many small, thus great, joys.
One day, the opulent city realized that Chávez Ravine was there and decided to change its existence.

Now, if this were a fairy tale, the narrative would continue in a way that concludes with the classic: "and they all lived happily ever after." But this is not a fairy tale; it is reality, an American story from 1950, which instead ended with the arrival of bulldozers and the destruction of the neighborhood, where today stands the baseball field and stadium of the Brooklyn Dodgers built in its place.
It took a sensitive, attentive, and curious artist like Ry Cooder to bring this story of ordinary injustice back to light and decipher it in fifteen splendid songs, which reveal the uncertain boundary between melancholy and the warm vitality of the human spirit.

In this music shines the scorching sun of Chávez Ravine, dimmed by the bulldozers and the light of its inhabitants, still very much alive at least in memory, yet there are also moments of more intimate and delicate introspection. Track after track, the threads of a story intertwine, as if flowing from an old and dusty radio tuned to the States of the 1950s, those of Senator Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, as much as of boxing as an epic sport or of wonderful singers in ballrooms overflowing with girls, rumba, and liquors. Chávez Ravine is, therefore, an album about the past and difference, the kind that some did not appreciate and one that is still sought to be erased or standardized today. The response of memory is, however, accompanied by the pride and strength of culture, thus making music a vehicle for ideas.
Musically speaking, the album ideally relates to the journey into the Latin universe that Ry Cooder embarked on in 1997 with the rediscovery of the old Cuban glories of the Buena Vista Social Club, but with differences. First of all, this is a true Ry Cooder album because, despite the numerous collaborations, his presence is prominent in blending his guitar with Latin, jazz, rumba, etc. The musician, in short, appears very involved in this project, into which he has indeed poured his soul.
The second peculiarity, compared to Buena Vista, is that Chávez Ravine is aimed at rediscovering Latin music with a different matrix than the Cuban one, being focused on Hispanic-American atmospheres. Thus, the language of the tracks is often a hybrid between English and Spanish (Spanglish), and there are consistently impure sounds, experienced at the border between California and Mexico, made famous by artists of the caliber of Lalo Guerrero. The latter barely made it in time to be part of this album before he passed away. But the list of "second leads" and old glories – as was said – is as long as it is impressive: from the magical bassist Mike Elizondo, to the visionary sound of the trumpet by Jon Hassell, to the accordion of Flaco Jimenez, to the visceral voice of Little Willie G.

It is truly impossible to dwell on each of them or describe the individual songs in a few words, but what matters most is to highlight, alongside talent, something rarer: the heart.
In fact, listening leaves a strong impression that every musician has put sincere and intense passion into this music full of energy. Truly rare human qualities, which represent that extra something capable of making this album simply splendid.