Ry Cooder can’t escape Cuba’s pull

After career phases as ace sideman, respected blues/folk-rooted solo artist, world music pioneer and film composer, Ry Cooder in recent years gained considerable profile as a key instigator and producer of the Cuban musical renaissance centered on the Buena Vista Social Club projects.

Now he’s stepping out for the first star billing of his own since his 1993 Grammy-winning “Meeting by the River” collaboration with Indian musician V.M. Bhatt. And for the project he’s turned ... back to Cuba.

Cooder has teamed with guitarist Manuel Galban, a key player in the Buena Vista circle who worked with the vocal group Los Zafiros starting in the ‘50s, for “Mambo Sinuendo,” an album due from Nonesuch Records early next year. But it’s a project that stands apart from the Buena Vista work.

“The style of Los Zafiros was a strange offshoot from Cuban music that I thought I could build on,” Cooder says. “I wanted to do something nontraditional, not in the path. We did all that. You have to run to push the envelope, and Galban is an envelope pusher anyway. He doesn’t play like anyone down there. He’s more like our electric twangers.”

Assembling a muscular sexteto with himself and Galban on guitars, American drummers Jim Keltner and Joachim Cooder (Ry’s son) and Cuban conga player Miguel Diaz and bassist Cachaito Lopez, Cooder sought a musical territory between Perez Prado and Henry Mancini. The music went in several other directions as well, with organ, electronic percussion and three young Cuban Bata drummers thrown into the mix.

With the success of the Cuban recordings, this would have seemed an opportunity for Cooder to do an album completely his own, something he hasn’t done since 1987. The thought never occurred to him.

“I don’t know what [a Cooder solo record] would be,” he says. “I can’t imagine one at this point. I enjoy playing with other people. I’m not a guy who writes albums of songs. My mind doesn’t go there. I look for these stories and settings to work with.”

Back in time, to Chavez Ravine

Ry Cooder is at work on still another collaboration, this one as part of a documentary film project built around photographer Don Normark’s study of L.A.’s Chavez Ravine in the years before the largely Mexican American community there was displaced by Dodger Stadium. Normark discovered the area when he was 18 in 1949 and wound up spending a year doing a photo essay for a school project.

Fifty years later he published “Chavez Ravine 1949: A Los Angeles Story,” collecting his haunting shots of a world that looked more like a Mexican village than a part of urban L.A. Cooder recruited veteran musician Lalo Guerrero to collaborate on songs evoking that world and the cultural changes that were brewing around it.

“Every time I come upon something where the environmental background or context is rich, then I seem motivated,” Cooder says.

Blockbuster team for a small film

When you think of film music involving David Foster and his wife, songwriter Linda Thompson, you generally think of blockbusters. Foster produced much of Whitney Houston’s material for the record-setting soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” arranged Celine Dion’s performance of “When I Fall in Love” for “Sleepless in Seattle” and produced Dion’s huge hit “Because You Loved Me” from “Up Close and Personal.”

So how did “The Rising Place,” a tiny-budget film by independent writer-director Tom Rice, get “God Bless the Heartache,” written for the project by Foster and Thompson with relatively unknown composer Conrad Pope?

The teaming came after a tape of the film, set in the South during World War II, was given to Thompson by a mutual friend of her and Rice.

“It was a story that touched my heart,” she says. “And Tom is the kind of guy you can’t not listen to.”

Inspired, Thompson wrote a set of lyrics and Foster, working with a piece of instrumental score melody by Pope, composed the music. Country-pop performer Kendall Payne did the vocals.

They’re takin’ it to the streets

Pink and Sheryl Crow are expected to perform free outdoor concerts in the L.A. area this week, Pink on Thursday evening for a Halloween celebration at a West Hollywood location still being confirmed and Crow next Sunday at noon at a location to be announced.

They are the final shows of a series presented in various U.S. cities by Nissan to promote the company’s new Z model. Stone Temple Pilots, No Doubt, Puddle of Mudd and the White Stripes are among the acts that have done previous shows. The White Stripes show in New York’s Union Square drew 7,000 people despite low-key promotion -- usually just handbills disseminated a few days before the concert, with no radio or television advertising or tie-ins.

“We’re trying to keep to the brand, which is ‘authentic,’ ” says Chris Murphy, vice president of client services for George P. Johnson, the Torrance-based event marketing firm that put the series together for the automaker. “These concerts are falling in line with that, having bands just show up and play.”

Small faces

“Lady Jane Madonna”? “Mother Nature’s Little Helper”? Songs by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones won’t be gene-spliced, but they will be paired toe to toe in a special battle-of-the-bands edition of “Breakfast With the Beatles,” next Sunday starting at 9 a.m. on KLSX-FM (97.1). In honor of the Stones’ Southern California shows, host Chris Carter will pit Beatles songs against Stones singles from the same period, working his way from 1964 to 1970. It’s the first time an act other than the Fab Four (or its solo components) has been featured on the show.

Established among the top dance-music DJs, Paul Oakenfold will embark on his first tour featuring live musicians in late November. After his opening DJ sets each night, Oakenfold will switch to keyboards and programming, accompanied by a bass player and drummer. The vocals -- by Perry Farrell and several others featured on his album “Bunkka” -- will be handled in specially produced video “appearances” by the singers. An L.A. date is being scheduled for mid-December.

A soundtrack to “Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony,” a documentary about the role of music in the South African struggle against apartheid, will be released in January by ATO Records, co-owned by South Africa-born Dave Matthews. The music ranges from traditional village songs to a jazz number by a young Miriam Makeba to masses of citizens singing the anthem “Nkosi Sikeleli Africa” at a rally after the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as president. The movie will be released in January by Artisan Entertainment and will be shown on HBO in the spring.