A son of the northern prairie devoted to the swampiest of southern blues befriends the Eddie Van Halen of Indian Classical music. They hold a meeting of musical minds using some of the world’s most wildly inventive lap slide instruments. The result: Juno Nominated (Canada's Grammy Awards – World Music Album of the Year) Slide to Freedom 2: Make a Better World, an intuitive exploration of the unexpected place where the sonic passions of slide guitar and dobro master Doug Cox and Indian classical slide icon Salil Bhatt come together.
It’s 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, though it has a North American reputation. If you look at most folk musics, 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 2, 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.
But the Bhatts’ true love is the slide, and they have both come up with new hybrid takes on the traditional Indian veena, a large and complex lute with two resonators. In the Bhatts’ hands, this mainstay of Indian classical music has collided with an arch-top guitar, all while retaining the sympathetic drone strings of a sitar, the plucked drone string of a banjo, and the lap playing style of the blues.
And Cox isn’t your average Canadian bluesman/folkie, either. Fascinated by the Indian slide, he made contact with Salil online right before Salil was heading to Canada for a tour. The tour hit a snag, and Cox arranged some concerts for Salil, Pandit Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and tabla player Ramkumar Mishra. Cox asked if he could spend a week studying with them. The Bhatts refused, but instead suggested they make an album together.
As they began experimenting, Cox realized that his usual standbys—the bottleneck slide guitar he’d first picked up playing with Canadian & British blues greats like Ken Hamm and Long John Baldry or the often haunting dobro he’d played with dozens of folk and bluegrass acts—just weren’t the best fit sonically for what Salil and company were playing.
So Cox picked up his Gadgie, a rare type of metal-bodied resophonic guitar created by an eccentric instrument builder in Northern England. It tuned to just the right resonant spot to match the veenas and blended perfectly with Bhatt’s sound, which is filled with the hard-core, rebellious drive of a rock guitarist. “I get the feeling that most people can’t tell exactly who’s doing what, and that’s a good thing,” Cox notes.
The blend of sounds was echoed by an evolving blend of approaches, with Cox bringing beloved blues tunes like the New Orleans classic “Make a Better World” to the table, and Salil contributing ragas and melodic lines that sparked instrumental improvisations like “The Moods of Madhuvanti” and “Blessings.” Using what Cox calls an “intuitive, instinctual approach,” usually captured in a single take, they discovered a deep spontaneity where their traditions met, despite some surprising challenges.
The musicians were intrigued as they exposed the juxtapositions of the blues emphasis on chord progressions with Indian music’s scales. The rhythmic tendency in blues to play a hair behind the beat was a sharp contrast to the Indian classical emphasis on the tala that forms the firm rhythmic basis for any Carnatic piece.
“There were times when we were showing each other phrases, and it was surprisingly hard. They were very, very patient in showing me the ragas and all their amazing subtleties. I always thought they were about microtones, but they’re about a lot more,” Cox recalls. “Once, I remember, after what felt like two hours, I got the line they were teaching me, and I was trying to show them a blues lick, a three-note phrase but with blues timing. It was about playing behind the beat and where you placed the phrase. The difference in rhythmic perspective was fascinating and challenging.”
After an album and two tours with Cox, Salil and Mishra, who became an expert at the tabla blues shuffle—got a real feel for the blues, thanks in part to the input and insight of New Orleans gospel tenor John Boutté, who joined Cox and the Indian trio on Slide to Freedom 2. Boutté’s powerful voice can move from sweet silk to Delta grit in the space of a phrase and added a whole new dimension to Cox and Bhatt’s work together.
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.”
For Cox, this was more than a great moment leading to a great track; it’s a symbol of the future of folk. “As a musician, I feel that 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,” Cox explains. “Instead, traditional artists will expose each other to sounds from other places and create something new together. There may be wariness on both sides, I’ve learned, but there is also profound understanding.”
Slide to Freedom's newest member, Cassius Khan, replaces Ramkumar Mishra on tablas, who has decided to take a break from touring too far from his home in India. Cassius is the only known Indian Classical musician in the world who has combined Tabla playing and Indian Ghazal singing simultaneously, thus a remarkable feat in the Indian Classical music scene. His first appearance with Slide To freedom was at 2009's Stan Rogers Folk Festival in Canso, Nova Scotia.
Cassius Khan is featured on Ellen McIlwaine’s recent release “Mystic Bridge” (2006), on Stu Goldberg’s “Dark Clouds” (2006) album, two of Dave Martone’s albums, “A Demon’s Dream” (2004) and “The Alchemists”
(2004), and recently on ROAM’s new album, “Baby Steps” (2008).
When not touring, Khan has students around the world who learn Ghazal singing and Tabla playing from him. He is married to Kathak Dancer/ Harmonium player Amika Kushwaha. They reside in Vancouver. Cassius has a new CD out called Mushtari. The CD features Cassius Khan in his element singing Ghazals and playing a tabla solo recital.
Slide To Freedom: Bio
An Upward Slide:
Slide to Freedom Finds the Divine Crossroads of Indian Classical and Southern Sacred Music on 20,000 Miles
They sat in silence, holding their breath as the last note of a wild, twining jam faded in a legendary Memphis studio. “Well, what are we going to call that?” laughed sacred steel elder Calvin Cooke, looking across the room at the 17th-generation Indian virtuoso, the hard-touring Canadian folk musician, the merry tabla whiz, the bold singer-songwriter from Austin.
The answer: Slide to Freedom, an ongoing conversation exploring where many sliding, singing strings from across the planet meet. Created by established roots and world music multi-instrumentalist Doug Cox and revered Indian classical master Salil Bhatt, the project brings together fantastic flights of musicianship, wild slide inventions, and the great, transcendent ache that unites sacred songs and deeply personal ballads.
On 20,000 Miles (Northern Blues; October 11, 2011), the band, now regularly joined by Canadian-Indian percussionist Cassius Khan, collaborated with Calvin Cooke, founding father of sacred steel, and members of electric gospel legends The Campbell Brothers, as well as special guest BettySoo, the Americana-inspired darling of Austin’s singer-songwriter scene.
Striking Indian classical pieces weave into newly forged spirituals. Unexpected covers (Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, The Zombies) trade licks with ghazals (Northern Indian songs touching on the divine and erotic). Sacred steel sounds alternate with the ingenious complexity of Bhatt’s satvik veena (a hybrid between a slide guitar and the traditional Indian veena) and Cox’s unique instrumentarium. The result: a catchy, uplifting reflection on the transcendent buzz and moan of mortality.
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“Down in Memphis, we had three members of the Campbell Brothers, though the whole band came to watch. We had Calvin Cooke, a Korean-American singer, two guys from India, and a white guy, me,” Cox laughs. “When we were setting up, someone called Boo Mitchell,” the second-generation head of the legendary Royal Recording Studios. “They asked who he was recording, and he answered, ‘The Rainbow Coalition!’”
But this wasn’t about diversity for its own sake, or for quirky novelty. This was a serious, if unexpected, meeting of musical minds. “We weren’t just looking at charts and banging off parts,” Cox continues. “We were interested in what the others were doing—and in taking risks.”
“At the start of the Memphis session, you could feel the different players ripple in and out of confidence, between riffing and tiptoeing because they didn’t want to stomp all over each other,” Soo recalls. “We were all trying to get an idea of where the person would go next. But at the end of the day, everyone let loose. It was magical.”
The session’s breathless final moment and Cooke’s quip came at the end of the grimly named yet musically uplifting “Suicislide,” a free-form dash that harnessed Khan’s vocal abilities and challenged Soo to reach deep, far out of her usual comfort zone.
“Calvin was sitting there, this serene wizard, but as soon as he put his hand to the strings, he created these amazing moments. He could really hold a groove and make it refreshing,” notes Khan. The elder statesman of sacred steel, a recently evolved grass-roots slide style born in Southern churches, Cooke’s bittersweet lines feel at home with Khan’s tender percussion on Soo’s intense “Still Small Voice.”
The heartfelt precision of Khan’s tabla is matched by the seemingly effortless solos that flow from Bhatt and Cox. Often cheekily compared to Jimi Hendrix, Bhatt can shred, but can also make his strings express deep subtleties backed by 500 years of family tradition and a lifetime of rigor. Cox, equally at home on a variety of instruments and in a range of genres, adds distinctive, gritty vocals and intriguing timbres, letting his gadgie (a metal resophone developed by an eccentric English instrument maker) rumble out tasty bass lines.
With years of collaboration behind them, Bhatt and Cox have reached a new level of friendship and interaction on 20,000 Miles, one that moves away from long-format cross-cultural jams to nuanced ballads and carefully crafted instrumentals. “Salil has the ability to reach out to audiences that might not be able sit still for Indian Classical music,” Cox explains. “He was playing to reach out to North Americans in a new way, rather than just responding. Together, we found a way to make both traditions more compact and accessible to new listeners.”
Yet Bhatt, Cox, and Khan carefully kept true to the spirit and practice of Indian classical music, while digging deeper into gospel and country. For more classical pieces like “Vishwakans”—composed by Bhatt’s renowned father Vishwa, a frequent guest musician with Slide to Freedom—the trio recorded together in Khan’s Vancouver-area living room, sitting in a circle on the floor.
“With our Indian Classical background, Salil and I had to retain the appropriate feel, while leaving room for Doug’s input. For the ghazal (‘Anjuman’), we all had to remain more traditional,” says Khan, a rare perfomer who can play tabla and sing at the same time. “But for many of the other compositions, we three relied on our uncanny intuition. We winked through it and jumped in with both feet.”