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Thursday, March 28, 2024 
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+ Donato Wharton - Body Isolations
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+ Brad Mehldau - Live in Japan
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+ Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country
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+ Various Artists - Tibetan And Bhutanese Instrumental And Folk Music, Volume 2
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+ Sufjan Stevens - The Avalanche
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+ Carla Bozulich - Evangelista
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+ Sonic Youth - Rather Ripped
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+ Glissandro 70 - Glissandro 70
+ Calexico - Garden Ruin (Review #2)
+ Calexico - Garden Ruin (Review #1)
+ The Flaming Lips - At War With The Mystics
+ The Glass Family - Sleep Inside This Wheel
+ Various Artists - Songs For Sixty Five Roses
+ The Fiery Furnaces - Bitter Tea
+ Motorpsycho - Black Hole/Blank Canvas
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+ Sondre Lerche And The Faces Down Quartet - Duper Sessions
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Ry Cooder
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Chávez Ravine
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The red cover art of Ry Cooder's expansive Chávez Ravine sticks out on the record-store shelves. It's a simple, pencil-drawn cartoon by Michael C. McMillen: a bulldozer driven by a chain-smoking skeleton, a mysterious, retro-looking flying saucer hovering above, and massive amounts of destruction. And while billing the release as "a record by Ry Cooder" might seem pretentious, it's both accurate and appropriate. For Chávez Ravine is a story set to music about a particular place at a particular time, all subsumed by Cooder's mastery of the American folk tradition.

Here's the story: A long time ago, Chávez Ravine was a neighborhood in Los Angeles with "a rural feel in [an] urban place," according to the liner notes, and populated by recent Mexican immigrants who mostly just wanted peace and quiet. White folks from Santa Monica never headed up that way — it was too colorful, too laid-back, too different. But in the name of progress and urban planning, the "right-wing politicos and 'bigness'-obsessed planners and developers" wanted to set their mark on Los Angeles, and via red-baiting and character assassination in the '40s and '50s displaced the residents and plowed over Chávez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. The city expanded, the color evaporated, and the process set the stage for a dark period in America's history.

Chávez Ravine the album tells this tale (figuratively from the perspective of a traveling flying-saucer pilot, a space vato) of how the coolest neighborhood in Los Angeles was taken over by blandness and suburbanization. The music is the magical blend of Tex-Mex and old-fashioned rhythm & blues, with legends old and new guesting. Politics and history lessons aside, it's a record filled with the mellow grooves of forgotten music that, if not as forgotten as the sounds of Cooder's commercial blockbuster Buena Vista Social Club once were, is at least as significant.

R&B legend Little Willie G. — former lead singer in Thee Midniters ("Land of 1000 Dances," "Whittier Blvd.," etc., etc.) — and David Hidalgo of Los Lobos pen and sing "Onda Callegera" to a lilting guitar melody, about the time sailors were dispatched to beat up Mexicans they found in the streets. The late Lalo Guerrero (called "The Father of Chicano Music") sings his own "Los Chucos Suaves," and Little Willie G. reprises the Lieber and Stoller hit "3 Cool Cats," all with a melodic and percussive groove. Perhaps the prettiest song on the album, "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium," is sung as a Latin lament by James "Bla" Pahinui, an innovator of slack-key guitar, who Cooder calls the "homey of homies."

Cooder's wonderfully understated guitar-playing gets some bluesy twang out on "It's Just Work for Me," which tells the story of the demolition from the perspective of the bulldozer driver. Like the neighborhood that's been plowed over, this is music that has been by-and-large forgotten by the same forces of greed and progress, and the juxtaposition of the tunes and the story is striking.

But Chávez Ravine works because, ultimately, it isn't a history lesson or museum piece. It's the sound of musicians, now on the periphery, playing and singing the music they love, following the direction of a bona-fide master whose vision just gets crisper and more pointed, all framed by a story that touches us all. The songs feature magical music, and the tale connects the music together. But ultimately it's the music that transcends the story to make something that's truly moving.


by Michael Lach




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