News (Noticias) Tagged ‘Ry Cooder’

Alternative-Latino group MEZKLAH will be appearing at the Ford Amphitheatre as part of KPFK’s Clash of the Pochos - an event that kicks off the station’s celebration of their 50th anniversary, Sunday, July 27th.

The band will performing to benefit the radio station alongside famed Chicano political theatre troupe, Culture Clash, who will be joined by “La Cucaracha” cartoonist Lalo Alcatraz’s Pocho Hour of Power comic group. MEZKLAH will perform with their recently-expanded lineup, a quartet with a live rhythm section; a new track featuring the enhanced sound, “Bestia,” is currently receiving airplay on KPFK as a promo for the upcoming event.

MEZKLAH’s sound has been described as “a very intelligent mixture of traditional Latin music, alternative rock, jungle, reggae, ska, dub, and drum-and-bass,“ (Indie Music Stop) gaining them a reputation as “one of L.A.’s most powerful and promising alt-Latino bands.” (Los Angeles Times) They have toured internationally, hitting Latin America, Europe and Japan, playing to a crowd of 20,000 at Mexico City’s La Feria del Libro festival and delivering Memphis, Tennessee’s first rock en español concert along the way. They have opened for Ozomatli, Kinky, Maldita Vencidad and Antibalas – just to name a few - and gained a fan in Ry Cooder, who personally approached the group to record a track for a future compilation of different genres of Los Angeles music. Mezklah is currently recording tracks for their new EP Bestia Zonika, the follow up to their acclaimed debut album Spider Monkey.

MEZKLAH will be continuing their longstanding supportive relationship with KPFK at the event, where they will be the only musical act performing.

Tickets are on sale for $35 and $25 per person.

See Mezklah Perform at:
“Clash of the Pochos”
Ford Amphitheatre
2580 Cahuenga Blvd East
Los Angeles, CA, 90068
Tickets: (323) 461-3673.”*

Ry Cooder has been exhuming and reappraising overlooked areas of the musical culture of America (and beyond, as the Buena Vista Social Club can vouch) for so long now that he has become part of the story himself. More than four decades since he emerged as an electric blues guitarist so highly rated that he turned down an offer to join the Rolling Stones, Cooder continues to ferret out unfamiliar and neglected stories.

I, Flathead is the third part of a loose Southern California trilogy that kicked off with the acclaimed Chavez Ravine in 2005, an elegy for a destroyed Latino community in the heart of Los Angeles. Its follow-up, My Name is Buddy, told the history of US labour as seen by a folk-singing cat (how else?). I, Flathead, though, is an unashamed tribute to Californian strange. A set of linked songs supposedly performed by one Kash Buk, a jobbing musician and salt flats racer (a “flathead” is an early V-8 engine), it explicitly evokes an era of “popular mechanics” magazines, sci-fi comics and demobbed servicemen in search of a thrill, the time and place that threw up the Church of Scientology, the Hell’s Angels and Disneyland. The modern world, in fact. “*

If you had ears for Wim Wenders’s 1999 documentary “The Buena Vista Social Club,” you’ll want to know all about “We Are the Music!”In the Wenders film, Ry Cooder assembled for the cameras a group of great Havana musicians who, prior to recording a best- selling album, had largely been forgotten. “We Are the Music!” made in black and white in 1964 by the Cuban filmmaker Rogelio Paris, is a more scattershot documentary, but it’s intoxicatingly alive with song and dance.”*

Ersi Arvizu was on vacation in Hawaii a few years ago when she heard that some guy named Ry Cooder was looking for her. She got the news from colleagues who knew her from her long-gone glory days as lead singer of El Chicano, the 1970s East Los Angeles band famous for her version of the classic old bolero “Sabor a Mi.”

No way, shot back Arvizu, who had long before moved to Arizona. Besides, she was “fit to be tied,” she said, over a money dispute involving a previous El Chicano comeback concert. She was in no mood to get back in the business.

Her colleagues insisted this was the chance of a lifetime. How many veteranos wouldn’t want to work with the producer who had turned a bunch of aging, forgotten Cuban musicians into the international superstars called the Buena Vista Social Club?”*

Ersi Arvizu was on vacation in Hawaii a few years ago when she heard that some guy named Ry Cooder was looking for her. She got the news from colleagues who knew her from her long-gone glory days as lead singer of El Chicano, the 1970s East L.A. band famous for her version of the classic old bolero “Sabor a Mi.”

No way, shot back Arvizu, who had long before moved to Arizona. Besides, she was “fit to be tied,” she says, over a money dispute involving a previous El Chicano comeback concert. She was in no mood to get back in the business.”*

“As always, Cuban reaction to the Latin Grammy nominations comes loaded with politics. What gets reported, what gets omitted and what role Cubans have played in the Latin Grammy according to Cuba are all worth a second look.

The musicians named by a Sept. 28 note from Prensa Latina, the Cuban press agency, are veteran singer/songwriter Pablo Milanés; the late Compay Segundo of Buena Vista Social Club fame; the Afro-Cuban All-Stars directed by Juan de Marcos González, who organized for Ry Cooder the Buena Vista recordings; and the rumba group Yoruba Andabo.”

“After moving to Toledo from Texas in 1979, Jesse Ponce was eager to start playing upbeat polkas and sentimental ballads in a conjunto band.

A skilled bajo sexto guitarist who had toured internationally with Grammy winners Ry Cooder and Flaco Jimenez, Mr. Ponce searched for an accordionist who would drive the Tex-Mex melodies he learned as a child from his father and brothers in San Antonio.”

“A Cuban musical wave exploded in popularity in the late 90s all over the world with the premiere of Wim Wender’s documentary, The Buenavista Social Club, and the albums associated with the film, produced by American musician Ry Cooder. The most ironic thing about this “new breed” of music was that it was very old.”

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