The American guitarist and producer who assembled the Buena Vista Social Club — Ry Cooder's 1996 trip to Havana resulted in one of the most celebrated world music recordings ever made and brought a generation of forgotten Cuban masters back to global attention.
Ry Cooder is an American guitarist and musicologist known throughout his career for exploring and documenting musical traditions from around the world — Hawaiian, West African, Tex-Mex, and others. He had worked with Cuban musicians before, and in 1996 traveled to Havana with the intention of documenting Cuban son traditions.
What he found was a group of veteran musicians — Ibrahim Ferrer, Compay Segundo, Rubén González, Omara Portuondo, and others — who were extraordinary artists largely forgotten in Cuba and unknown to the outside world. The recordings he produced, released as the Buena Vista Social Club album in 1997, became a global phenomenon. The album and Wim Wenders' documentary brought these musicians international careers in the final decades of their lives and sparked a worldwide interest in traditional Cuban music.