The world music bin at the record store is a depository for all non-Western sounding musics. From field recordings of Australian aborigines spinning bull-roarers in a ritual context to studio-produced fusion musics that use an occasional tabla sample for the sake of added exoticism, the world music category catches them all. On
Hollow Bamboo, celebrated bansuri player
Ronu Majumdar tunes into a few of the different bandwidths offered within the world music spectrum. With half of the tracks he grounds his playing in traditional Hindustani works. Accompanied by the penetrating tabla playing of
Abhijit Banerjee on most of these cuts,
Majumdar whips up stunning melodic gusts that swirl in and out of time with the tabla. The other four tracks are experimental collaborations with trumpeter
Jon Hassell, guitarists
Rick Cox and
Ry Cooder, and percussionist
Joachim Cooder. "A Day for Trade Winds," a song formed upon richly textured guitar drones, is the most successful of these four fusion tracks because guitarists
Cox and
Cooder lay back and let
Majumdar develop subtle, yet sophisticated, melodies. "African Queen" is a less successful hybrid, due in part to the fact that
Joachim Cooder's hand drumming drowns out the superior playing of
Banerjee. Whatever the contributions of his collaborators may be,
Ronu Majumdar's sensitive performance on the hollow, bamboo bansuri makes this CD a great listen, no matter what end of the world music spectrum you're coming from. ~ John Vallier