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Ry Cooder

The Ry Cooder Anthology: The UFO Has Landed

Rhino

Drummer Joachim Cooder produced this alternately sinuous, swaggering, and stomping two-CD anthology devoted to his singer-guitarist father, Ry Cooder. The album focuses on the California guitarist’s blues, folk, and R&B side as it skips around among some 17 albums and soundtracks Cooder has recorded since his self-titled 1970 debut album. (An entirely different record might have been programmed from Cooder’s bicultural collaborations with musicians from India, Mali, and Cuba.)

Cooder specializes in transforming the raw sound and spirit of black musicians— such as Blind Willie Johnson in "Paris, Texas," Washington Phillips in "Tattler," and Skip James  in "Cherry Ball Blues"—into something luminous and accessible. –All this he does without extinguishing the magic of the original. There’s joy and sorrow aplenty in these tracks, and in more recent recordings that were inspired by the Los Angeles Chicano experience. Cooder remains true to his roots-music values, as he writes in his notes, "Regional music is what made this country great."

A Technicolor Dream

Eagle Vision DVD

Sometimes it’s fun to jump into the way-back machine and travel through history. "A Technicolor Dream" transports viewers back to London at the height of the swinging 1960s, when stylish young Brits launched an underground movement. It came complete with its own newspaper (the "International Times"), exclusive hot spot (the UFO Club), and house band (Pink Floyd).

The film’s most surprising footage documents a festival of Beat poetry at the Royal Albert Hall, featuring an inebriated Allen Ginsberg. It preceded the "Technicolor Dream," a 14-hour musical "celebration of the coming of age of the postwar generation," as one participant put it, that took place at the Alexandra Palace in April 1967. The event marked the movement’s apex but also its descent into hippie commercialism.

"A Technicolor Dream" also focuses on the sad case of Pink Floyd cofounder, Syd Barrett. After writing much of the group’s early material and reportedly taking massive amounts of LSD, Barrett more or less abandoned consensual reality for a life of mental illness. Whether his breakdown was a symptom or a result of those heady times is left to the viewer to decide.