Album: Nguyen Le, Saiyuki (ACT)

The Japanese title means "Journey to the West", which in this case indicates a journey – led by the Paris-based Vietnamese Nguyen – with the Japanese koto-player and singer Mieko Miyazaki, tabla-player Prabhu Edouard and the great Hindustani flute player Hariprasad Chaurasia. Each is conversant withtransnational modernstyles. The resulting musicchanges its cultural centreof gravity from track totrack. Sometimes it's northIndia; sometimes it linksJapan and San Francisco.Asparky experiment.