The Jade Princess

Tabula Rasā is a collaborative studio album released in 1996 under the label Water Lily Acoustics. The recording features American banjo player Béla Fleck, Indian slide guitarist Vishwa Mohan Bhatt and Taiwanese erhu performer Jie-Bing Chen. The album explores cross-cultural fusion by integrating bluegrass, Hindustani classical music and traditional Chinese instrumentation.

The tenth track, The Jade Princess, runs for 2 minutes and 57 seconds. The composition blends Chen’s erhu with Fleck’s banjo and Bhatt’s mohan veena, creating a textural interplay between Eastern and Western acoustic traditions. The album’s production emphasizes natural acoustics, with minimal post-processing to preserve the organic timbres of the instruments.

Water Lily Acoustics issued Tabula Rasā on CD. The release date for the album is confirmed as 1996, though the exact day and month remain undocumented in available sources. The label specialized in high-fidelity recordings of world and classical music, and this project marked one of Fleck’s early forays into non-bluegrass collaboration.

Critical reception and commercial performance details for Tabula Rasā are not provided in the given context. The album’s tracklist beyond The Jade Princess is also unconfirmed, as the provided data focuses solely on the tenth track. No live performances or subsequent reissues of the recording are documented here.