A Meeting by the River

Cooder had heard a recording of Hindustani classical music by Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and admired the clarity of the Mohan veena, the stringed instrument Bhatt created. The two met less than an hour before recording began in September 1992, and the liner notes say the recording was unplanned and unrehearsed. Cooder plays only slide guitar, Joachim Cooder, then fourteen, plays dumbek, and Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari plays tabla.

The album has four tracks, of which three are credited to Cooder and Bhatt. Longing has a structure like a raga, and on the hymn Isa Lei Cooder takes the lead while Bhatt adds asides. It reached number four on Billboard's Top World Music Albums chart and won both men the Grammy for Best World Music Album at the 1994 ceremony. AllMusic's Daniel Gioffre called it the strongest record in Cooder's catalog, the Chicago Tribune gave it four stars out of four, and Rolling Stone gave it three out of five.