Ancient-Future.com Rec. 
Matthew Montfort :
Seven Serenades for Scalloped Fretboard Guitar (US,2009)****
Matthew Montfort has cooperated for a long time (since 1978) with Ancient Future, a World Fusion group now with its own label and talent organization. He studied with gamelan director K.R.T.Wasitodiporu, with North Indian sarod master Ali Akhbar Khan, with vina master K.S.Subramanian. He performed with his scalloped fretboard guitar with people like tablaist Zakir Hussain, Chinese zither master Zhao Hui and so on, this is in fact his first solo release showing his improvised skills on guitar. Some other members from the label and friends helped him well on a texturing background or for some interactive idea.
On the first track, Alan Tower provided a didgeridoo drone replacing the Indian tampura, weil Patty Weiss played an electric violin passage. On the second track we hear a great interaction between a musical theme composition on santur by Mariah Parker, in 7/8 improvising with guitar, mixing styles perfectly. The most wonderful thing also is that Matthew Montfort fluently and colourfully paints his compositions of improvisation, without really leaning entirely towards one specific traditional style. That way, he more moodily touches the colours of an Indian raga, remains in between the conditional explorative moodiness. Very interesting for instance is his “Celtic Raga” : “This improvisation applies Indian melodic exploration techniques to a prominent scale used in Celtic music, commonly known as the Greek mixolydian mode, which corresponds to Khammaj”…from the North Indian classicification system. On “Purple Raga” he created a raga based upon “the Jimi Hendrix chord” (D7#9). The music sounds pure and not too complicated, while remaining explorative and creative all the time. Very nice.
