What’s the deal with your dad, Ry Cooder, and the ancient Egyptian music manuscripts?
This is the best reconstruction I can offer (I wasn’t there when any of this happened). My dad was in his mid 90s at the time. I had spoken to Kavi Alexander at Water Lily Acoustics about my dad’s background as an ethnomusicologist, and his groundbreaking research on ancient Pharonic and Coptic Egyptian music. Kavi in turn passed that info along to Ry Cooder. It’s hard enough to understand the Ptolemaic cosmological paradigm, but coming from my blissfully cantankeros father (who is steeped in the erudition of a bygone era), somehow the wires got crossed, and Ry wound up flying out to meet with my dad thinking it would be an opportunity to produce another Buena Vista Social Club, but with Biblical implications. The project mired down in confusion, miscommunication, and unrealistic expectations – it never went any further (although the local newspaper descended on the meeting and published some really funny photos of my dad, Kavi, and Ry). Inexplicably, a CD of ancient Coptic chants was
