In Conversation With Colin: Joachim Cooder

He may not have achieved the iconic heights of his father, but Joachim Cooder has unquestionably forged his own impressive musical career. Ry Cooder’s son has worked with a number of respected roots and world music artists, he also records as a headliner, where his primary instrument is the electric array mbira, a variation on the traditional African thumb piano.

A new album of original songs titled Dreamer’s Motel was released on November 1st 2024 ahead of a UK tour stopping off at Acapela on November 12th. From his home in Altadena, California nestled in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains, Joachim chatted to Colin Palmer via zoom as he prepared for his first visit to Wales.

“I’ve been over to the UK a bunch of times playing with my Dad on his tours”, explains Cooder. “When he put out the Prodigal Son record and some stuff with David Lindley but I’ve never done my own headlining tour so this is the first one. I’ve never been to Wales, my wife and I fantasise about having a country home and Wales keeps popping up, and so I’m going to go look at some schools, that’s my un-rock ‘n’ roll way of touring. I always have a better time in other places than the United States. I love going to the UK, I love playing in Ireland and I think it’s nice to be away from your own place, it puts you in a different head space and you find yourself thinking new things and having new ideas which you don’t if you’re just in LA.”

While Cooder has been an in-demand drummer and percussionist for over 20 years, featuring on albums from 1997’s Buena Vista Social Club to 2015’s In the Heart of Moon by Toumani Diabaté & Ali Farka Touré to his father Ry Cooder’s 2018 release Prodigal Son, the mbira is his instrument of choice. He uses it for the kind of traditional Americana songs that showcases the harmony array mbiras primary strengths, as a singer’s best friend.

“Once you start seeking out odd-ball instruments you keep going down that road”, he says. “My Dad had found what he calls a ‘floor slide’, it’s

like a huge slide guitar on a table and he would use a big flower vase as a slide and the guy that built that said ‘hey, you should check out the guy who makes array mbiras’ and so we did, his name is Bill Wesley and he lives in San Diego.

“I bought an acoustic version and I would play it on film scores and on records but I could never play it live because it was too quiet and then a few years later I find that he’s making solid body electric versions of it, so I plugged it into a guitar amp and got a beautiful distorted sound that just blew my mind.

“It’s not chromatic like a piano, it goes in fifths so it’s very modal and I just put my fingers on it and find a key that I can sing over and then I go into these patterns and it changed my life. Being a drummer I was never a guitar player or much of a keyboard player and I had no way to conceive of song-writing until I came upon this thing and really got on my way after that.

“Once I start playing it puts me in this very receptive almost meditative state, it almost sounds like a lullaby in a way but it puts you in this zone. Then I have lyric ideas that are floating around in my head and I just see what happens. Sometimes nothing happens, and then you put it away and wait until the next time to see if something comes into your head, and sometimes they come right away.”

Being the son of one of the most revered musicians of the past five decades, Joachim was introduced to music from an early age. Hearing the music of Steve Earle was a pivotal moment for the youngster, as he recalls. “People used to send my Dad tapes and CD’s to listen to, there was always things showing up at the house and when Guitar Town came out in 1986 somebody had sent a cassette and said you need to listen to this. So we put it on when he drove me to school that morning and both of us were just floored by it, and we listened to it every morning on the way to school and from that record forth he has been my main inspiration in a song-writing way.”

Since those early days Cooder has worked with an array of stellar acts, including Buena Vista Social Club, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker and Mavis Staples. Out on the road touring with other musicians has provided the catalyst that often results in his own songs coming to fruition.

“Sometimes when I’m on tour I carry an iPad and when people like my Dad for example are sound checking I’ll just record them and then later that night when we’re on the bus I just lie in my bunk and listen to things

I’ve recorded and if I find a little piece I’ll take it out and loop it and then just start singing over that. Everything comes about in a different way.

“When I have enough written I’ll bring in my wife and she will sing all the harmonies, or my Dad will play some mandolin, also a lot of stuff I get ideas from stuff my kids say – so I bring them in at the beginning ‘cos they say crazy stuff and then I take those and turn them into lyrics.”

Joachim goes on to explain the background to some of the songs that feature on the album, starting with the title track:

Dreamer’s Motel – “It comes from when I was growing up my parents always took me to this little motel up the coast from LA about an hour and a half up, and it was just these little bungalows you could get real cheap and it seemed like nobody was ever there, and it was right on the water and a train would go by and you could just cross the train tracks. I always thought it would just be there for ever and that I would eventually take my kids and you just don’t think about it. And then one day it got sold and the developer pulled everything apart and then ran out of money. You would drive by and see all these bungalows up on blocks like carcasses just rotting, and I wondered when was the last time I had even been there, and that got me thinking about places that you can’t go back you can only visit in your memories, and that’s kind of the umbrella of the whole record in a way.”

Sea Level Man – “I think it’s a combination of me and a made up person, the idea came from being too far up in Norway once on tour, and I couldn’t sleep, the light wasn’t right and I was thinking about what it means to be a sea level man and then I thought what is that also conceptually, all your dreams and the things you want just fit in the palm of your hand so you keep it low to the ground, so it has a double meaning.”

Cool Little Lion – “That was more of a patchwork that I put together with the mbira I’d made a loop out of and slowed it down and sat with that for a while, and found myself singing about this dog that my wife and I had about ten years ago before our kids were born. We found her on the street when our touring van got impounded, we had parked it in the wrong place, woke up next morning and found our van was gone. So we had to go to this area where they tow your cars to and we saw this dog, a little chow, and she was all matted up and it was a hot nasty day and so she became our dog. We took her into a place and they gave her a lion cut, big head and big paws, and it just came out of nowhere that I found myself singing about her.”

Joachim is clearly a fan of expansive sonic soundscapes, using his electric mbira to transform Appalachian music and blues with a powerful evocative aesthetic. The mbira has become his signature instrument, and he clearly has a deep love and affinity with this traditional African instrument and its capacity to find untold stories in

Colin Palmer