Album: Ry Cooder and Corridos Famosos, Live at the Great American Music Hall (Nonesuch)

Ry Cooder once told me he’d stopped touring with a band because he just couldn’t make any money from it – which makes these isolated 2011 San Francisco shows all the more precious.

Cooder requires considerable forces to realise his amalgams of blues, rock, folk, reggae and Mexican music, and here his band is expanded by the extraordinary, shrill horns of the 10-piece La Banda Juvenil. Still, it’s his own scarified slide guitar on Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man” that’s best here.

Download: Vigilante Man; Why Don’t You Try Me; Dark End of the Street; Wooly Bully