Southwest
Southwest was definitely the right direction for Eric Tingstad to turn in discovering a new musical path. Tingstad is best known as the guitar half of his duo with oboist and ocarina player Nancy Rumbel. They've been plying their pastoral chamber music since the mid 1980s, but Tingstad clearly had some other sounds in mind when he went southwest.     From the opening track, "Sunrise at Four Corners", it's obvious this isn't another acoustic chamber work as Terry Lauber's pedal steel articulates an open plains melody. While there are echoes of old country rock bands like Poco and New Riders of the Purple Sage, Tingstad's southwestern chamber music also embraces native sounds. "Voices of the Ancient Ones" has native chants from Petra Stahl and the native flutes of Gary Stroutsos creating canyon echoes. Tingstad mixes flat-picking guitar and fingerstyle on this disc, with tunes like "The Last Caballero" sounding like an old folk tune, but with a resonance that comes from glorified memory, making it feel bigger, fuller, and richer than the original probably ever was.     Nancy Rumbel hasn't been left behind. She plays on several tracks, her oboe articulating the soulful refrain of "Kiva" against Stahl's chants. The pedal steel anchors this album in country, but this ain't line dances and spilled beer. Tingstad has taken a country sound, touched it with his chamber music aesthetic, and added just enough trail dust to make it earthy and real.   -John Diliberto, 2007.