Proper WLACS29CD music/sound recording CD World music Ry Cooder & V.M.Bhatt

A meeting between renowned US guitarist, Ry Cooder, and an equally outstanding young instrumentalist from Jaipur, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt. On four extended, spontaneous tracks inspired by a river bank parable by Jelaluddin Rumi, the sound of glass against steel strings from Cooder's bottle-neck guitar contrasts and blends with the sound of a steel rod against metal strings from Bhatt's instrument of his own design, which he calls the Mohan Vina. This he evolved from the slide guitar and resembles the hollow-bodied curved-top jazz guitars of the 1920s.

Rumi's poem concerns a frog and a mouse who meet on a river bank to converse in a language unhindered by the rules of grammar, and thus Cooder and Bhatt converse musically, with the complex rhythms of India added by Cooder's son, Joachim, on dumbek and Sukhwinder Singh Namdhari playing tabla.