Slide To Freedom (View Discography)

Release Info

Multi-instrumentalist Doug Cox put together this extremely motley crew of musicians from all over the world in order to bring into a single place a variety of slide guitar traditions and see what would happen when they all played together. Indian slide guitarist Salil Bhatt, sacred steel luminaries Calvin Cooke and Darick Campbell, Austin singer/songwriter BettySoo, Canadian-Indian percussionist Cassius Khan, and others gathered together to play songs from each other's home traditions and to improvise new material. The results are consistently goodhearted, and inconsistently satisfying. Some tracks are spectacular: "Suicislide" is both thrilling and restrained, featuring rhythmically complex and wordless vocals from Khan and haunting melismas from BettySoo over busily multi-layered melody lines and percussion parts from the band's core trio and many of its guests; the group's rendition of the traditional gospel song "Angel of Death" is stark and gorgeous. On the other hand, the blend of samba guitar, tabla, satvik veena, and bluesy vocals on "Spooky" sounds contrived and rather silly, and the satvik veena sounds distractingly out of place on BettySoo's very fine "Still Small Voice." "Revival" is another lovely BettySoo composition, but it works much better; here the tabla takes a back seat to moaning steel guitar and a straight-ahead, acoustic guitar-driven groove. The problem isn't that these various musical elements can't work well together -- it's just that they don't always work well together, so experiments like this are necessarily hit-and-miss affairs. In this case, the ratio of hits to misses isn't as high as one would like it to be. ~ Rick Anderson

Tracks

1. Spooky
2. Still Small Voice Alap
3. Still Small Voice
4. Anjuman
5. Vishwakans
6. Revival
7. Wee Wee Hours
8. Hichki
9. Angel of Death
10. Suicslide