Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Pay a lovely musical visit to the ‘Buena Vista Social Club’

Friday, Aug. 6, 1999 | 10:07 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com.

Late in "Buena Vista Social Club," Wim Wenders' bravura concert film/documentary of the all-star Cuban jazz group of the same name, comes the most affecting film moment of the year. Vocalist Ibrahim Ferrer has just performed with the group at Carnegie Hall and is strolling through the streets of Manhattan, murmuring, "Lovely ... lovely ... lovely."

To Ferrer and his companions, New York was little short of a wonderland -- a valley of lights, grandeur and motion that had no reference point to their native land. It's a strange statement, but only to us: In Ferrer's eyes, Cuba is merely home, a once-proud land suffering silently under the grip of outdated politics. To us, and to Wenders' unorthodox lens (the entire film is shot on Sony Digital Handycam), it is, well, a wonderland -- a colorful, beautiful place that appears to be frozen in 1950s stasis, as if a spell was cast on the region some years back.

Actually, one was. The sound of Buena Vista Social Club -- named for a onetime East Havana nightclub -- is an enchanted one, a sound that had quieted before guitarist/composer Ry Cooder ventured to Cuba to make an album. As he explains in the film, the initial idea was to make a Cuban/West African album, using local musicians for color. When the West African musicians became unavailable, Cooder plunged headlong into the local talent pool, finding musicians whose past glories had faded to the point that one of them, 77-year old pianist Ruben Gonzalez, had not touched a piano in years.

The film puts faces to the names in creative and wonderful ways. In a manner like "The Blair Witch Project" -- an "accidental" film that isn't accidental at all -- Wenders' camera plays the surprised spectator, "discovering" the musicians playing their instruments in natural settings. Gonzalez's piano is heard before it is seen, as the camera winds up the stairs of a once-elegant manse, finally discovering the pianist in a bright, airy room and orbiting him as if in love. Eliades Ochoa sits in the middle of a rail yard, strumming his guitar with a look of plaintive, satisfied solace on his face.

It's contagious, too. Switching back and forth between intimate concert footage shot in Amsterdam and portraits of life in Cuba, "Buena Vista" imbues the viewer with such pure joy that the intense and heartfelt music of the Grammy-winning group seems merely like the cherry on a big, multiflavored cake. There are so many indelible scenes in "Buena Vista" that it's hard to sort them out -- the classic cars driving by the shoreline, getting splashed by the breaking surf; two band members marveling at the window of a New York souvenir shop, trying to figure out where they've seen the face of a certain blonde woman (Marilyn Monroe) before; Guitarist Compay Segundo looking from the site of the original Social Club. Wenders lets the musicians tell the story; he merely records it.

And, of course, the music is sublime. I was tempted to get up and dance as the band blazed through the wild, sexually charged "Candela," with its playful double-entendres ("Margarita call the fire-men quickly, to put out the flames"). Wenders uses the number to provide a crash course in Cuban music -- if you don't know what a Cuban laoud looks like, you will after seeing the film. And hearing Ferrer and Omara Portundo duet almost makes one forget that the mean age of Buena Vista Social Club is 75. The emotions they stir in the listener are those of youthful passions.

The film is playing through Tuesday at the Village Square Cinemas. I cannot recommend highly enough that you drop those plantains you're nibbling on, drive up to the Lakes and see one of the best films of the year, and the best concert/music documentary since the 1984 Jonathan Demme/Talking Heads collaboration, "Stop Making Sense." In this season of the "Blair Witch," it's nice to remember that there are happy accidents, too. Absolutely lovely.

Stereo Dynamics

Soundtrack, "The Iron Giant"; Various Artists, "Cartoon Network Cartoon Medley," Rhino Records

The only head-scratching element of Rhino Records' compilation soundtrack to the Warner Bros. animated feature "The Iron Giant" is that more producers don't hand the musical reins over to these committed musicologists. Faced with the task of producing a record of Cold-War rock 'n' roll, the Rhino-heads responded with two or three familiar tracks -- Mel Torme's "Comin' Home Baby" and the Coasters' "Searchin' " among them -- and filled the rest with rocket-age beatnik stomps that haven't been heard in years. The spacey swing of Jimmie Mitchell's "Rockin' In the Orbit," The Nutty Squirrels' wild (and somewhat annoying) "Salt Peanuts," Torme's "Comin' Home Baby" and Lou Donaldson's timelessly sexy "Blues Walk" are as fresh as the day they were made, and lend an adult voice to this adaptation of Ted Hughes' famed children's story.

Several years and a million universes away, Rhino's compilation for Ted Turner's Cartoon Network -- in my mind, a much cooler network than CNN -- crackles with self-awareness and goofy irony. The real winners here are the beginning and end themes to "The Powerpuff Girls." The former sports a wicked drum 'n' bass rhythm track, and the latter is a girl-pop winner by Grand Royal artists Bis: both are very catchy and way, way too short. There are more surprises -- late guitar legend Sonny Sharrock's raw solo over the "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," the snappy jump swing of the "Ed Edd 'n Eddy," the surf-guitar nyah-nyah of "I Am Weasel." And the themes to "The Jetsons" and "Speed Racer" sound as cool as they ever have. Consume in moderation, of course -- perhaps in shuffle mode with some other artists who take themselves too seriously.

Get Up, Act Out

"Push Th' Little Daisies." "Waving My (Expletive) In The Wind." "Poop Ship Destroyer." When one thinks of Ween, these are the pop masterpieces that come to mind. This group is so full of it that it's not full of it at all, and if one of their songs happened to end up on the radio, let's just say that it was the public that bent, and not the band. Ween plays the House of Blues Saturday night, for the low, low ticket price of $17.

If you miss them, you will be subject to peer group scrutiny: Choose wisely.