Ry Cooder & V.M. Bhatt, A Meeting by the River (CD)

Mohan Bhatt is already a fairly assimilated Indian classical musician—he's modified an acoustic guitar with resonant strings to make it into a guitar-sitar hybrid. The presence of Ry Cooder does not really add a Western feel, but it does pull Bhatt even further from a recognizable idiom. 1993's A Meeting by the River is beautiful and warm. I love that the liner notes mention having used custom microphones with Milab capsules and tube bodies, and the recordings do sound great, but the disc is mastered too quietly (perhaps because the bass tabla notes occasionally boom out too much). The insipid cover design and notes praising Coleman Barks are the only real flaws of this very pretty album.