MARIZA Transparente (EMI)
BARRY DRANSFIELD Unruly (Violin Workshop)
MOUSSU T E LEI JOVENTS Mademoiselle Marseille (Manivette)
ELIZA CARTHY Rough Music (Topic)
FIMBER BRAVO & KADIALY KOUYATE Small Talk (Bravo Bravo)
BAYE COLY Etamaya (Frikyiwa)
DEBASHISH BHATTACHARYA Calcutta Slide-Guitar 3 (Riverboat)
SAVINA YANNATOU Sumiglia (ECM)
STELIOS PETRAKIS & BIJAN CHEMIRANI Kismet (Buda)
ACTORES ALIDOS Cante Delle Donne Sarde (Finisterre)

Debashish Bhattacharya plays modified guitar in the Northern Indian Style. Over this album's six tracks he is captured plying three very different instruments. He names his main 22-string Guitar, Chaturangui ( here translated as Four Attributes). The first track Aanandam (Joy) however, introduce "the tiny Anandi Guitar, elsewhere described in Devid Ellenbogen and J.W.Junker's generally excellent supporting notes, as "a slide ukulele". Oh the second track, Prema Chakor ( Lover's Eyes), Bhattacharya plays the Ghandrvi, a 14-string guitar. ( With the descriptions of the instruments I sensed there was more to them than the notes let on, but that my be because Bhattacharya's album notes are littered with variations and the dully reproduced pictures of him with his instruments do not answer questions.)

This studio is recording made at Prime Studio in Kolkata is family affair with the soloist accompanied by his younger brother Subhasis Bhattacharya with his younger sister Sutapa playing tanpura, the subcontinent's stringed drone instrument. To lay my cards on the table I haven't been one of the people yelling hosannas about his cross-cultural release . They sit on the library shelves as reference and only Mahima ( riverboat,2003), Bhattacharya's collaboration with Bob Brozman, has been played, unlike his more classical veined material for India Archive Music. Calcutta Slide-Guitar 3 though is a recording with siren calls coming from its currents and depths. An album to which the word 'noble' can be unapologetically applied; music from a man whose hands are there to liberate spontaneous creativity. An album to return to.