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His new LP River Music is a new step in Ryan Lee Crosby's musical development. Inspired by an intense study of African and Indian musicians such as Ali Farka Touré or Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya, Ryan absorbs sounds of Mali-Blues and Indian Ragas while playing a 22-stringed Indian slide-guitar and being accompanied by breath-taking tabla playing. As a contrast the sound of the band is completed by a gutsy blues harp and some mean electric guitar as if Jerry Garcia, Charles Musselwhite, and Ravi Shankar were having a relaxed jam-session on some shadowed patio somewhere in Mumbai.
Crosby has been touring across America and Europe for years, and gigs regularly in the Boston area. His new record River Music includes his versions of traditional songs with originals, mixing the past and the present into a potent musical stew. Tabla drums and West African calabash percussion support the rumbling of his electric guitar with short bursts of harmonica, taking the time-honored rhythms of the blues and stirring in a delicious, rich Eastern drone. His vocals stir this swirling broth with practiced singer’s earned confidence, crooning one minute and lamenting the next. River Music will satisfy the slightly adventurous listener as few other records I heard last year.
If blues musics are to survive this popno-tomorrow-is-already-boring-world it has to mutate and evolve, meander and stretch, and that's just what Ryan Lee Crosby does with his new album River Music by going forward into the past via India, and Malian desert music tones transmogrified via Mississippi hill country trance/drone vibes.
Ryan has been inspired by African and Indian musicians, like Ali Farka Touré and Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya. These influences are keenly felt, and as such have invested these country folk/blues with desert rhythms and Indian ragas. The songs sing out with a clarity and determination that work so well, the album should be listened to as a complete piece. This is an excellent album, that I’m also pleased is available on vinyl, as it sounds particularly great in this format.
For those of you who do not yet have an affinity for Ryan Lee Crosby, we can immediately state that his “blues” has something intriguing about it. Partly due to the use of the Eastern slide guitar, the tangents are obviously short on raga blues. But also through the use of African instruments like the West African gourd, the Mali blues also quickly comes into reach. (...) On this “River Music” we find 8 songs, most of which are obviously written by Ryan Lee himself. The most remarkable song on this album is the RL Burnside classic “Going Down South” which mixes the blues from North Mississippi with textures of North Indian Hindustani classical raga music. Closing he does with the spiritual “Since I Lay My Burden Down” and thus this “River Music” belongs among the better folk and world blues albums.