Rādhā Krsna Līlā

Rādhā Krsna Līlā is a track from the 1996 collaborative album Tabula Rasā. The composition features Béla Fleck on banjo, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt on mohan veena and Jie-Bing Chen on erhu. The piece spans 6 minutes and 42 seconds and appears as the third track on the release.

The album Tabula Rasā emerged from a cross-cultural fusion project that blended American bluegrass, Indian classical and Chinese traditional music. Water Lily Acoustics issued the recording on CD in 1996. The label specialized in acoustic and world music productions, emphasizing high-fidelity sound capture.

Béla Fleck contributed his signature five-string banjo technique, adapting its percussive and melodic qualities to the raga-inspired framework of the track. Vishwa Mohan Bhatt employed the mohan veena, a modified slide guitar designed for Hindustani classical performance, to anchor the composition in Indian tonal traditions. Jie-Bing Chen integrated the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese fiddle, to introduce timbral contrasts and melodic phrasing drawn from East Asian folk and classical repertoires.

The title Rādhā Krsna Līlā references themes from Vaishnava devotional traditions, though the album itself presents instrumental interpretations without vocal or lyrical components. The track exemplifies the ensemble’s approach to improvisation within structured modal progressions, a hallmark of the Tabula Rasā sessions.

Critical reception of the album noted its experimental fusion of disparate musical systems, with particular attention to the interplay between Fleck’s banjo and Bhatt’s mohan veena. The recording process occurred in studio environments optimized for acoustic instrumentation, though specific session details remain undocumented in publicly available sources.