Emperor's Mare

Emperor’s Mare is a collaborative instrumental track recorded by American banjo player Béla Fleck, Indian slide guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, and Taiwanese erhu musician Jie-Bing Chen. The composition appears as the second track on the album Tabula Rasā, released on May 21, 1996, under the label Water Lily Acoustics. The album adopts a fusion format that integrates elements of bluegrass, Hindustani classical music, and traditional Chinese instrumentation.

The track spans 1 minute and 39 seconds and exemplifies the album’s cross-cultural experimentation. Fleck contributes banjo passages that incorporate improvisational techniques rooted in American folk and jazz traditions. Bhatt performs on the mohan veena, a modified archlute adapted for Hindustani classical music, while Chen provides melodic lines on the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese fiddle. The interplay between these instruments creates a textural contrast between plucked, slid, and bowed timbres.

Tabula Rasā was issued as a compact disc and marked a departure from Fleck’s prior work by emphasizing acoustic world music collaboration. The album’s production prioritized natural acoustics, with recording sessions captured in a studio environment designed to preserve the organic resonance of the instruments. Water Lily Acoustics, a label specializing in high-fidelity world and classical recordings, distributed the release.

Critical reception of Tabula Rasā noted the track’s brevity and its role as a transitional piece within the album’s sequencing. The composition’s title references historical and cultural motifs, though the artists did not provide explicit programmatic notes to clarify its thematic inspiration. Live performances of material from the album occasionally featured extended improvisations on Emperor’s Mare, though no official concert recordings or alternate versions have been documented.

The broader context of the collaboration reflects a period in the mid-1990s when Fleck actively sought partnerships with non-Western musicians. Bhatt, a Grammy Award winner for his 1993 album A Meeting by the River (with Ry Cooder), brought Hindustani raga structures to the project, while Chen contributed a repertoire grounded in Chinese classical and folk traditions. The album’s liner notes credit all three artists as co-composers for the original material, though specific writing contributions for individual tracks remain undetailed in available sources.