Restless spirit

Singer-guitarist Ry Cooder. Photo / Supplied by DeLaunay Enterprises

Nick Lowe offers a telling insight into the personality of Ry Cooder, his long-time friend with whom he is currently touring. They first came together in 1987 when John Hiatt asked Lowe if he'd like to work on an album which subsequently became Hiatt's much acclaimed Bring the Family.

"I managed to get Ry, who said he'd come along for a day and see if he liked it. But if he didn't, he'd clear off again."

Ry Cooder, a man in a hurry and - if a slightly flinty 15 minute conversation with someone who rarely gives interviews suggests - someone who doesn't like to waste his time. He tells of making the '93 album A Meeting by the River with Indian slide guitarist VM Bhatt in two hours, the '94 Talking Timbuktu with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure in three days. "Barely."

"But in that time, if you can conjure up something then you can say, 'at least we have a record and we moved towards something from his side and my side ... and then we moved on'. That's what musicians do habitually."

Cooder, now 62, has enjoyed a long career of moving on: he played with Captain Beefheart and he played slide guitar on the Stones' Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers in the late 60s; recorded a series of much admired solo albums in the 70s which explored regional American music (Hawaiian, Tex-Mex, gospel) as well as blues and jazz; and spent most of the 80s recording soundtracks, among them the haunting music for Paris, Texas and Walter Hill's western The Long Riders.

The soundtracks have fallen by the wayside and Cooder is blunt about why: "I hate films, films make me sick now and if something makes me sick I back off. They call you, you don't call them. Walter Hill used to call me and we were friends and understood one another, but there aren't any Walter Hills anymore."

As much as you can identify any thread in a musical career which has seen him explore so many different styles in a variety of company - from John Lee Hooker and Mavis Staples to Ireland's Chieftains and Cuban guitarist Manuel Galban - it is that he moves on fast.

"It appears to you this way but it's like this: I can't play Indian music to save my life and I can't play African music very easily either. But these things are like stops along the way because you are moving along your path. So although you meet somebody, the path stays the same."

A significant stopping-off point was the Buena Vista Social Club in which Cooder went to Havana to oversee musicians from Mali record with Cuban players. "But when the Africans couldn't make it we said, 'let's just get all the cats we can find'. So we just put everybody together to see if they could relate and come up with something, since they weren't normally going to be found playing with one another.

"For instance [singer] Compay Segundo and [pianist] Ruben Gonzalez never would have recorded together because in Cuba they have these distinctions. But me coming from Santa Monica, you don't make them and learn not to.