Talking Timbuktu is the 1994 collaboration between Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré and American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder. Its ten tracks provide a meeting place for two musicians whose histories should remain visible even when their instruments suggest a connection. The album's identity begins with both names.
A Meeting by the River is a 1993 Grammy-winning world music crossover album recorded in September 1992 by Ry Cooder on slide guitar and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on the Mohan veena—an instrument Bhatt created—with Joachim Cooder on dumbek and Sukhvinder Singh Namdhari on tabla. The session was unplanned and unrehearsed: Cooder and Bhatt met less than an hour before recording began. Produced and engineered by Kavichandran Alexander, it features voice-like phrasing, alternating and unison melodic lines, and improvisation rooted in Hindustani classical tradition and blues sensibility. Its four tracks—'A Meeting by the River', 'Longing', 'Ganges Delta Blues', and 'Isa Lei'—are noted for clarity, distinctness, and three-dimensional sound quality.
Paradise and Lunch is a 1974 Reprise Records album of jazz, blues, and roots covers recorded at Warner Brothers Studios. Ry Cooder plays guitar, mandolin, and sings. Milt Holland plays drums and percussion. Russ Titelman and Lenny Waronker produced. Cooder’s updated arrangement of Washington Phillips’ 'The Tattler' stands out for its guitar playing. The closing track 'Ditty Wah Ditty' features a duet with Earl 'Fatha' Hines. It belongs to Cooder’s 1970s folk-and-blues triptych with Into the Purple Valley and Boomer's Story. It reflects his practice of exploring bygone genres and updating old-time recordings.
Sticky Fingers is the Rolling Stones' ninth studio album, released in April 1971 on their newly formed Rolling Stones Records label. Recorded between December 1969 and 1971 at Muscle Shoals in Alabama, Olympic Studios in London, and via the band's mobile studio at Stargroves, it was the first Stones album to feature guitarist Mick Taylor throughout and the first since the death of Brian Jones. Jimmy Miller produced, with Andy Warhol contributing the album's famous zip-fastened cover. It became the band's first album to reach number one in both Britain and America.