(Ry Cooder, bottleneck guitar; W. M. Bhatt, Mohan Vina; Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari, tabla; Joachim Cooder, dumbek)
Ry Cooder has long been exploring the highways and byways of roots music in North America, beginning with his evocative early albums Chicken Skin Music and Jazz. He doesn’t need to step into international “world music” area in order to capture new ears, but in this case he was paired with East Indian modified-guitar virtuoso Bhatt by Water Lily’s owner, Kavi Alexander. The Mohan Vina is a hollow-body curved-top guitar from the 1920s with 3 melody strings, 5 drone strings and 12 sympathetic strings added to it. It is played with a plectra on the fingers of one hand and stopped with a glass ball held in the other.
A pickup designer associated with Alexander suggested they should send a copy of an earlier Water Lily recording of Bhatt to Ry Cooder, and after hearing it Cooder expressed a desire to play with him. Alexander was intrigued by the combination of the two instruments of East and West, both with metal strings and played with a glass or steel slide device. The session was held in the wee hours of the morning in the chapel of a seminary in Santa Barbara, CA, and was entirely improvised by the two musicians, who were playing together for the first time. In addition to the timekeeping of the tabla player, Ry’s 14-year-old son Joachim played the dumbek.
The opening ten-minute title track is a fascinating spontaneous expression by the two musicians, and it soon becomes clear that there really isn’t that great a gulf between the musical culture of the bottleneck guitar and that of the Indian vina. That more uptempo track is followed by Longing – a quieter and more contemplative 12-minute track. The Ganges Delta Blues is great fun and reminded me of some other examples I’ve heard which mixed blues and jazz with East Indian music.
This album won a Grammy in 1993 and it’s easy to understand why. Although Water Lily has issued SACD versions of many of their recordings of musicians of India and the West, A Meeting by the River was only available as a standard CD for some reason. Analogue Productions (really Acoustic Sounds) is to be congratulated for bringing it out on SACD, where we can fully appreciate the super-high-end approach Water Lily used in recording these two wonderful players.
TrackList: A Meeting by the River; Longing; Ganges Delta Blues; Isa Lei
– John Henry
