Ry Cooder and V M Bhatt – A Meeting By The River

Slide instruments and musicians have always gone relatively unnoticed in the world of music, even though the sweet sounding fluent lines one can create from such instruments has always been unmatched by their counterparts. Slide musicians use a different technique and mind set during their playing, to produce lines, which tend to melt into the surrounding landscape rather than making a severe dent in it visible from a mile away.

In 1993 Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, slide musicians from opposite ends of the world joined hands in exploring the limitless possibilities available to them when they would add the encyclopedic knowledge each of them carried with them regarding their respective musical inclinations. The end result of their meet would be the forty-minute journey into the world of improvisation, driven by reciprocality rather than divulging haughtiness.

‘A Meeting By The River’ is an album, which spells out a meeting of two poets of entirely different tongues reciting their poems all at once thus creating a beautiful harmony. The haunting melodies of the bluesman Ry Cooder and the Indian classical representative Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s melancholic tweets flow hand in hand in the same river of music.

There is a certain feeling of calm associated with the album, which is amplified by the swells of the Mohan Veena, much like a standard lap steel guitar does. Ry Cooder’s depressive acoustic work creates a very worn out effect on the sound, which adds to the whole environment.

‘A Meeting By The River’ is a very interesting work, much more subtle in its approach than other fusion oriented albums. Here the focus is not so much on who’s better, but instead the musicians have worked as a team, may be caused by a sense of maturity and security the aged musicians shared.

The title of the album itself though, simply worded does indeed sum up the record as a real meeting of travelers from different worlds but with the same destination.