Ry Cooder’s Chavez RavineThis is an amazing record, featuring guests I know like Flaco Jimenez and David Hidalgo and other Mexican-American greats I don’t, about the so-called urban renewal project in Chavez Ravine in the early 1960s that created Dodger Stadium.
Bitter and angry but equally life-affirming and rocking, it deftly explores the ways poverty and wealth, neighborhoods and baseball twist into a thicket of conflicting meanings that challenge each of us to come to grips with the contradictions between having too much when there are some who want. Even 40 years after the ballpark was built.
If I give the impression this record is anything less than beguiling, let me correct that. A wonderful survey of California and authentic versions of Mexican musical styles, with some nods to California jazz and soft rock. And it’s about baseball!