It’s been nearly ten years since Ry Cooder and the other Buena Vista Social Club members played Carnegie Hall, but Cooder remembers it like it was yesterday. The concert was aculmination of a whirlwind couple of days where rehearsals took place, audiences were granted and interviews were done. By this time, the Buena Vista Social Club album as well as siste  albums by Ruben Gonzalez and Afro-Cuban All Stars (which featured many of the same people) were an unexpected but massive global success.

Tickets were impossible to come by on that fabled night. The hall was packed with a mix of New York’s cultural elite and Cuban expatriots. It was one of only three live concerts the members would ever perform together as an ensemble, and the energy in the room was at nuclear levels before the concert even began. No one knew what was going to happen, including Cooder. But by the time someone charged the stage with a Cuban flag at the end of the show, which singer Ibrahim Ferrer took and held up proudly, the concert was an unqualified success. It seemed that the 90 miles to Cuba wasn’t so far after all.

Sitting on a riser at the back of the stage next to his son, percussionist Joachim Cooder, had ringside seats for the show, even though the two were in the band.“I was there to watch and see,” Cooder remembers. “To take note of this, pay attention. I told Joachim, ‘Let’s watch. Because they’ve got it covered. They’re gonna go. We don’t have to worry about that. But let’s watch and see because this is something you don’t do every day.’”

Indeed not. Nonetheless, Cooder seems to specialize in being on hand for special moments in time, quietly working in the background to make brilliant music. He was part of the sessions for The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. He played guitar and bass on, and helped arrange  Captain Beefheart’s classic album Safe As Milk. He appeared on suchgems as Little Feat’s self-titled debut and hundreds of other albums as a studio guitarist.

Cooder started working as a musician at 16 and released his first album in 1970, quickly becoming known as a real musician’s musician.His own out put has been eclectic, with such classics as Paradise and Lunch, Chicken Skin Music and Get Rhythm as well as scores for movies like Paris,Texas and Crossroads. Of course, such triumphs as his Grammy-winning collaboration  with Ali Farka Touré and the members of Buena Vista Social Club moved his name into broader public consciousness.

While it isn’t always obvious in his music, Cooder is a sentimental guy—he’s obsessed with the past. He drives vintage cars, celebrates forgotten Cuban musicians, plays old-time blues with th  Stones. Even his new album, My Name is Buddy, recalls the feel and sound of California from the ‘30s up to the early ‘60s, which is when Cooder grew up.

“Music for me is a look back, not a look forward,” explains the guitarist, who turns 60 this year. “Because all my life I’ve been noticing that stuff was receding. I couldn’t catch up to the receding aspect of it. I could tell this by the time I hit high school; I could see that everything I liked was going to get harder to find and harder to reach and harder to grasp, even understand. So I had to hurry. So I got in the habit of being in a hurry, but it’s never fast enough because shitjust kept disappearing on me.”

Growing up in California, he watched it change from the sleepy farming community of a Steinbeck novel to a giant stripmall along I-5. Living in the same house for years in Santa Monica, Cooder holds onto the past for dear life, even if he has to create it anew.

Fans of his Cuban music projects thought Chavez Ravine,an album that celebrated the music played in a forgotten Mexican neighborhood that was razed to build Dodger Stadium, was a variation on the whole old time Cuban music thing. Actually,it’s really more of an old-time California album that speaks volumes about immigration and the vibrant Mexican-American culture of the time. Those who thought the 2005 album was a little offbeat will think that Ry Cooder has gone off his rocker with My Nameis Buddy.

Another theme album, this one follows the life of a red cat (literally) named Buddy and his friends. Along with the usual music and lyrics,the album also includes short stories by Cooder and drawings byVincent Valdez. Each song is another chapter in the story, and the story is a parable about those who lived on the fringes—either because they were involved in populist left-leaning politics or because theywere having a hard time finding an honest day’s work. Buddy is a working-class drifter learning about life, sometimes in a busted-upunion meeting, sometimes in a broken-down bar.

“He’s simple,” Cooder says of his protagonist cat. “You don’t have to think in terms of human consciousness how complicated everything gets, and how all our perceptions are so diverted or managed or whatever you want to say. But for Buddy that’s not the case. He knows his own mind; it’s not such a maze.”

There is optimism at the beginning of the album, on tunes like the old-timey “Suitcase In My Hand,” but as the lessons mount in songs such as “Cat and Mouse,” “Strike!” and “Christmas in Southgate,” the music gets darker. By the time we get to the haunting “One Cat, OneVote, One Beer” and the ragged “Cardboard Avenue,” Buddy has had too many lessons—he’s not lost in the maze but he can’t get out. The album ends, appropriately, with a gospel traditional, “There’s a Bright Side Somewhere,” which is both sad and hopeful.

A slice of American music, the album moves from folk to blues to country to rock and jazz. Like all Cooder albums, it features a dream team of players: drummer Jim Keltner, The Chieftains’ Paddy Moloney,bluegrass legends Mike and Pete Seeger and jazz greats Jacky Terrasson and Stefon Harris. Cooder does much of the singing himself in a hoarse, understated conversational way that perfectly matches his lyric stories.

While Cooder celebrates the downtrodden in his own recent work, it’s his collaborations with such larger-than-life figures of TheBuena Vista Social Club and African icon Ali Farka Touré for which the guitarist is probably best known.

Talking Timbuktu (1994) was a Grammy-winning collaboration between Touré and Cooder. Ostensibly,and in true Cooder fashion, it’s a Touré album with Cooder producing and playing on it. Nonetheless, the cover shows the two guitarists sitting, playing face to face. It was a true meeting of opposites: Cooder was the laid back American who liked to sit at the back of the stage and Touré was a giant of a man who commanded the stage from front and center.“Ali Farka’s a tough man, a powerful cat,” Cooder says of the legend,who died of cancer in 2006. “He stood off a whole battalion of armed sheep herding nomads who had come into his town like in the western movie Shane, where they’d come into town to shoot up the place. And Ali Farka walked out on the road unarmed. Just stood there. And theybacked down. He was just a larger-than-life presence.”

Another past collaborator who ranks up there as a “real star” was Cuban singer/guitarist Compay Segundo. “He’s one of these guys who takes the energy from wherever it’s coming and just sucks it up. Compay was kind of a friendly vampire. I couldn’t last with these guys. That’s part of what makes them a star and operate the way they do.”While these artists have that certain something, it took Cooder’sunique skill to translate their star power far beyond their own culture.It’s partially his unassuming nature, partially his ear for music, andcertainly his love o  the past.

“I used to say to Compay, ‘That’s too fast, you want to do everything too fast.’ He would say in Spanish, ‘It’s younger that way.’ And I said,‘Yeah, but it’s not as pretty, I don’t feel it as much. You go through the songs so fast I don’t have time to enjoy it as much.’”

Through Cooder’s gentle prodding and tireless work, he’s found forgotten or largely unknown musicians and brought them to a whole new audience. He talks of always being in a hurry because the music is fading around him, either in Cuba or here in the United States. Yet more times than not, he’s been able to hold onto the past and make it work for him. How he creates his magic time machine, is for him, really quite simple. “You just listen and serve.”

My Name is Buddy was released on March 6, 2007 on Nonesuch Records.