20,000 Miles

Doug Cox is a Canadian spiritual cousin to Ry Cooder: a bottleneck guitarist steeped in the blues, he finds common ground between the high lonesome sounds of American folk and musical traditions from the opposite side of the world. Slide to Freedom is his now well-established partnership with Salil Bhatt, master of the veena, an Indian slide guitar. Their first two albums had many high points, not least a palpable atmosphere of spontaneity. In contrast, 20,000 Miles, their third, flies a lot less by the seat of its pants.

Things start off commendably, with a cover of The Zombies’ ‘Spooky Little Girl Like You’ played as a bluesy bossa nova. Bhatt’s rapid veena slides sound a little like a Brazilian berimbau (the bow with a Jew’s harp-like sound), while Calvin Cooke’s gospel singing is warm and authoritative. If only the rest of the album gelled so well. ‘Still Small Voice’, ‘Revival’ and ‘Angel of Death’ are Nashville-style Christian country-pop songs – very middle of the road and 80s sounding – and Bhatt and Cassius Khan (a tabla virtuoso) struggle to find anything that can improve them. The nicest thing you could say about guest singer BettySoo is that she’s unexceptional; she has one of those open-mic singer-songwriter voices and her lack of imagination is painfully evident on the pointless jam that closes the album (ten minutes in which no-one sounds like they’re enjoying themselves). The CD’s beautiful moments make this a frustrating missed opportunity. ‘Anjuman’ is a sumptuous ghazal sung by Khan (a must-hear which, incidentally, can be individually downloaded via Bandcamp). It makes you wish Doug Cox had limited his party invites to the Indian contingent.