Over the course of his illustrious career, visionary bassist-producer Bill Laswell has been one of the most prolific and restlessly creative forces in contemporary music. A sound conceptualist who has always been a step ahead of the curve, he has put his inimitable production stamp on a stunning range of important recordings by such stars as Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Public Image Ltd, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno, Bootsy Collins, Motorhead, Sting, Carlos Santana, just to name a few. Probably most notable was Herbie Hancock, who co-wrote with Laswell the pivotal 1983 worldwide smash-hit single Rock-It, which introduced scratching to the mainstream, inspired a generation of turntablists and gave the great jazz pianist instant street credibility among the burgeoning hip-hop cognoscenti. With Means of Deliverance, his most austere and personal album to date, Laswell pushes the envelope in a zen-like way. An intimate and revealing solo bass outing, performed entirely on a Warwick Alien fretless four-string acoustic bass guitar, it puts a premium on melody while tapping into some of Laswell"s deepest roots as a musician. I think in this case, it"s about where you come from, he says of his first-ever solo bass recording. And you never lose that. If you come from a background where you hear country music, you hear blues and simple music, and you"re born with it…maybe you forget about it later on when you get involved with more complex or avant garde things, but it never really goes away. You just have to sometimes move away all the things on your plate and get back to that natural thing. In a very real sense, Means of Deliverance celebrates Laswell"s own Americana upbringing in a small town outside of Bowling Green, Kentucky. I grew up in the country, he explains. I heard hillbillies play, and it"s different than hearing them on records. And it stays with you. You see the trains go by on the tracks and you realize people are poor and there won"t be anything else for them, and that stays with you. Many of these bands today are inventing images of these things. I actually was there, I grew up like that. So you have this thing deep in you and you play that thing of where you grew up. And it"s rich. It"s American music…Midwest music. Pieces like the Delta blues-infused Low Country and the melancholy but moving Against the Upper House exude profound feelings of Laswell"s rural Midwestern upbringing while his sentir-sounding bass playing on Buhala and Epiphinea reflect his more recent interest in Moroccan, Malian and Ethiopian musics. On the buoyant A Dangerous Road, Laswell utilizes an Ebow to create a tamboura-like drone underneath his melodic motifs while he incorporates a sample of an Ethiopian stringed instrument on Bagana/Sub Figura X. Elsewhere, the adventurous bassist and improviser makes almost subliminal use of slide while also exploring bell-like harmonics on the bubbling, slowly insinuating Ouroboros and the mesmerizing In Failing Light, affects resounding upright bass tones on the sparsely appointed Aeon and strikes a surging vibe with muted strumming on the low-end groover, Lightning in the South. Means of Deliverance stands as a crowning achievement for the prolific bassist-composer-producer and occupies a special spot in Laswell"s sprawling discography. These kind of things take more priority because they"re personal, he says. And they have great meaning because you take the kind of devotion and commitment that goes into religion and you put that into each note and each chord. And that"s a powerful thing.