by Ry Cooder List Price:$20.00 Our Price:$15.00 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Product Details
Media: Audio CD
Release Date: Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Label: Nonesuch
Average Customer Review: 4.5 Based on 12 reviews.
Sales Rank: 36
Tracks
1.
It's Just Work For Me
2.
Los Chucos Suaves
3.
Muy Fifi
4.
Onda Callejera
5.
Poor Man's Shangri-La
6.
Soy Luz Y Sombra
7.
In My Town
8.
El U.F.O. Cayo
9.
Ejercito Militar
10.
Don't Call Me Red
11.
Corrido de Box Eo
12.
Chinito Chinito
13.
Barrio Viejo
14.
3rd Base, Doger Stadium
15.
3 Cool Cats
Editorial Review
Ry Cooder might have been tempted to bill this as the Chavez Ravine Social Club. After generating such popular and critical interest in Cuban music of decades past with the Buena Vista Social Club, Cooder applied a similar approach closer to home, extending his fascination with the Mexican-American culture that flourished in 1940s and '50s Los Angeles. The result is an CD that sounds like it's aspiring to be something far more ambitious: a DVD, a theatrical production, even a time machine. Cooder and a cast of seminal Chicano artists present a song cycle that conjures an era of UFOs, the Red Scare, and political machinations that leveled the Chavez Ravine barrio to lure the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. In his celebration of a vibrant community that doesn't know it's on the verge of displacement, Cooder enlists Thee Midnighters vocalist Little Willie G. (whose songwriting collaboration with Los Lobos's David Hidalgo on "Onda Callejara" highlights the album). and Pachuco patriarchs Don Tosti and Lalo Guerrero, with the latter reviving his dancefloor favorite "Los Chucos Suaves." The accordion of Flaco Jimenez adds conjunto flavor to "Barrio Viejo." Throughout the album, Cooder plays a typically tasteful, understatedly virtuosic guitar, assumes a variety of vocal roles--including a cool Chet Baker homage in duet with pianist Jacky Terrason on "In My Town"--and provides the provocative social context. --Don McLeese
More Ry Cooder
Buena Vista Social Club (producer and performer)
Mambo Sinuendo (with Manuel Galbán)
A Meeting by the River (with V.M. Bhatt)
Paradise and Lunch (solo)
Music by Ry Cooder (film music compilation)
Into the Purple Valley (solo)
Top Customer Reviews
Rating:
1 LOUSY MUSIC
what more can i say? have collected cooder for years. and this is just a horrible album.
Rating:
5 A Masterpiece
This is the first time I have ever been moved to write a review, but I am just knocked out by "Chavez Ravine." I have been listening to it almost continuously for the five days since I purchased it, and I don't see stopping any time soon.I'm a huge baseball fan, but I didn't know much about the sorry story of the disenfranchisement of the largely Hispanic community at Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium. The CD takes you through a cultural and political history of the area, starting with the so-called "Zoot Suit" riots during World War II, which branded the area as undesirable; the proposal for public housing in the area that wound up costing LA Public Housing Director Frank Wilkinson 30 years of his life ("Don't Call Me Red"); and the cultural life of the barrio ("Muy Fifi" and the Lieber-Stoller classic "3 Cool Cats").Along the way we hear multiple perspectives -- the operator of the bulldozer who razed the houses in Chavez Ravine ("It's Just Work for Me") and Wilkinson, understand the cultural conflict between Asian and Mexican Americans ("Chinito Chinito"), and finally, in a ballad that leaves me weepy every time I hear it, a Dodger Stadium parking lot attendant, born in Chavez Ravine, who places his childhood memories at ballpark landmarks -- his home at 3rd base, his first kiss on the first base line -- while ruefully remembering "a place you don't know, up a road you can't go."This is a perspective most of us aren't familiar with -- the disenfranchisement of the poor in the name of progress in the 1950s, but after you've listened to this CD, you get it, and your body moves to the beat of the long-gone neighborhood. Don't miss this.
Rating:
5 More Topical Than You Think
I would like to point out the sudden political relevance of "Chßvez Ravine". On June 23, 2005, a narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of "Kelo v. City of New London, Conn." local government can condemn private residential property for the purpose of forcing its sale to another private interest. The Court majority declined to "second-guess" local governments in their use of eminent domain to promote "economic development." Local governments no longer will have to demonstrate that a neighborhood is "blighted" as LA did to the barrios. Now every homeowner in America faces the potential prospect of going the way of Chßvez Ravine, should some developer convince your city council he can bring in more revenue. Ry Cooder himself has been following the case, noting that "poor people are the ones who get moved around" (see the June 23 Christian Science Monitor). For another journey to a community lost to the schemes of out-of-control government, look for David Kramer's musical tributes to District Six, the racially-mixed Cape Town neighborhood knocked down by the apartheid regime in 1966 under the Group Areas Act.
