Joachim Cooder can hardly deny his family roots. Having been a percussionist from a young age on many landmark projects by his father, Ry, including The Buena Vista Social Club and A Meeting by the River, he has learned his craft from the best. He made his solo debut in 2020, with the album Over That Road I’m Bound. It’s a languid and louche exploration of the songs of Uncle Dave Macon, an early 20th-century banjo player, singer and comedian.
“I came upon him when I took my kids to visit my parents,” Joachim says by Zoom from his home in California. “My dad was playing his banjo, and I asked what song he was playing. He said Morning Blues by Uncle Dave Macon. He told me that I used to love that when I were little, and it just sparked something in my mind. So I went in to listen.”
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Reaching back in time is something that comes easily if your surname is Cooder. And as a player of the electric mbira — a variation on an African thumb piano — he chose the perfect instrument to reimagine a raft of songs from Macon’s back catalogue.
“I play everything on this electric mbira, this big, space-aged-looking instrument of mine,” Cooder says, laughing, “and I thought how nice it would be play it in this slowed-down, contemplative way. Uncle Dave Macon was born in the 1800s in Tennessee, during the time of vaudeville music, medicine shows and acoustic blues music, and he took all this stuff that had never been recorded and repopularised it in the 1920s, and a whole new group of people started listening to it. He was a serious showman, and he’s considered the forefather of modern country music.”
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It came naturally to Cooder to make Macon’s songs his own. Over That Road I’m Bound is an imaginative and deliciously loose-limbed collection that carries echoes of his father’s warm vocal style and idiosyncratic phrasing, all buoyed by the otherworldly sound of the mbira. It was Joachim’s young daughter who helped propel the project in its early stages.
“I brought over this box set of his songs,” Cooder says, “and my daughter just became obsessed with it. It was the only thing we were listening to in the house, morning, noon and night. Banjo music can be very hard-driving and fast, and I can’t always see into the melodies when everything is that hard-driving, but then, when I approached it all in a slower way, I found songs that were so catchy, and I realised that these were the pop songs of their day. I just needed to bring it down a little, add in some chords here and there that he wouldn’t have used, and it just worked for me.”
For Cooder, the mbira was the perfect foundation for a collection that he knew needed to soar freely, untethered to any predefined notions of how these old songs should sound in the 21st century.
“I came across an early version of the mbira that this one man makes, named Bill Wesley. He lives in San Diego, and it’s his creation,” Cooder says. “It’s not chromatic, and it goes up in fifths. Every person who plays it goes about it in their own way, I think. There’s no wrong way to do it. I think that’s one of the reasons he made it, because he wanted young kids to be gratified by music at an earlier age, instead of struggling to make a note out of the violin and getting discouraged. I think that’s a really lovely idea.
“We just happened upon it, and now that he makes an electric version, it’s great because I can just plug it into a guitar amp on stage, and the way that it sounds made me come up with all kinds of songs for it. At times it lends itself to an African mode and at other times a kind of Irish or Celtic mode. This instrument makes my mind go places that I hadn’t planned on going.”
Given the time that has elapsed since the release of his album in 2020, Cooder is almost ready to release a follow-up, so his forthcoming tour, on which he’ll be joined by the fiddle player Rayna Gellert and the bass player Mark Fain, will preview some of that material alongside the Uncle Dave Macon songs. All are filtered through the formative experiences of growing up in the company of his father, whose collaborative instincts are still earning him Grammys, most recently earlier this year, with Ali Farka Touré for the pair’s album Get on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
“Through these projects that I got to play on, the main thing that I feel like I’ve learned — which is not a hard lesson, because it’s right there waiting for you — is to always be listening,” Cooder says, “and to never come in with ‘I do this’ or ‘I do that.’ That kind of self-serving is a celebrity thing. In music, there is no place for that. It’s always the sympathetic ear, and you learn so much through that. The Cubans were so generous in themselves and with their musicianship. It all just felt like a flowing river.”
Ry Cooder’s openness to musical exploration where egos were left at the door must have been an incredible apprenticeship. “Definitely,” Joachim says. “And that’s how I grew up. I was always an accompanist. That’s the nature of the drums, unless you’re somebody like Buddy Rich. I’ve always approached playing the drums as a role where you’re somebody to exalt whatever project you’re working with. I think that’s a good place to come from, instead of trying to be a big name.”
- Joachim Cooder’s tour includes dates at Campbell’s Tavern, Headford, Co Galway, on Tuesday, August 29th; Black Box, Belfast, on Wednesday, August 30th; Whelan’s, Dublin, on Thursday, August 31st; and Hawk’s Well, Sligo, on Friday, September 1st
