Roll My Blues Away
OnRoll 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