Yeah, there's a million of em in all genres, but one of my favorites is Tony Furtado "Roll My Blues Away", an acoustic blues and blue-grass combination with stellar string picking by all the players, and a great sounding album too. A little more than just banjo and slide guitar, but not too much. Kelly Joe Phelps also plays guitar and lends vocals to a few songs and does a very good job. Some great progressive bluegrass, to be sure.
Amazon.com
On Roll My Blues Away, Tony Furtado combines his bluegrass banjo past and his slide-guitar blues future with a haunting, spare elegance that marks this as a superior acoustic-instrumental. Like Fleck and Cooder, Furtado has learned that the liberation of acoustic music lies not in playing more notes faster but in playing fewer notes with more feeling. On this album's 10 original instrumentals and two traditional songs, the arrangements are stripped down to focus on the strong melodies. His guitar sounds weary but content on the lovely Tex-Mex ballad, "Song for Early"; his banjo evokes the prickly dissatisfaction of the slow blues, "Willow Tree"; he plays both guitar and banjo on the nervous, restless tune, "The Stark Raven." --Geoffrey Himes
