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Guitar great Ry Cooder to open 2018/2019 California Center for the Arts season

By George Varga
San Diego Union-Tribune
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Guitar great Ry Cooder, whose past collaborators range from Randy Newman and the Rolling Stones to Captain Beefheart and Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, will open the 2018-2019 season at California Center for the Arts, Escondido.

He will perform there Aug. 19 with a band that features his son, drummer and percussionist Joachim Cooder, saxophonist Sam Gendel, multi-instrumentalist Robert Francis and the North Carolina vocal group The Hamiltones, best known for their work with R&B singing star Anthony Hamilton. Ticket information appears below.

This will mark at least the third time Cooder has appeared at the 1,523-seat Escondido venue, following his 1999 performance there with Buena Vista Social Club stars Ibrahim Ferrer and Ruben Gonzalez, and his 2003 encore show there with the entire Buena Vista Social Club.

Cooder is now on tour to promote his superb new album, “The Prodigal Son,” his first solo release since 2012. It is steeped in blues, gospel and some of the other American roots-music styles Cooder has devoted himself to since the release of his self-titled debut album in 1970.

Single tickets for his Aug. 19 concert go on sale on June 26 and are priced from $35 to $70 each. CCAE members can buy tickets during a two-week pre-sale that begins June 12. More information is available by phone at (760) 839-4138 and online at artcenter.org/

While Cooder’s concert was only announced Tuesday, CCAE in recent weeks has quietly announced a number of other upcoming shows for its 2018/2019 season.

They include: Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández, Oct. 18; The Ten Tenors, Nov. 30; classical violin master Itzhak Perlman, Jan. 19; Latin-pop singer Gina Chavez, Feb. 28; and genre-leaping Mexican-American singer Lila Downs, May 11.

“We hope to have 32 shows confirmed when we announce our season on June 12,” said CCAE spokesman Ely Ramos.

george.varga@sduniontribune.com

Twitter @georgevarga

UPDATES:

8:35 p.m.: The Hamiltones are from North Carolina, not South Carolina, as the original version of this article incorrectly indicated..

Music
George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 and 2023 San Diego Press Club awards and a double first prize-winner at the 2022 and 2023 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”

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