Adrift," the first track on Ruby, begins gently with rippling tabla, mournful flute, and shimmering sitar. It could almost be the soundtrack for an Indian tourism promotional film—the sun rising over the Ganges and Varanasi's ghats maybe—until the vocal comes in and we are taken to an altogether different place. This place is in many ways even more mysterious than India and relates to the work of the Persian poet Rumi, everybody's favorite Sufi mystic.

On Ruby, Iran-born Katayoun Goudarzi is responsible for the vocals while Grammy-nominated sitar player Shujaat Husain Khan takes charge of the musical accompaniment, composing all the tunes and leading a group of six Indian musicians. This is, as they say, a "musical marriage" that works. It's a cross-cultural coming together that seems effortless and natural. Khan's compositions provide the perfect musical backdrop, while Gourdarzi sings beautifully, her rich voice carefully weighing the Persian lyric as each of the songs slowly unfurls.

The mood and atmosphere of this recording is very much that of a piece; one track leading into the next without any jarring change of tempo or musical color, just a gentle shift of shades. The overall effect is enchanting, and despite a gap of nearly 800 years between the composition of words and music there seems to be no incongruity between the two. And if the literal message behind the words is veiled in mystery (and, of course, already lost to ears that cannot comprehend Farsi) then its emotional content is as clear and vivid as the blue Persian sky.