Doug Cox: Reviews

Review: Slide to Freedom II
By Doug Cox and Salil Bhatt

(Northern Blues Music)

Review by Douglas Heselgrave

Cross cultural conversations in music are nothing new, and the novelty that once accompanied the release of albums like Paul Simon’s Graceland has long since faded away. The world is getting much smaller and almost every week one can find new and unlikely collaborations between artists as different from one another as a New York DJ and a group of Tuvan throat singers. The variety of new world music recordings available is staggering, and whether one likes Persian jazz fusion or Senegalese hip hop, there is something to fit almost every taste. With so many potentially interesting collaborations vying for music fans’ attention, it would be easy for a gem like Slide to Freedom II to get lost in the commotion. That would be a shame as it’s an album that succeeds completely on its own musical terms. Unpretentious, loose and fun, Slide to Freedom II is the second album from Doug Cox, Vishwan and Salil Bhatt.

Vishwan Bhatt is one of sitarist Ravi Shankar’s most senior disciples and has long been considered amongst the world’s greatest Veena (seven stringed resonating slide) players. No stranger to cross cultural musical explorations, Bhatt collaborated with Ry Cooder in 1994 to produce Meeting by the River, a wonderful album of instrumental music that explored the common ground shared by western and Asian string traditions. Slide to Freedom II – like its predecessor - captures a joyful and spontaneous conversation with the blues filtered through Indian raga progressions.

The three first met when Vishwan Bhatt and his son, Salil were touring in Canada several years ago. Doug Cox has long been a veteran of the Canadian blues scene, having recorded several albums of traditional and original music over the years, while nurturing a passion for world music that was just waiting to come to fruition. When he first heard the senior Bhatt’s music, he recognized a kindred soul and began to communicate with him online about the varieties of slide music. When the Bhatts arrived in Canada to play a series of concerts, they contacted Cox who promptly asked to study with them. Vishwan refused this request, and instead suggested that they record an album together while they were on tour.
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When the musicians first sat down together, Cox brought along his slide guitar, but the tonal qualities didn’t complement the Indian instruments, so he switched to a Gadgie – a resonating hollow bodied guitar made in England – and the sounds gelled to such an extent that it’s often difficult to distinguish between what where Cox’s guitar ends and the Bhatts’ veenas begin. This synthesis of tone creates a seductive flow to the performances as guitar and veenas effortlessly weave and dance around each other.

In addition to featuring delta inspired raga improvisations, Slide to Freedom I included versions of blues standards such as John Hurt’s Payday and Blind Willie Johnson’s Soul of a Man sung by Doug Cox. For the second album, Cox and Bhatt decided to bring John Boutte, a New Orleans gospel tenor on board to handle vocal duties. This was an inspired choice - for if there was one complaint about the first collaboration, it was that Cox’s voice was not on par with the divine fluidity of the music that arose out of their instruments. Boutte is a sensitive and emotive singer whose contributions to Make a better world, I scare myself and Amazing Grace raise the proceedings to a much higher level. For some people, the trio’s off the cuff recreation of George Harrison’s For You Blue, replete with psychedelic veena solos will provide reason enough to buy this album.

Even though traditional tunes on a collaboration like this offer a familiar place to begin listening from, the instrumental pieces are by far the most interesting cuts on the disc. Freed from conventional song structures, tracks like The Moods of Madhuvanti – a stellar ten minute blues raga – and the aching and wistful Blessings make this an essential addition to anyone’s music collection.

While it might be interesting to undertake a musicological excavation of the compositions on this album and deconstruct every phrase and find references to everything from twelve bar blues figures to Indonesian gamelan forms, it’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter how much musical background a person has - Slide to Freedom II takes listeners on an exhilarating musical journey from beginning to end. Like a vintage guitar, this record improves with age and sounds better every time it’s played.

"Dobro means good in any language."

That’s an old motto of the Dobro Manufacturing Corporation- for any of you non-industry people less than 100 years old- the word ‘dobro’ itself a trade name, now property of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, which intends to vigorously defend its exclusive rights to the name btw. So sue me. If you’ve ever spent time in a Slavic country you might be excused for imagining that they’re a race of resonance-guitar lovers, but no, in fact the word DOES mean ‘good’ in nearly all of them, so you hear it frequently. I used to jokingly refer to this for my dobro-playing younger brother without even knowing that the Slovakian-born DOpyera BROthers indeed had this also partly in mind when they named their new company. The rest is history, but only part of it.

The intimate connection between blues-based slide guitar and country-based dobro doesn’t get talked about very much, much less expounded upon, but the connections are there, and it’s more than just the ‘tude. It’s the tunes. At the same time that the Dopyera Bros. and the National String Instrument Corp. were trading secrets, designs, and patents in factories and courts and board-rooms, Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Robert Johnson, and others were doing something a little bit different with their guitars in the Mississippi delta. All of them had probably played with the ‘diddley bow’ (as in ‘Bo Diddley’) as children, a one-string toy instrument eerily reminiscent of some one-string African designs, played with a glass or metal slide…

The connection with Hawaiian slack-key style slide guitar is more remote, though, and India’s slide tradition hardly even known… until recently. Canadian slide guitar and Dobro master Doug Cox knows them all… and loves them… and can play most of them. But on this album he had to dig deeper into the corners to get just the sound he was looking for… on his gadgie, a resonance guitar even more obscure than a Dobro™ (satisfied now, Gibson?). “Slide to Freedom II: Make a Better World” is his latest collaboration with Indian sitarist and veena player Salil Bhatt, son of the master Vishwa Mohan Bhatt.

One of the nice things about ‘world music’ is that because of the plethora of regions and cultures represented, there are no sharp divisions between classes, simply because they no longer have much meaning outside the local context. And I don’t mean social classes as much as I mean classes of anything. Everything’s connected. This is a good thing. Best of all you can be a nerd intellectual and still be cool, or you can be urban and still be country, or you can live simultaneously in about three different countries signing your e-mails with your current GPS co-ordinates (or maybe that’s just me). So you’re in a funny mood tonight and can’t decide whether you’d like to listen to some classical Indian music or some down-home folk blues? With the album ‘Slide to Freedom II: Make a Better World’ you can do both, where various versions of Indian slides on strings intermix effortlessly with their American counterparts.

The album leads off with the title song “Make a Better World” by Earl King and that pretty much sets the redemptive tone for the album- “sing sing sing… join hands, do yo’ thing, make a better world to live in,” or at least about half of it anyway. In some act of cosmic symmetry, whether accidental or intentional, the album is pretty much divided between modern covers and classical-Indian-inspired instrumentals. I personally probably reached my ‘Amazing Grace’ saturation point long ago, but I can always get up for one more, and the one here is a nice to-the-nailhead-point version. And it’s always nice to hear someone cover the late great George Harrison- another Shankar disciple, along with Salil Bhatt’s father- in this case ‘For You Blue.’ But the real chestnut of a cover song is ‘I Scare Myself’ by Dan Hicks. When’s the last time you heard someone cover that? They nail it, too, its spookiness only augmented with eerie gospel vocals.

A special note needs to be said about the accompaniment to the major collaborators Salil and Cox. Salil’s father and mentor Vishwa delivers a stinging almost ungodly solo on ‘For You Blue’- as though some buddy still had another lick to lay down- and Ramkumar Mishra maintains a tabla rhythm throughout the album without which it would not have been the same, nor nearly so successful. But the real revelation is New Orleans blues and gospel singer John Boutte’. After listening several times to the album without carefully perusing the notes and credits beforehand, I kept thinking, “Who is that ballsy blues mama doing the vocals?” Well ballsy indeed, imagine my surprise at seeing John Boutte’s name- and face. Little surprises like that are magical, like imagining that maybe Michael Jackson’s soul divided around 1990 and the sane half went to New Orleans and became a kick-ass blues-and-gospel singer, while the other half… you know. Tenors are not that rare, but for a blues and gospel singer? As with the tabla-based rhythm, it is excellent and serves to help define the album.

The album’s other half is pretty much straight-ahead Indian string-based instrumental, heavy on the slide, which, according to Salil Bhatt, has always been an element of its use. Thus “A Letter Home,” “Blessings,” and “The Moods of Madhuva” all allow your mind to wander while simultaneously blowing it, as you meditate on origins and endings and the ways and means to it all. The beauty is that- as Doug Cox put it- you really don’t know who’s doing what all the time, the parts fit so seamlessly together. Albums like this are more than just happy accidents and brilliant mistakes. There is purpose and vision behind it. As Cox himself says: “…the future of traditional music really lies in the coming together of cultures. Folk music until now came from isolated cultures developing their own unique style of music. That’s not going to happen anymore.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. The album ends with “Freedom Raga” by Cox, which sets the still-yearning closing tone for the album, “I touch freedom, I smell freedom…” as if by simple affirmation we could correct all the slights and injustices that have ever been perpetrated in the history of the world. Would that it were that easy… Listening to “Slide to Freedom II- Make a Better World” is easy. Check it out.

eview: Slide to Freedom II
By Doug Cox and Salil Bhatt

(Northern Blues Music)

Review by Douglas Heselgrave

Cross cultural conversations in music are nothing new, and the novelty that once accompanied the release of albums like Paul Simon’s Graceland has long since faded away. The world is getting much smaller and almost every week one can find new and unlikely collaborations between artists as different from one another as a New York DJ and a group of Tuvan throat singers. The variety of new world music recordings available is staggering, and whether one likes Persian jazz fusion or Senegalese hip hop, there is something to fit almost every taste. With so many potentially interesting collaborations vying for music fans’ attention, it would be easy for a gem like Slide to Freedom II to get lost in the commotion. That would be a shame as it’s an album that succeeds completely on its own musical terms. Unpretentious, loose and fun, Slide to Freedom II is the second album from Doug Cox, Vishwan and Salil Bhatt.

Vishwan Bhatt is one of sitarist Ravi Shankar’s most senior disciples and has long been considered amongst the world’s greatest Veena (nineteen stringed resonating slide) players. No stranger to cross cultural musical explorations, Bhatt collaborated with Ry Cooder in 1993 to produce Meeting by the River, a wonderful album of instrumental music that explored the common ground shared by western and Asian string traditions. Slide to Freedom II – like its predecessor - captures a joyful and spontaneous conversation with the blues filtered through Indian raga progressions.

The three first met when Vishwan Bhatt and his son, Salil - a veena master in his own right - were touring in Canada several years ago. Doug Cox has long been a veteran of the Canadian blues scene, having recorded several albums of traditional and original music over the years, while nurturing a passion for world music that was just waiting to come to fruition. When he first heard the senior Bhatt’s music, he recognized a kindred soul and began to communicate with him online about the varieties of slide music. When the Bhatts arrived in Canada to play a series of concerts, they contacted Cox who promptly asked to study with them. Vishwan refused this request, and instead suggested that they record an album together while they were on tour.
.
When the musicians first sat down together, Cox brought along his slide guitar, but the tonal qualities didn’t complement the Indian instruments, so he switched to a Gadgie – a resonating hollow bodied guitar made in England – and the sounds gelled to such an extent that it’s often difficult to distinguish between what where Cox’s guitar ends and the Bhatts’ veenas begin. This synthesis of tone creates a seductive flow to the performances as guitar and veenas effortlessly weave and dance around each other.

In addition to featuring delta inspired raga improvisations, Slide to Freedom I included versions of blues standards such as John Hurt’s Payday and Blind Willie Johnson’s Soul of a Man sung by Doug Cox. For the second album, Cox and Bhatt decided to bring John Boutte, a New Orleans gospel tenor on board to handle vocal duties. This was an inspired choice - for if there was one complaint about the first collaboration, it was that Cox’s voice was not on par with the divine fluidity of the music that arose out of their instruments. Boutte is a sensitive and emotive singer whose contributions to Make a better world, I scare myself and Amazing Grace raise the proceedings to a much higher level. For some people, the trio’s off the cuff recreation of George Harrison’s For You Blue, replete with psychedelic veena solos will provide reason enough to buy this album.

Even though traditional tunes on a collaboration like this offer a familiar place to begin listening from, the instrumental pieces are by far the most interesting cuts on the disc. Freed from conventional song structures, tracks like The Moods of Madhuvanti – a stellar ten minute blues raga – and the aching and wistful Blessings make this an essential addition to anyone’s music collection.

While it might be interesting to undertake a musicological excavation of the compositions on this album and deconstruct every phrase and find references to everything from twelve bar blues figures to Indonesian gamelan forms, it’s really beside the point. It doesn’t matter how much musical background a person has - Slide to Freedom II takes listeners on an exhilarating musical journey from beginning to end. Like a vintage guitar, this record improves with age and sounds better every time it’s played.

The album Slide to Freedom II is being hailed as eclectic mix of blues, Indian music with a touch of bluesgrass. The two principal players are Doug Cox. He is a Canadian steeped in the various blues styles of the American South. He is deeply into playing the bottleneck blues on the Dobro. Salil Bhatt is from India and his family tree includes his father, Grammy Award Winner Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, who studied under the great Ravi Shankar

John Boutte adds his soulful voice to several of the songs. Of course, he needs know introduction here.

Slide to Freedom II is a collaboration that goes far beyond the obvious “Indian meets blues.” It’s an improvised road trip across the terra incognita of the planet’s slide instruments. “People often think of slide instruments like the dobro as hokey American folk instruments, the kind of thing you play while sitting on a haybale,” Cox smiles, “but slide developed all over the world, from the United States to India and China, though it has a North American reputation. If you look at most folk music, there usually is some kind of slide involved.”

India may in fact rival North America in its devotion to and creative license with lap-style slide instruments. Salil Bhatt hails from a long line of sitar and veena masters and innovators, most notably his father and fellow collaborator on Slide to Freedom II, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, one of Ravi Shankar’s oldest sitar disciples and an old buddy of George Harrison. The late Beatle is honored on “For You Blue,” where Vishwa takes a wild and eerie solo.

At the suggestion of NorthernBlues’ label head Fred Litwin, Cox decided they should tackle gospel standard, “Amazing Grace,” though he hesitated at first. That is, until Boutté began to tell the story behind the hymn, how it was written by 18th-century British slave trader John Newton, whose religious revelation caused him to demand humane treatment of his human cargo and eventually condemn human trafficking. Boutté’s words proved revelatory for Salil and Vishwa: “They had never heard an African-American talking about the experience of slavery,” Cox muses. “We were all so moved that when we sat down to record the track, it became this otherworldly music. They just got it.”

It's too easy to lazily affix the word "eclectic" to describe the musical affectations of Doug Cox but the shoe fits. Blending acoustic, blues and classical Indian music, the West coast native again teams up with Indian slide guitarist Salil Bhatt to deliver an aural mélange by way of dobro and slide guitar. A sequel to their 2007 outing, the vocals have always been overshadowed by Cox and Bhatt's delectable instrumentation, and here is no exception, with tracks like opener "Make a Better World." Then again, it's hard to dismiss the earnestness of the message with such precise musicianship on display via songs like "A Letter Home" and "Blessings." Slide To Freedom II is short (eight tracks) and the two collaborators come together to create a sound that's ethereal and tangible at the same time. (Northern Blues)

Blues and Middle Eastern music are not often thought to go stylistically hand in hand. However, on the second release by slide guitarist Doug Cox and satvik veena-player Salili Bhatt, 2009's Slide to Freedom 2: Make a Better World, both musical worlds do indeed coexist, and surprisingly, can do so quite cohesively. But for the most part, it's the Middle Eastern musical style that overshadows the blues here, especially on such tunes as "A Letter Home" and "Blessings." However, on such ditties as the album-opening "Make a Better World," as well as a cover of "Amazing Grace," both aforementioned styles are detected, with the blues/soul being provided primarily by singer John Boutté. For fans of world music with a modern-day twist, Slide to Freedom 2: Make a Better World is certainly worth some close inspection.