On a night approaching the weekend, say on a Thursday or Friday, would find Cooky’s band either at the Unplugged along Adriatico or Hobbit House on Mabini. She leads her band which is as solid as ever, the frontwoman stretching out to jazz mode, yet remaining faithful to her rock and blues roots.
Other times she jams with Mike Villegas, her old cohort in CIR who has since gone solo, arranging songs for his better half, the singer-songwriter Bayang Barrios.
What does Color It Red sound like these days and nights of terrorist scares?
For CIR they have continued to mature with their music, it’s hard to imagine that over a decade ago, they were pimply, driven individuals barely out of a protracted adolescence, performing gigs at the old Club Dredd on Lower Timog corner Scout Tobias, as well as in an abandoned haunted mansion in New Manila.
They were just college kids then. Of course bassist Hank Palenzuela has since been replaced by the brooding Bopip Paraguya, and Arnel Policarpio has taken Villegas’ place. Keyboardist and founding member Marc Florendo, formerly one of the group’s Tres Marias, has opted to concentrate on motherhood and/or sheer domesticity.
But they have a new and reliable drummer whose timekeeping reminds one of Jamie Oldaker from Eric Clapton’s mid-’70s band. Songwriter and guitarist Barbie Cristi is still very much around, keeping CIR’s occasionally ethereal excursions anchored in the real world.
A Friday night in Malate’s Unplugged has CIR branching out to semi-jazz mode, courtesy of Cooky’s own innovative and playful phrasing coupled with the saxophone work of a Caucasian session musician, a familiar face in such blues gatherings.
CIR’s second set has old rock and reggae standards juxtaposed with more recent compositions, from Marley’s Waiting in Vain and Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love, to songs we heard for the first time.
The beer and rum-coke might have already been taking effect, as the music winked and stretched its legs and got ready for the wee hours of the morning.
As far as we could tell it was the only time we heard Sunshine of Your Love arranged with a saxophone, and proof that it is a song that could outlive all of us is that it still sounded as urgent as when Jack Bruce many years ago began singing those lines, "it is getting near dark, and lights close the tired eyes, I’ll soon be with you my love, give me my dull surprise."
Cooky herself says that the band is no longer with BMG, and they are presently working on a new album possibly on an independent label or back at Alpha where they started. They’re just gathering enough songs and steam.
Over a Winston or two and in between sips of red wine, she can reminisce over years gone past, if they have at all been kind to her and her music.
She’s already a mom to a two and half year old son, and she’s hired a PA (production assistant) to help her out in this ever demanding business of music, another aspect of the tricky showbiz world.
Onstage CIR’s music is never assaulting, but neither is it soft; rather it hovers over you like a misplaced dragonfly, buzzing while the crowd falls in love or gets terrorized by the beauty of it all.
"Walk with me," she might say, and the decades slink away into black, to a morning in SM City to share a beer at French Baker, or past midnight into the future of an indecent proposal for a spin in the car until it runs out of gas, and on the radio Sheryl Crow’s Everyday is a Winding Road could be playing.
Keep your eyes on the road and your hand upon the wheel, an icon might remind us. That was Cooky and Barbie and the rest of the band we saw backstage at Amoranto Stadium in a pa-morningan concert, sipping on rum-coke and wearing black as usual and tender as the night.
There is always the risk that I am making this all up as I go along, but she is still singing and continues to sing till the lights close the tired eyes.