Ry Cooder: The honorary Cuban

For Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club was just the overture. With some very fine musicians, and a little help from Bill Clinton, he has produced two more great Cuban albums. Philip Sweeney met up with him in Paris

Hang on, is this for the arts or the motoring pages? We've just finished discussing Ry Cooder's '55 Nash – "beautiful little car, designed by Farina" – and the yellow Buick on the cover of Into the Purple Valley, and we're on '59 Cadillac tail-fins – "standard on all Cadillacs, Fleetwood, El Dorado, from '49 to '59 – the signature of Harley Earl, the Perez Prado of automobile design..."

Cooder's life seems to be a quest for exquisite period-style in cars, instruments, musicians. We're sitting in a large suite in Paris's Le Bristol hotel (named after the marquess, not the car), looking at the newly arrived sleeve photo for Cooder's soon-to-be-released album, Mambo Sinuendo. It's a striking red and silver close-up of either two lipsticks on a chrome arrow flight, or a detail of Harley Earl's legacy to humanity, the '59 Caddy tail-fin.

Vintage American cars, mambo... yes, Ry Cooder's been to Cuba again – and the latest result is not one, but two records. One of these is the follow-up to the hit solo album of Ibrahim Ferrer, the elderly Havana vocalist plucked from impecunious obscurity by the Buena Vista Social Club recordings seven years ago. Cooder produced Ferrer's new Buenos Hermanos, and was one of the core group of musicians who played on both of the records. Others were the bassist Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, the conga player Miguel "Anga" Diaz, plus Cooder's son Joachim and long-standing collaborator Jim Keltner on drums. And one more rather important Cuban, the electric- guitarist Manuel Galban, whose echoey bass twang blends in with the soughing strings behind heart-tugging Ferrer boleros such as "Mil Congojas".

Galban is sitting in another wing of the Bristol suite, also receiving the succession of European journalists, because he is the co-star of Mambo Sinuendo, the other album. Mambo Sinuendo is the subject that the record company is keen to focus on, but the Ferrer disc keeps intruding. "A goddam classic, the ultimate Latin record": Cooder demonstrates again his unfailing quotability in the publicity material for Buenos Hermanos. He's also a man of unfailing musical perspicacity, though, and he isn't about to hold out unrealistic claims for the 76-year-old Ferrer's vocal performance. Isn't Ferrer's voice, frankly, near the end of its recording life? "Well, I think you're right," says Cooder. "It's the top end that goes through use," – we could be talking Fifties Cadillac engines – "but at the same time, Ibrahim is bolder now, more vigorous; capable of handling really complex phrasing... I don't think I'm going to have the opportunity to build around a voice like that again... But you've got to recognise the facts of age, and the clock's ticking all the time."

In his race against time, Cooder has more than the frailty of musical flesh to contend with. Especially when it comes to Cuba. The two new Cooder Cuban CD releases arrived together because they had to be made together. "I had a year," says the guitarist, "to get these two projects done, and it's really complicated work." Why the year's deadline? Because of "my little licence from Clinton," says Cooder. Thereby hangs a chunky legal monograph on US-Cuba trade relations, and the explanation for the appearance in the Mambo Sinuendo CD credits of un-rock-star names such as Congressman Howard Berman, the architect of the Berman Amendment that sought to exempt art from the American trade embargo, and Richard Popkin, an attorney specialising in US-Cuba trade law.

The Buena Vista success resulted in a lengthy legal imbroglio for Cooder, including prosecution for contravention of the Trading With The Enemy Act. But following a year's lobbying by the guitarist and his supporters, Bill Clinton, in the last days of his Presidency, instructed the Treasury Department to issue a rare one-year licence for Cooder to resume his "enemy collaboration". "We were on the plane the next day with the paper in our hand... the Head Customs guy at LA airport came to look. 'Well, I'll be damned,' he says, 'I haven't seen one of these in 40 years!'"

Top of Cooder's list of collaborators back in Havana was Manuel Galban, "a real electric guitarist who could do something beautiful with a magnetic pick-up, not just some guy with hair and a lifestyle". Also, a true period original, a Latin disciple of Duane Eddy. In his salon in the Bristol, Galban struggles to find a Spanish translation of the word "twang": "No se... it's like... twang! ... instead of stopping the note, you let it finish. Like... twang!" Galban made his name as sole purveyor of "twang" in a country where any electric guitarists were rare. Between 1963 and 1973, he was the musical director of Los Zafiros, a quartet of sharp-suited young vocalists whose unique mix of Latin doowop made them, briefly, the Beatles of Cuba.

After the group broke up, amid alcohol and illness, in the early Seventies, Galban slogged round the world for two decades in a backing quartet called Grupo Batey – "shows, dances, receptions – we did anything". By 1998, Galban was semi-retired in Havana, eking out his tiny state pension with work as a piano-tuner and occasional member of the Vieja Trova Santiguera, the pioneering Cuban granddad ensemble. Then came the knock on the door from Buena Vista. There followed starring roles on Ibrahim Ferrer's and Cachaito Lopez's solo albums. And also elevation to the pantheon of Ry Cooder musical classics, for his guitar style, his compendious repertoire – a thousand or so numbers in Galban's memory, he reckons. And because Cooder wanted to try something new after six years of Buena Vista, namely, a revisiting of the atmosphere of 1950s jukebox music, "somewhere between Perez Prado and Henry Mancini", with a small guitar-based group.

Back in the ancient Egrem studio in Havana ("No, I couldn't have made the record outside Cuba – you can't replicate that sound and feel"), Cooder put the line-up to Galban. The two drum kits, bass and conga, a touch of vocal chorus, Galban on his trusty Telecaster and Cooder on his usual container-load of choice stringed transport. The drums were to give horsepower, Galban was to provide the solo-guitar character.

As for the material, Galban's jukebox brain came up not only with almost all of the 12 tracks on Mambo Sinuendo, but half of Ibrahim Ferrer's album, too. A good deal of Mambo Sinuendo consists of Cuban standards – Perez Prado's "Patricia"; the Lecuona lullaby, "Drume Negrita"; Arsenio Rodriguez's "Monte Adentro"; even the hoary Pineiro guaracha, "Echale Salsita".

The recording concluded, Cooder & Son checked out of Havana's Hotel Nacional and set to mixing in LA. Even here, Cooder's nose for an antique musical find paid off. "We were in the Capitol studio, where those great Fifties guitarists recorded, and I had an old picture of Speedy West in front of a microphone, so I asked what the mic was... and the same mic was still there, in a cupboard. We re-recorded through it. Made the bass much better."

The result is an intelligently conceived record, loungey but funky, with enough period novelties, such as a girl chorus instead of the usual male one, to keep the attention. The best moments are courtesy of Galban's twang stating its case, capitalising on the recent Latin electric Zeitgeist created by guitarists such as Marc Ribot. Cooder thinks the album "powerful, lyrical and funny". Galban looks quietly delighted, as a man whisked from piano-tuning to a suite on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré might.

So what next for Cooder? So much to record, so little time. "Music is fragile, people die and it's forgotten." As far as Cuba is concerned, times are not propitious. The same Office of Foreign Assets Control that processes US-Cuban trade matters is currently hunting down terrorist money-transfers. Cuban musicians are finding US entry harder than ever. But Cooder is determined: "I want to record again with Galban – he's a younger man, we can rock some more... but I can't control some things. I don't know what the hell's gonna happen..."

He looks lovingly at the Caddie tail-fins on the table, and sighs.

'Mambo Sinuendo' by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban (EastWest) is out 27 Jan