SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
SPRING, 2021
VOLUME TEN NUMBER ONE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
JEREMY PELT
(April 17-23)
WILLIAM GRANT STILL
(April 24-30)
AMINA CLAUDINE MYERS
(May 1-7)
KARRIEM RIGGINS
(May 8-14)
ETTA JONES
(May 15-21)
YUSEF LATEEF
(May 22-28)
CHRISTIAN SANDS
(May 29—June 4)
E. J. STRICKLAND
(June 5-11)
TAJ MAHAL
(June 12-18)
COLERIDGE-TAYLOR PERKINSON
(June 19-25)
DOM FLEMONS
(June 26-July 2)
HEROES ARE GANG LEADERS
(July 3-July 9)
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/taj-mahal-mn0000790604/biography
Taj Mahal
(b. May 17, 1942)
Artist Biography by Steve Huey
One of the most prominent figures in late 20th century blues, singer/multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal played an enormous role in revitalizing and preserving traditional acoustic blues. Not content to stay within that realm, Mahal soon broadened his approach, taking a musicologist's interest in a multitude of folk and roots music from around the world -- reggae and other Caribbean folk, jazz, gospel, R&B, zydeco, various West African styles, Latin, even Hawaiian. The African-derived heritage of most of those forms allowed Mahal to explore his own ethnicity from a global perspective and to present the blues as part of a wider musical context. Yet while he dabbled in many different genres, he never strayed too far from his laid-back country blues foundation. Blues purists naturally didn't have much use for Mahal's music, and according to some of his other detractors, his multi-ethnic fusions sometimes came off as indulgent, or overly self-conscious and academic. Still, Mahal's concept was vindicated in the '90s, when a cadre of young bluesmen began to follow his lead -- both acoustic revivalists (Keb' Mo', Guy Davis) and eclectic bohemians (Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart).
Taj Mahal was born Henry St. Clair Fredericks in New York on May 17, 1942. His parents -- his father a jazz pianist/composer/arranger of Jamaican descent, his mother a schoolteacher from South Carolina who sang gospel -- moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, when he was quite young, and while growing up there, he often listened to music from around the world on his father's short-wave radio. He particularly loved the blues -- both acoustic and electric -- and early rock & rollers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. While studying agriculture and animal husbandry at the University of Massachusetts, he adopted the musical alias Taj Mahal (an idea that came to him in a dream) and formed Taj Mahal & the Elektras, who played around the area during the early '60s. After graduating, Mahal moved to Los Angeles in 1964 and, after making his name on the local folk-blues scene, formed the Rising Sons with guitarist Ry Cooder. The group signed to Columbia and released one single, but the label didn't quite know what to make of their forward-looking blend of Americana, which anticipated a number of roots rock fusions that would take shape in the next few years; as such, the album they recorded sat on the shelves, unreleased until 1992.
Frustrated, Mahal left the group and wound up staying with Columbia as a solo artist. His self-titled debut was released in early 1968 and its stripped-down approach to vintage blues sounds made it unlike virtually anything else on the blues scene at the time. It came to be regarded as a classic of the '60s blues revival, as did its follow-up, Natch'l Blues. The half-electric, half-acoustic double-LP set Giant Step followed in 1969, and taken together, those three records built Mahal's reputation as an authentic yet unique modern-day bluesman, gaining wide exposure and leading to collaborations or tours with a wide variety of prominent rockers and bluesmen. During the early '70s, Mahal's musical adventurousness began to take hold; 1971's Happy Just to Be Like I Am heralded his fascination with Caribbean rhythms, and the following year's double-live set, The Real Thing, added a New Orleans-flavored tuba section to several tunes. In 1973, Mahal branched out into movie soundtrack work with his compositions for Sounder, and the following year he recorded his most reggae-heavy outing, Mo' Roots.
Mahal continued to record for Columbia through 1976, when he switched to Warner Bros.; he recorded three albums for that label, all in 1977 (including a soundtrack for the film Brothers). Changing musical climates, however, were decreasing interest in Mahal's work and he spent much of the '80s off record, eventually moving to Hawaii to immerse himself in another musical tradition. Mahal returned in 1987 with Taj, an album issued by Gramavision that explored this new interest; the following year, he inaugurated a string of successful, well-received children's albums with Shake Sugaree. The next few years brought a variety of side projects, including a musical score for the lost Langston Hughes/Zora Neale Hurston play Mule Bone that earned Mahal a Grammy nomination in 1991.
The same year marked Mahal's full-fledged return to regular recording and touring, kicked off with the first of a series of well-received albums on the Private Music label, Like Never Before. Follow-ups, such as Dancing the Blues (1993) and Phantom Blues (1996), drifted into more rock, pop, and R&B-flavored territory; in 1997, Mahal won a Grammy for Señor Blues. Meanwhile, he undertook a number of small-label side projects that constituted some of his most ambitious forays into world music. Released in 1995, Mumtaz Mahal teamed him with classical Indian musicians; 1998's Sacred Island was recorded with his new Hula Blues Band as he explored Hawaiian music in greater depth, and 1999's Kulanjan was a duo performance with Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté. Maestro appeared in 2008, boasting an array of all-star guests: Diabaté, Angélique Kidjo, Ziggy Marley, Los Lobos, Jack Johnson, and Ben Harper. A holiday album with the Blind Boys of Alabama, Talkin' Christmas, appeared in time for the season in 2014. In 2017, Mahal teamed with Keb' Mo' to spotlight the good-time side of the blues on TajMo.
https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/tajmahal
Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal - guitar, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist
Taj Mahal has spent more than 40 years exploring the roots and branches of the blues. Grounded in the acoustic pre-war blues sound but drawn to the eclectic sounds of world music, he revitalized a dying tradition and prepared the way for a new generation of blues men and women. While many African Americans shunned older musical styles during the 1960s, Mahal immersed himself in the roots of his past. “I was interested in the music because I felt something [got] lost in that transition of blacks trying to assimilate into society.” He had no intention of repeating what had come before, however, and drew deeply from the wells of the ethnic music of Africa, South America, and the Caribbean.
Taj Mahal was born Henry Saint Claire Fredericks in New York City in 1942. His father, who had emigrated from the Caribbean, wrote arrangements for Benny Goodman and played piano. His mother, Mildred Shields, had taught school in South Carolina. “Even though I have Southern and Caribbean roots, my background also crossed with indigenous European and African influences,” Mahal told Down Beat. “My parents introduced me to gospel, spiritual singing, to Ella, Sarah, Mahalia Jackson, Ray Charles.” Mahal also listened to music from around the world on his father's short-wave radio, and developed a love for blues artists like Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins, and early rock-n-rollers like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Mahal's family moved when he was a young boy and he grew up in Massachusetts. Growing up in Springfield, Mass., Mahal was a rarity”a young African American who immersed himself in the study of his cultural heritage. At age 11 he witnessed the death of his father in a farming accident, but he found solace in music. When his mother remarried, he discovered his stepfather's guitar in the basement and learned to play it with a broken comb. He also took lessons from Lynnwood Perry and absorbed the radio sounds of jazz players like Illinois Jacquet and Ben Webster. Although he is primarily known as a guitarist, Mahal mastered an arsenal of instruments including piano, banjo, mandolin, and harmonica.
Mahal studied agriculture and animal husbandry at the University of Massachusetts. A dream inspired him to change his name from Fredericks, and he formed Taj Mahal and the Elektras in the early 1960s. He was lucky enough to have his ideas coincide with the '60s and the resurgence of the blues. He attended the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s to witness the folk and blues revival first hand. The opportunity to watch traditional blues players perform and meet the artists in person reinforced his decision to play acoustic guitar.
After graduating in 1964 Mahal moved to Los Angeles and formed the Rising Sons with Ry Cooder. The group signed with Columbia, but the label was unsure how to market the eclectic group. The band was unmatched on the L.A. scene, with a repertoire including electrified country blues and traditional folk tunes, although the Rising Sons released one single, the rest of the band's recorded material remained locked away in Columbia's vaults until 1992.
After the Rising Sons broke up, Mahal remained with Columbia and recorded his self-titled debut album, “Taj Mahal.” The album was a startling statement in its time and has held up remarkably well. The follow-up album, “The Natch'l Blues,” was equally well received. Mahal, however, soon revealed his penchant for going his own way, recording the half electric, half acoustic double album “Giant Step,” in 1969. Those three records built Mahal's reputation as an authentic yet unique modern-day bluesman.
Mahal continued to explore new directions in the 1970s. “Happy Just to Be Like I Am,” surveyed Caribbean rhythms, while “The Real Thing,” added New Orleans tubas. In 1973 he recorded the soundtrack for the movie “Sounder,” and the following year released “Mo' Roots,” an album heavily influenced by reggae. In 1976 Mahal left Columbia for Warner Brothers, where he recorded three albums in 1977 alone.
After remaining relatively silent through much of the 1980s, Mahal recorded the well-received “Taj,” in 1987. He then released “Shake Sugaree,” the first of several children's albums, and recorded a musical score for Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's lost play, “Mule Bone,” for which he received a Grammy nomination.
He signed with Private Music and released “Dancing the Blues” in 1993 and “Phantom Blues,” in 1996. Mahal is a fine interpreter, breezy and light on love tunes, righteous and randy on cheatin' songs, and soulful and shouting on the dance numbers. “Phantom Blues,” also included high-profile guest appearances by guitarist Eric Clapton and singer Bonnie Raitt. In 1997 he won a Grammy for “Señor Blues.” He followed up with another Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album for “Shoutin' in Key: Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band Live” in 2000.
Mahal's next music project grew out of his 15-year residency in Hawaii during the 1980s and 1990s. Joining with the Hula Blues Band, he recorded “Sacred Island,” in 1998, and followed it with “Taj Mahal and the Hula Blues” the same year and “Hanapepe Dream,” in 2003. This recording would also be the first of his albums to be released on his on label, Kan-Du. In 2005 he released “Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band in St. Lucia.” This was followed with “Mkutano,” where he joined up with musicians from Zanzibar, displaying once again his versatility and global scope in music.
If the mixing of genres such as blues, Zydeco, gospel, and Latin music seems natural today, it is because of pioneers like Mahal. He opened up myriad possibilities for young artists who wanted to expand their musical palette beyond traditional blues. In the '90s, Guy Davis, Keb' Mo', Corey Harris, and Alvin Youngblood Hart, all flowing out of the surge in cultural consciousness that ensued as the offspring of the civil rights generation came into their own, prove Taj Mahal a pioneer.
While proud of his accomplishments, Mahal has remained more interested in pursuing current projects. He has recorded more than 25 albums and traveled throughout the world, continuing to explore new musical veins, playing as many as 200 dates a year, and releasing a steady stream of albums. Whether he's with a full band playing pop arrangements or stripped-down roots, Mahal has asserted himself as a keeper of the faith and a still vital force that continues to roam past musical boundaries.
Taj Mahal 2019
Taj Mahal doesn’t wait for permission. If a sound intrigues him, he sets out to make it. If origins mystify him, he moves to trace them. If rules get in his way, he unapologetically breaks them. To Taj, convention means nothing, but traditions are holy. He has pushed music and culture forward, all while looking lovingly back.
“I just want to be able to make the music that I’m hearing come to me––and that’s what I did,” Taj says. The 76-year-old is home in Berkeley, reflecting on six decades of music making. “When I say, ‘I did,’ I’m not coming from the ego. The music comes from somewhere. You’re just the conduit it comes through. You’re there to receive the gift.”
Taj is a towering musical figure––a legend who transcended the blues not by leaving them behind, but by revealing their magnificent scope to the world. “The blues is bigger than most people think,” he says. “You could hear Mozart play the blues. It might be more like a lament. It might be more melancholy. But I’m going to tell you: the blues is in there.”
If anyone knows where to find the blues, it’s Taj. A brilliant artist with a musicologist’s mind, he has pursued and elevated the roots of beloved sounds with boundless devotion and skill. Then, as he traced origins to the American South, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, he created entirely new sounds, over and over again. As a result, he’s not only a god to rock-and-roll icons such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, but also a hero to ambitious artists toiling in obscurity who are determined to combine sounds that have heretofore been ostracized from one another. No one is as simultaneously traditional and avant-garde.
“What inspires me most about my career is that I’ve been able to make a living playing the music that I always loved and wanted to play since the early 50s,” Mahal says. “And the fact that I still am involved in enjoying an exciting career at this point in time is truly priceless. I’m doing this the old fashioned way and it ain’t easy..”
Quantifying Taj’s significance is impossible, but people try anyway. A 2017 Grammy win for TajMo, his collaboration with Keb’ Mo’, brought his Grammy tally to three wins and 14 nominations, and underscored his undiminished relevance more than 50 years after his solo debut. Blues Hall of Fame membership, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association, and other honors punctuate his résumé. He appreciates the accolades, but his motivation lies elsewhere. “It’s not a hunger, not a lust or even a thirst,” Taj says of what drives him. “It’s just more knowledge of self––to realize that almost everything is right here. We’re so used to looking outside of ourselves for things, and it’s right here.”
Taj’s exploration of music began as an exploration of self. He was born in 1942 in Harlem to musical parents––his father was a jazz pianist with Caribbean roots; mother was a gospel-singing schoolteacher from South Carolina––who cultivated an appreciation for both personal history and the arts in their son. “I was raised really conscious of my African roots,” Taj says. “So I was trying to find out: where does what we do here connect to what we left there?” In the early 1950s, his family moved to Springfield, Massachusetts––a microcosmic melting pot for immigrants from across the globe: the Caribbean, the American South, Europe, the Mediterranean, Syria, Lebanon. “Music was everywhere,” he says. “Things were different in those days. There weren’t a lot of places that African Americans had to go out to entertain themselves. So people did a lot of entertaining in their homes. Friday or Saturday night, you’d move the furniture, mop and wax the floor, and set things up so people could pop over and hear all the music.
From the beginning, Taj found the blues magnetic, even as most artists around him in the Northeast were exploring other sounds. “I could hear little strains of the blues coming through––you could feel that energy in the music that was being played,” he says. “I could also feel that energy of the blues inside myself.” Piano lessons didn’t stick––“I’d already heard what I wanted to play”––so when a blues guitarist from
North Carolina moved in next door, Taj found an early mentor and was off.
For college, Taj attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He graduated after studying agriculture and animal husbandry. “I knew I’d like to connect myself to something on this planet that’s meaningful,” he says. “That’s why I was interested in agriculture and music. Those were the two things that I recognized even as a very young child that people are never going to do without.”
In 1964, Taj packed up and headed west. In Los Angeles, he formed six-piece the Rising Sons with Ry Cooder. The group opened for Otis Redding, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas, and recorded an album, but it wasn’t released until about 30 years later. “I guess that’s when they decided, ‘Whoa. I guess this guy is real,’” Taj says, with a hint of a smirk. He’s referring to record executives––a breed for whom he has little patience. “For me, playing the old music was a refuge from all the stupid stuff that was going on,” he says, pausing for a moment to point out commercialization’s limiting effects on what was both recorded and heard.
In 1967, Taj’s self-titled debut announced the arrival of bold young bluesman. The following year ushered in two milestones: sophomore album The Natch’l Blues dropped, and Taj performed in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a film featuring performances from the Stones, The Who, Marianne Faithfull, and others meant for the BBC but pulled and kept from public eyes until 1996. In 1969, full of music and only just beginning, Taj released Giant Step / De Ole Folks at Home, a massive double album that hinted at Taj’s refusal to be boxed in.
The 70s were a productive and ambitious recording period for Taj that included the Grammy-nominated soundtrack for the film Sounder. He began experimenting with global fusions and flirtations, signaling to listeners his restless intention to discover both new and old and disregard commercially imposed boundaries. In the 80s, Taj moved to Hawaii, and fell in love with sounds native to the island as he toured constantly, internationally. His gritty blues began to incorporate Latin, reggae, Caribbean, calypso, cajun, jazz, and more, all layered over a distinctly Afrocentric roots base he’d been raised to rediscover.
For Taj, the 90s were incredibly prolific. Back-to-back Grammy wins for the Best Contemporary Blues Album recognized two dynamic projects with the Phantom Blues Band: Señor Blues and Shoutin’ in Key. “I noticed that when it came to complicated pieces of blues music, they’d never get played,” Taj says. “It’s one of the reasons we put Señor Blues out––to say, ‘You guys, you know there is more that just the same old [imitates a beat] di da di di di da.’ It’s good when you believe it when you’re playing it. But just to play it as a cliche? That’s real boring. And real tiring.” Collaborations with Hawaiian, African, Indian, and other musicians helped define his decade.
Over the years, Taj had also emerged as a mind-boggling, multifaceted player. In addition to the guitar, he has become proficient on about 20 different instruments––and counting. “There weren’t an awful lot of people still playing these instruments that came from my culture,” Taj explains. “Not that they didn’t before, but nobody was playing them in the time I was. But I wanted to hear them. So I watched people play, got one, sat down, remembered the music that I was listening to, and started picking it out on the mandolin or banjo or 12-string.”
Taj didn’t slow down as he entered the 21st century. Maestro, marking the 40th anniversary of his recording career and featuring a global mix of voices ranging from Angelique Kidjo to Los Lobos to Ziggy Marley to Ben Harper, dropped in 2008. Last year, his highly anticipated collaboration with Keb’ Mo’––TajMo––netted Taj his third Grammy. Several projects are currently in the works, as Taj remains excited by fresh young voices trying new things and exhumed treasures that have been buried too long.
As Taj thinks about the dozens and dozens of albums, collaborations, live experiences, and captured sounds, he finds satisfaction in one main idea. “As long as I’m never sitting here, saying to myself, ‘You know? You had an idea 50 years ago, and you didn’t follow through,’ I’m really happy,” he says. “It doesn’t even matter that other people get to hear it. It matters that I get to hear it––that I did it.”
“Like ancient culture,” he adds, “the people are as much a part of the performance as the music. Live communication through music, oh yeah, it’s right up there with oxygen!”
Using traditional country blues as a starting place, Mahal perfumes the pot by mixing a spicy concoction of Afrocentric roots music, a blues gumbo kissed by reggae, Latin, R&B, Cajun, Caribbean rhythms, gospel, West African folk, jazz, calypso, and Hawaiian slack key. The savory dish he serves is both a satisfying and uplifting stew that actually transforms ‘singin’ the blues’ into something to be very happy about.
The Early Years
The parents of Harlem born Henry St. Claire Fredericks, Jr. (Mahal’s given name until his dreams of Gandhi, India and social tolerance inspired him to change it) came of age during the Harlem Renaissance and instilled in their son a sense of pride in his West Indian and African ancestry. Growing up in Springfield Massachusetts, Mahal’s father was a jazz pianist, composer and arranger of Caribbean descent (called “The Genius” by Ella Fitzgerald) who frequently hosted musicians from the Caribbean, Africa and the U.S. His mother was a schoolteacher and gospel singer from South Carolina. Henry Sr. had an extensive record collection and a shortwave radio that brought sounds from across the world into their home.
Back in the 1950s, Springfield was full of recent arrivals from all over the globe, allowing Mahal to understand and appreciate many world cultures. “We spoke several dialects in my house – Southern, Caribbean, African – and we heard dialects from eastern and western Europe,” he says. In addition, musicians from the Caribbean, Africa and all over the U.S. frequently visited the Fredericks home, and Mahal became even more fascinated with roots – the origins of the various forms of music he was hearing, the path they took to reach their current form, and how they influenced each other along the way. He threw himself into the study of older forms of African-American music, which the major record companies of the day largely ignored.
Mahal’s parents started him out on classical piano lessons, but he soon expanded his scope to include clarinet, trombone and harmonica and discovered his talent for singing. His stepfather (his mother remarried after Henry Sr. was killed in a tragic accident) owned a guitar and Mahal began playing it in his early teens, becoming serious when a guitarist from North Carolina moved in next door and taught him the various styles of Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed and other titans of Delta and Chicago blues.
Before music became a viable option, Mahal – who first began working on a dairy farm at 16 and was a foreman by 19 – thought about pursuing a career in farming. Over the years, this ongoing passion has led to him performing regularly at Farm Aid concerts. In the early 60s, he studied agriculture (minoring in veterinary science and agronomy) at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he formed the popular U. Mass party band, the Elektras. After graduating, he headed west in 1964 to Los Angeles, where he formed the Rising Sons, a six-piece outfit that included guitarist Ry Cooder.
The band opened for numerous high-profile touring artists of the ‘60s, including Otis Redding, the Temptations and Martha and the Vandellas. Around this same time, Mahal also mingled with various blues legends, including Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Sleepy John Estes. He and Cooder also worked during this period with the Rolling Stones, and in 1968, he performed in the classic film “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.”
This diversity of musical experience served as the bedrock for Mahal’s first three recordings: Taj Mahal (1967), The Natch’l Blues (1968) and Giant Step (1969). Drawing on the eclectic sounds and styles he’d absorbed as a child and a young adult, these early albums showed signs of the musical exploration that would become Mahal’s hallmark in the years to come. In the 1970s, Mahal carved out a unique musical niche with a string of adventurous recordings, including Happy To be Just Like I Am (1971), Recycling the Blues and Other Related Stuff (1972), the GRAMMY®-nominated soundtrack to the movie Sounder (1973), Mo’ Roots (1974), Music Fuh Ya (Music Para Tu) (1977) and Evolution (The Most Recent) (1978). The type of blues he was playing in the early 70s showed an aptitude for spicing the mix with exotic flavors that kept him from being an out and out mainstream genre performer.
Mahal’s recorded output slowed somewhat during the 1980s as he toured relentlessly and immersed himself in the music and culture of his new home in Hawaii. Still, that decade saw the well-received release of Mahal in 1987, as well as the first three of his celebrated children’s albums on the Music For Little People label. He returned to a full recording and touring schedule in the 1990s, including such projects as the musical scores for the Langston Hughes/Zora Neale Hurston play Mule Bone (1991) and the movie Zebrahead (1992). Later in the decade, Mahal released a series of recordings with the Phantom Blues Band, including Dancing the Blues (1993), Phantom Blues (1996), and the two GRAMMY® winners, Señor Blues (1997) and the live Shoutin’ in Key (2000). Overall, he has been nominated for nine GRAMMY® Awards.
During this same period, Mahal continued to expand his multicultural horizons by joining Indian classical musicians on Mumtaz Mahal in 1995, and recording Sacred Island, a blend of Hawaiian music and blues, with the Hula Blues Band in 1998. Kulanjan, released in 1999, was a collaborative project with Malian kora master Toumani Diabate (the kora is a 21-string west African harp). Mahal felt that this recording embodied his musical and cultural spirit arriving full circle. He recorded a second album with the Hula Blues Band, Hanapepe Dream, in 2003, followed by the European release Zanzibar in 2005. His 2008 Heads Up International recording Maestro marked the 40th anniversary of his recording career and featured performances by Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Angelique Kidjo, Los Lobos, Ziggy Marley and others – many of whom have been directly influenced by Mahal’s music and guidance.
“What inspires me most about my career is that I’ve been able to make a living playing the music that I always loved and wanted to play since the early 50s,” Mahal says. “And the fact that I still am involved in enjoying an exciting career at this point in time is truly priceless. I’m doing this the old fashioned way and it ain’t easy. I work it and I earn it. My relationship with my audience has been fun, with great respect going both ways! I am extremely lucky to have fans who have listened to the music I choose to play and have stayed with me for 50 years. These fans have also introduced their children, grandchildren and in some cases great-grand children to this fabulous treasure of music that I am privileged to represent. It’s very exciting, to say the least.
“Like ancient culture,” he adds, “the people are as much a part of the performance as the music. Live communication through music, oh yeah, it’s right up there with oxygen!”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/listening-booth-taj-mahal-unsung-blues-south
Listening Booth: Taj Mahal and the Unsung Blues of the South
The blues singer and multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal began his career in the late sixties, making albums of stark vintage sounds. He has since embraced influences from Hawaii, the Caribbean, Africa, and many other places, but his heart lies with the unheralded musicians of the Deep South. He’s long been a supporter of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, a nonprofit based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, which for the past twenty years has been helping older blues artists to continue to perform.
On August 10th, the Music Maker Blues Revue comes to Lincoln Center. The show will feature Dom Flemons, a young multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops; Beverly (Guitar) Watkins, a hard-stomping singer and guitarist; and Ironing Board Sam, a keyboardist who, when he started out, in the fifties, propped his instrument on an ironing board. Taj Mahal spoke to me recently about the importance of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, and shared a few of his favorite tracks by artists connected to the organization.
When the foundation was formed, in the nineties, Mahal told me, “so many so-called scholars and ethnomusicologists were certain that all the Southern music of any significance or importance had been chronicled and documented and there wasn’t any more to be had. Along comes M.M.R.F. and—bang!—we got a whole new ball of wax with tons of talent and not one with a familiar name at all. Colorful names, no less, but completely unknown outside their own community, local area, or ‘drink house’ (a modern-day combo of bar, social club, check-cashing facility, and sometime dance hall, usually located in someone’s house).”
“Many of these musicians were passed up by talent scouts, or were locally successful and made recordings years ago, or were never discovered at all,” Mahal continued. “Some left home in the South and plied their musical wares and talents in the industrial cities of the North. Many, tired of the constant noise and calamity of those cities, returned back South and, as often as not, to a poverty-stricken or nearly poverty-stricken life.”
Here is Mahal’s playlist, with his notes below. (Several songs feature Mahal on instruments.)
[audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/44320332"]
1. Cootie Stark, “High Yellow,” featuring Taj Mahal. Stark spent his whole life playing on the streets of Southern cities, tobacco towns, and hamlets. Dressed sharp, he was always pleasant! Here’s his take on the topic of a certain kind of sought-after, good-lookin’ woman that many Southern men dreamed about having in their lives.
2. Neal (Big Daddy) Pattman, “Shortnin’ Bread,” featuring Taj Mahal. I learned this old-time song from my mom when I was a child of three or four years old, and continue to hear it from so many different people and sources (mostly Southern) to this very day. Pattman drops in some brand-new verses and creates a version that I had never heard in all my years of listening and knowing this Southern classic.
3. Precious Bryant, “If You Don’t Love Me, Would You Fool Me Good.” Every time I hear Bryant’s voice, it’s as if I’ve known her forever but am hearing the song for the very first time! She just engages you on the spot.
4. Beverly (Guitar) Watkins, “Back in Business!” This lady is a flat-out musician who can duke it out onstage with the best there is—man, woman, or child prodigy. You have not seen a show until you catch Ms. Beverly in action! I’m still feeling the effects, and have some great memories of touring the country and playing onstage with her.
5. Adolphus Bell, “Child Support Blues.” This man knew what entertainment was all about. Bell could take any group of folks—indoor, outdoor, onstage, in the park, on a cruise ship, in a club, wherever—and have them rollin’ with laughter and music. No topic was taboo.
6. Eddie Tigner, “Route 66.” Now this is some real cool, smooth music! Makes you want to get out on the road in a convertible and drive ole Route 66 to L.A. again. I’ve known this song since the late forties, a Nat King Cole record my parents had and played a lot at house parties along with other great music of that era.
7. Captain Luke, “Old Black Buck,” featuring Cool John Ferguson. The absolutely amazing coffee-and-deep-molasses voice of Captain Luke and the beautifully country-picked guitar of Cool John breathe new life and nuance into this rural classic. This song is sung in many different traditions in the South, where tales of exceptional animals abound.
8. John Dee Holeman, “Mistreated Blues,” featuring Taj Mahal. John Dee hails from Louisburg, North Carolina, where my late friend and first and only guitar teacher came from. Upon meeting John Dee and playing with him for the first time, I remarked that he played just like my guitar teacher Lynwood Perry, from Louisburg. He said, “I’m from Louisburg!” We’ve been fast friends and musical pals ever since.
9. Neal (Big Daddy) Pattman, “Catfish Blues,” featuring Taj Mahal and Cootie Stark.
A Mississippi Delta classic that made its way through the South,
bluesman by bluesman, and into countless repertoires. Here Pattman gives
us a soulful reading, as if we are being pulled downstream by the big
river itself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Music legend Taj Mahal talks music, race and the Rolling Stones
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Taj Mahal was not yet a blues legend when the Rolling Stones first heard him live in the mid-1960s at the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles. But they immediately became avid fans of his no-nonsense instrumental prowess, earthy singing and charismatic stage presence.
Such avid fans, in fact, that Mahal was the only American artist the now-legendary English band invited to perform in London as part of their 1968 concert film, “The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.” As the recently released expanded “Circus” DVD and CD box set vividly attests, he was a standout in a lineup that also included the Stones, The Who, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, Eric Clapton and Marianne Faithfull.
Clapton would later be a guest on an album by Mahal, who may well be the only veteran blues great to earn a degree in agriculture and animal husbandry from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst before launching his musical career. The New York-born Mahal’s many other collaborators range from Miles Davis, Bonnie Raitt, Los Lobos and the Pointer Sisters to John Lee Hooker, Ziggy Marley, Ben Harper and the Stones.
“The Stones came to see us in 1965 at the Whiskey and they were all dancing and enjoying our music. They were earnest, they really loved the American artists they were learning from and they had a lot of good things to say about them. They really helped my career,” said Mahal, who headlines Saturday’s AimLoan.com San Diego Blues Festival with his acclaimed Phantom Blues Band. The full performance schedule appears below.
Now in its ninth year, the festival is a fundraiser for the Jacobs & Cushman San Diego Food Bank’s hunger-relief programs. Since debuting in 2011, the nonprofit event has raised more than $955,000 and 14 tons of food to feed individuals and families in need throughout San Diego County. (Cash donations and cans of food will be accepted Saturday at the front gate of the festival.)
Mahal, fittingly, has long been a source of rich aural nourishment, recording more than 50 albums and performing countless concerts around the world. Along the way, he has won four Grammy Awards — the most recent just last year for his duo album with Keb’ Mo’ — and received an array of Lifetime Achievement awards and honorary doctorates.
From Ry Cooder to four tubas
A tireless musical crusader for nearly 60 of his 77 years, Mahal first gained regional attention in 1964. That was when he co-founded the Rising Sons, a talent-packed L.A. band that also included fellow singer and guitarist Ry Cooder and jazz drum veteran Ed Cassidy, who later was a charter member of the genre-leaping rock band Spirit.
Mahal, who was born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, released four solo albums between early 1968 and late 1969. While steeped in various acoustic and electric blues traditions, his artistic scope was already broad and has only become more expansive in the intervening years.
An early landmark was his superb 1971 double-live album, “The Real Thing.” It showcases the singer and multi-instrumentalist leading a nine-piece band that includes a four-man tuba section featuring Howard Johnson and Bob Stewart.
“The tuba band was interesting,” Mahal recalled. “I’d done my first five albums and the ‘Sounder’ film soundtrack. I was a young, black musician, very well-liked by the counterculture, and I was doing a different thing from other people. The guys that came over with the British Invasion bands knew well who I was. But, somehow or other, I couldn’t seem to start jump-start my career... I didn’t have the correct business acumen with management.
“Howard and Bob had a band, Substructure, that had seven tuba players, piano, bass and drums. I was like: ‘What? Let me hear this!’ I did, and I was knocked out. I was ready to jump into something different. It was clear I should do what I wanted. I didn’t want to get to a point, later in life, of saying: ‘Man, I had these ideas...’ If I hear something I like and want to work it in, that’s what I do.”
Blues, rock, folk, soul, swing, ragtime, calypso, reggae, Hawaiian and various African music styles are all part of Mahal’s creative palate. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I have five different bands, and each has a particular sound that I write a certain way for and then cross-reference. I’m having fun, man! I’m not waiting for anyone to tell me what to do,” Mahal said, speaking by phone from his Northern California home.
“I just hope people are excited that I’m excited about music. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But they certainly show up when we play.”
That was not the case when he began performing as a teenager.
One of the few young artists of his generation to embrace rural acoustic blues in the 1960s, as well as the electrified Chicago blues style pioneered by Muddy Waters and Little Walter, Mahal initially found difficulty drawing audiences. His devotion at the time to raw, stripped-down folk-blues was an advantage, artistically, but a major impediment, commercially speaking.
“Stripped of all your possibilities, you don’t have any concept of who you are, so you don’t know what’s real when you hear it,” he said.
“Growing up, I was taught there was all this beautiful culture and that I should honor and support it. A lot of people, black people, are not raised that way. They’re raised to be negative — and older music reminds them of a time when they didn’t have control over their lives, as opposed to being able to see the beauty of the music for what it is.
“You don’t have to be religious to love great gospel music by Baptist people! I do what I want to, because I want to. Nobody can pay me to play music. They can pay me to put up with all of what I have to do in order to get to play music. But I play music for free. That’s why it sounds like it does. I’m a free man and will express myself freely through the music.”
‘The U.S. is a young country’
Like other American blues and jazz greats before him, Mahal has been embraced by audiences in Europe, Japan, Africa and South America. Those audiences often display greater respect for, and knowledge of, rootsy American music than audiences here.
“Those countries are not an experiment — the U.S. is a young country and we are experimenting and constantly evolving,” Mahal noted. “People in Europe are not insecure about who they are. They have classical music, they’re looking beyond that, and they revere what’s beyond that. Americans really don’t think deeply of their own history, which is so rich.”
There are also business factors, Mahal maintains, that hindered many blues and jazz artists in the U.S.
“There were no black-owned record companies that really knew the music business; if there were, it would have been different,” he said. “But there were white companies. And when they made all the money, they chewed all the flavor out. The black artists didn’t own anything; it was just their voices on a record. You signed a contract and the record company can sell your music as long as they want, in perpetuity. It’s just crazy.
“But it wasn’t just black people. A lot of these British Invasion bands in the first half of the 1960s — like the Stones and The Beatles — didn’t know any better, and they signed bad record contracts, too.”
In any country, Mahal reaches out to audiences by making music from the heart and by refusing to take his listeners for granted.
“You don’t play down to the people; you play up to them so that you bring people up,” he said. “People think the blues brings people down. No! It’s to lift you up, and I do so by looking down on me, in front of you. There’s plenty of hope for people. That’s why I play music.”
When: Noon to 8 p.m. Saturday; gates open at 11:30 a.m.
Where: Embarcadero Marina Park North, 400 Kettner Blvd., downtown
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/taj-mahals-world-of-music/
Taj Mahal doesn't just play world music; he embodies it. Rooted in American blues, his songs' influences range from West African to Hawaiian.
But they do have something in common: "The one thing I've always demanded of the records I've made is that they be danceable," he says on his site, www.tajblues.com.
And that's why even when Mahal plays theaters, like his show at Napa's Uptown on Sunday night, he'll have people leaping out of their seats to dance.
Born Henry St. Claire Fredericks in Harlem on May 17, 1942, Mahal grew up in Springfield, Mass.
His father, of West Indian descent, was a jazz pianist, composer and arranger; his mother a teacher and gospel singer from South Carolina.
As a boy, Mahal listened to the family's shortwave radio, captivated by music from around the world.
His father, who was called a musical "genius" by Ella Fitzgerald, was killed in a tractor accident when Mahal was 11. His mother remarried and when Mahal was about 13, he picked up his stepfather's guitar and mastered the instrument.
Mahal also learned to play banjo, trombone and harmonica, absorbing musical styles that would pour out later in his unconventional, genre-hopping songs.
But he never forgot where he came from.
"My parents grew up during the Harlem renaissance," says Mahal, in an interview for arts site Straight.com.
"I was connected with my African ancestry through their stories. My grandparents on my father's side came to this country from the Caribbean with a strong connection to Africa and no shame about it.
"As I got more involved in music one of the things that made me excited, from the time I was a child, was that clear link between our ancestors and the sounds we hear today."
A Taj Mahal show can be a journey through diverse worlds. He'll bounce from Caribbean-inflected rhythms to West African highlife, with a layover in Hawaii for some hula blues.
But Indian raga? Probably not, despite his adopted name. So where does Taj Mahal, the moniker he started using around 1960, come from?
"Dreams," Mahal says cryptically. An admirer of Gandhi, he says he dreamed of India and social tolerance. And it's probably no accident that he named himself after a pearly palace built in the name of love.
Mahal expresses his love through his singing, embracing his audiences with his ebullient voice. He greets audiences like old friends, and lots of his devoted fans have seen him many times, so the feeling is mutual. In some ways, Mahal's shows feel more like parties than concerts.
Yet Mahal, 68, wasn't always clear that he'd pursue a musical career.
After studying agriculture at the University of Massachusetts and working on a dairy farm - which he loved even though he had to rise before dawn - Mahal moved to Los Angeles to pursue music.
There he formed a band with Ry Cooder called the Rising Sons, opening for Otis Redding, the Temptations and other '60s legends.
In this early stage of his career Mahal performed with such legends as Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters. He's also worked with the Rolling Stones.
In 1967, Mahal released an eponymous album, his first effort under his own name, reveling in the gumbo of styles he'd absorbed as a youth.
Over the next four decades he traveled from Maui to Mali, seeking out local musicians and collaborating with them.
He's won two Grammys, his first in 1997 for "Se?r Blues," the second in 2000 for "Shoutin' in Key."
Mahal celebrated four decades of diverse music on his 2008 album "Maestro," which garnered a Grammy nomination.
"This record is danceable, it's listenable, it has lots of different rhythms," he says, though he doesn't see it as the culmination of his career.
This album, he says, is "just the beginning of another chapter, one that's going to be open to more music and more ideas. Even at the end of forty years, in many ways my music is just getting started."
Michael Shapiro writes about the arts for The Press Democrat. Contact him at shapiro@sonic.net.
Taj Mahal: His Musical Stomping Ground is the World
Read More: Taj Mahal: His Musical Stomping Ground is the World | Beartrap Summer Festival | Casper, Wyoming | https://beartrapsummerfestival.com/taj-mahal-his-musical-stomping-ground-is-the-world/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral
Relix 44: Taj Mahal
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photo by Jay Blakesberg
Welcome to the Relix 44. To commemorate the past 44 years of our
existence, we’ve created a list of people, places and things that
inspire us today, appearing in our September 2018 issue and rolling out
on Relix.com throughout this fall. See all the articles posted so far here.
The Real Thing: Taj Mahal
Harlem-born singer, multi- instrumentalist and composer Henry Saint Clair Fredericks Jr. made a bold move in taking his unforgettable stage name from a magnificent 17th century Indian holy structure, but it was also a conscious decision to convey himself as something to behold, a true wonder. Like the original, Taj Mahal projects an image of dignity and awe even while keeping it all as real as real gets.
For more than half a century now, Taj Mahal has continued to radiate a rare authenticity in an increasingly less authentic world. Whatever he undertakes—when he sings the blues, reggae or when he delves into the music of Hawaii, the Caribbean or Africa—he throws his entire being into it, embodying its essence. From his self-titled debut album in 1968 to his Grammy-winning 2017 collaboration with disciple Keb’ Mo’—appropriately titled TajMo—Taj Mahal has always been an explorer, a pursuer of the genuine. Many other survivors of the era in which he came up have long since left their roots behind, but Taj Mahal has never tired of digging deeper at the source, never hesitating to turn down another road to investigate what lies ahead.
Wherever he has gone, the blues has never been far away—it’s at the core of who he is. Even in his earliest days, with the Rising Sons—a band that included kindred spirit Ry Cooder and should’ve but didn’t make the big time—Taj was on to something new while mining his beloved traditional American roots music. He came into his own on his first albums for Columbia, among them the gutsy, self-explanatory The Natch’l Blues from 1968, the same year he was invited to take part in the historic concert film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Singing the Sleepy John Estes blues “Leavin’ Trunk” on that program, surrounded by A-level musicians, including guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, Mahal blew harp and sang and quickly found love among the rock-and-rollers craving the rawness and honesty he offered. As he found his way onto multi-bill gigs at emerging shrines like the Fillmores West and East, he soon rose from opening act to headliner.
By 1971, when he recorded a live album at the latter, The Real Thing, he’d already changed gears, performing his show with a stunning new band that included no less than four tuba players. Taj left Columbia for Warner Bros. during the second half of the decade, and other labels have come and gone, but his musical wanderlust only intensified with each passing year: Mahal habitually branched out, applying the same boundless curiosity whether he probed Indian music (1995’s Mumtaz Mahal), Malian grooves (1999’s Kulanjan, with kora player Toumani Diabaté) or gospel (2014’s Talkin’ Christmas!, with the Blind Boys of Alabama).
That he continues to find colleagues who are enthusiastic to join him in the studio is a testament to Mahal’s influence. His 2008 Maestro album features a long list of guests including Los Lobos, Ben Harper and Ziggy Marley, while the aforementioned TajMo collaboration features appearances by fellow blues mavens Bonnie Raitt, Joe Walsh, Sheila E. and others. During the past few years, he’s sat in with friends like the Stones, Eric Clapton and the Allman Brothers Band, all of whom continued to treasure his authenticity.
Taj Mahal, at age 76, remains totally committed to that quality he defined as “The Real Thing” many decades ago. Like the shrine from which he took his name, he continues to dazzle and inspire reverence.
This article originally appears in the September 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.
https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/podcast-episode-022-taj-mahal/
Music is My Life: Episode 022
Taj Mahal on Working with Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Rolling Stones, and More
Emerging in the late 1960s as an enthusiast of blues and folk music, Taj Mahal has spent his career bending genres to his own signature style. His work includes moving explorations in jazz, funk, reggae, country, rock ‘n’ roll, and more. He has worked with everybody from Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones to Bob Marley and the Wailers. His songs have been covered by Eric Clapton, the Black Keys, the Blues Brothers, Natalie Cole, and more. And like the range of his influences (those he has been influenced by, and those who he has influenced) the artists that pop up in conversation really run the gamut. Read a transcript of the interview below:
Pat Healy: What was the first instrument you picked up?
Yeah. I remember hearing an anecdote that your mom danced until she was 80, or in her 80s. Was music always around the house, and were they playing as well?
The maestro!
Yeah. I just love what he does.
It’s
interesting you talk about people passing down songs and putting their
own spins on it. When I think about your music, one of the songs that I
think is such a defining song is “Stagger Lee,” which has been with you
since the beginning, as far as I can tell.
Oh, yeah. It was
actually before I started playing music. I mean, it’s an old song, but
how I got it, I got it through kind of the R&B . . .
The Lloyd Price version?
The
Lloyd Price one, yeah. Just in the midst of one day listening to the
lyrics, I was like, “This is an older song than this. This didn’t just
happen right now.” You know, “Somebody didn’t just write this for rock
and roll, or even R&B.” But yeah. It made me always keep my ears
open, and then of course in the 60s when a lot of that music was coming
around, particularly through the university, and the university of
Massachusetts where I was going was … I realize now, if I probably had
gone to HBC, a historically Black college in the south, I probably would
have missed the music that I actually got in touch with. Yeah, because
you know, Springfield had a … Well, Springfield was a big terminal in
the Underground Railroad, and that whole area was a big abolitionist
area. They used to have a stronghold. So there was a lot going on to
bring people into society there, but nationally and for the record
industry and the music business, there was a large black population
there, or a significant one. Therefore, they were marketing to that
population. If you came with stuff, you could go
In those days with record stores, you could ask for what you knew you wanted and they could go and get it. They had distributors and they could ask for it. So it was a lot different than what it is today where whatever it is they got is what you get, you know? Also, so that kind of like put everybody in a particular lane. Unless you heard the blues beyond, say, Jimmy Rushing and maybe Count Basie, or just been into the jump blues stuff, you didn’t really hear the down home stuff except kinda closer to Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and those guys, late at night. There was a guy over in I think even Rochester or Buffalo, “Hound Dog” Lorenzi used to play stuff. If you was a radio kid like I was, I listened to the radio deep into the night. There was always a lot of different kinda music that was on. You’d hear music out of Chicago, hear music out of Memphis, Louisiana. As far away as New Orleans. When all the radio stations went down and it would roll up on the skip. But the thing is, the point I’m making, is that I would have been just … If I hadn’t heard music before the programming of rock and roll or R&B to people, I would have gone along with what everything was.
But
then I went to the university, and all of a sudden there was this whole
kinda folk music thing which I didn’t particularly care about in the
beginning, because it kinda was like Burl Ives and I didn’t really get
it. You know, my mom really liked Burl Ives. No disrespect for Burl.
Hey, the guy had an idea, he had a way of putting it across and he
followed through. Made records, had a career around it. You know, as you
get older, a lot of stuff that you really think about when you were
younger, you just realize that, “Boy, I was nuts.” Anyway. What was
really great was that neighbors in my neighborhood … I mean,
circumstance set itself up that [when I was] around 12, my dad was
killed. After that, my mom spent a few years really adjusting herself to
the fact that she was a housewife and a substitute schoolteacher with a
degree from South Carolina and a big family.
How many siblings did you have?
At that point, I had two brothers and two sisters. There were five of us and I’m the eldest. So here she was. She didn’t have any concept of how to handle the business. My father was from a Caribbean background and Caribbean men handle the business for the house. So anyway, a number of years later, not that many, she remarried to another man from the Caribbean. This time from Jamaica. With him unbeknownst to me came a guitar.
Then that guitar eventually got spoken about to a neighbor
that moved up from South to North Carolina, and he could play. He could
really play. And I mean, he had the natural keys to everything. He was
not a schooled musician, which is fine by me, because I kept noting that
there was a certain kind of snobbery that went along with schooled
musicians that unschooled musicians didn’t have. So anyway, he came to
North Carolina and then up the block from me was a bunch of guys that
came from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Stovall, actually, outside of
Clarksdale. On Colonel Stovall’s farm out there. So they played that
kinda John Lee Hooker, Mississippi boogie stuff, you know? Then the
inside music was like Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker. Both
T-Bone and B.B. [King] were, I found very hard to listen to at first
because I had been listening to a lot of jazz, which is always moving
and improvising. This was a different kinda set. So it took me a little
bit to get to that, but all along the music was there in those versions
of the blues that were there. The classic blues, the stuff that W.C.
Handy and those kind of guys wrote. But yeah, I just know that I heard
it, I felt it, we danced to it. It just was something that I never
thought it was a good idea to let go of.
Yeah. So you’re a teenager and you’re listening to all of this, but are you playing all this stuff too?
Mostly
I was playing pretty much, as far as vocally I could go anywhere. As
far as my playing was concerned, I pretty much stuck it around Jimmy
Reed and Muddy Waters. In or around there. It wasn’t until I started
going to the university that I got a chance to see some of the other
guys in the same way I learned from my next-door neighbor. I picked up
from them, and created my own stuff.
You had a different track at university, right? You were going to do farming?
Yeah. I was doing it before university. I was doing it in high school.
What finally made you commit to music?
I
was committed to music one way or another. If the farming came first
then the music would just be what I did. If the music came first,
hopefully then I’d have an opportunity to put together a farm or be
involved with it one way or another. What I was doing was like, dealing
with the fact that traditionally the music and the agriculture and the
culture and the life were inseparable, and here it tended to be
separated because of probably Western ideals, where you sit in the
audience and you are separate from the performer and the performer
performs and you wait till the end, as opposed to if you went to say, a
black gospel church, people are shouting in the audience and encouraging
the singer to do something. It’s just a different kind of aesthetic,
you know? I was always trying to impart that to an audience, say, “Hey,
you. Don’t you understand, when you get involved in this music you are a
part of the performance? And nobody’s going to tell you no!”
So you get out of school in 1960-what?
63-64.
Then I came up to Cambridge. I was going to see a lot of different
people, listening to a lot of music. I had the time to be able to do it.
I also had kind of a college R&B band at that time, called The
Electras. We played around the east coast, all the Ivy League colleges.
We went to a big northeastern mixer at Smith College. Our drummer was a
business major, and he made up some cards and passed them out. We worked
every weekend, and sometimes even during the week, while we were in
school. Did that, but all along I was really working on my guitar jobs.
Banjo and mandolin, and attempting to figure out harmonica. Came out to
the west coast with a friend of mine who knew some people out there,
knew some clubs. Most importantly, he knew Ry Cooder and he knew The Ash
Grove and McCaig’s Guitar Store. Wallichs Music City. A few other
places. Got involved when I came out to the West Coast, and started
working with him. Ry was phenomenal. I knew a lot of guys that played
guitar and they were okay, but he was just leaps and heaps ahead of
everybody.
Yeah. Had he already found success commercially by that point? He was just a young guy too, right?
Just
a young kid that … Well I mean, he had some success working with people
like Jackie DeShannon and maybe some other people. I don’t really
recall right now. In that musical pond out there, he was well-known, and
for a 17-year-old, 18-year-old kid, he was really playing the music,
you know? A lot of guys brought the notes. The thing of Ry, Ry not only
brought the notes, the melody, the notes, but he brought the body of the
music and he also was really, totally onomatopoeic about the swing and
the rhythm. I mean, he could transfer that, and a lot of guys couldn’t
do that. Didn’t even know how to. They didn’t know. I mean, they would
either speed up or slow down, or slow down and speed up. In his pace, he
was really consistent.
So he was playing with you. Who else? Was Jesse Davis playing?
No.
Jesse Davis was not in the picture. Jesse Davis didn’t start until I
started my solo career. We were, all of us, were signed to Columbia
Records as The Rising Sons as a group, and individually.
Oh wow, I didn’t know that.
Yeah.
So it was Ry Cooder, myself, Gary Marker played bass. Ed Cassidy, who
eventually became the drummer with Spirit. He was our drummer at that
time. Yeah. And Jessie Lee Kincaid, he was the other guitar player and
writer. So yeah, we were a bunch of guys that came with a lot of
information. We didn’t have a group leader or anything. We just really
had a group, and we would love to go and work with each other’s ideas,
which was a little bit difficult for the record company. I see now that
it was difficult for the record companies, because they are like …
Because these are brown hi-top shoes, and we can sell those. You know,
on the other side, they don’t understand if you’ve got anything
different than that. So the problem with them is that they didn’t have
any … They couldn’t see the future, because what we were doing was
eventually about a year and a half after they stopped with us, everybody
was doing the same thing, you know? But you know how they are, they
won’t leap in to something. They wait till it’s happening all around
them. So anyway, that and a bunch of crazy politics around the group
kinda put everybody at odds with the industry. Then we just sort of, all
of us just decided that, okay we’ve had enough. Rather than break up
our friendships and go away disgusted with one another, we just cleared
out. Then here I was, teaching harmonica and guitar and a little banjo.
But you had your solo deal, right?
Yeah,
but I didn’t really know how well that was. Finally what I did was I
went like, “You know what? You’re signed individually to Columbia. Pick
the phone up and call them. Call Clive Davis.” That’s exactly what I
did.
And he answered?
No, his secretary did.
No, his secretary did and I told her what was going on: that I was on
their label and I had some ideas and I wanted to record and I’d like to
talk to Clive Davis, Mr. Davis. She said, “Alright, well I’ll take your
number down and that’s Taj Mahal?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
So you were going by Taj Mahal at that point?
I was going by Taj Mahal since 1959. So anyway, what happened then was about three hours later, phone rings and it’s Clive Davis. You know, it’s exactly like a certain 45 says: “Don’t talk to the people downstairs in the basement. Talk to the top.” Call him. He’s going to say no, or you’re going to get a message, or you won’t get no message at all. Which is the message. You know? So anyway, I told him what I wanted to do and he quickly said, “Well look. I’ll tell you what we can do here. How about we send you out some producers?” They were willing to put that kinda money in, so I don’t think they sent but the one guy out, and that turned out to be David Rubinson. I didn’t need to hear anything else. We clicked. We kinda came out of the same neighborhood in Brooklyn that my grandparents were in … he was really deeply into Latin music.
He was a wonderful person to hang with, and he kinda did me like Damon Dash did Jay-Z. He did the business, and I did the music. He just left me to the music. That was what I wanted. I knew what songs I wanted to record, and then the only thing that was difficult was I didn’t have a band. I was kinda like, sitting in with different bands. I sat in with Gandhi a few different times and this one and that one, and then I was like, helping people make demos and that kinda thing. I ran into a guy that was playing in a band with a woman named Pamela Polland. Pamela Polland, Riley Wildflower and I don’t know who was the bassist in that, but a guy named Sandy Konikoff was the drummer.
This guy named Gordon Shryock, he always had … people were making demos so they needed a harmonica player or a rhythm guitar player to make the demo. So I did a couple things with him, and then he asked me, well, what kinda music was I up to? I said, well I really liked blues a lot and I was thinking about putting some stuff together. He says, “Well you know, I think I’ve got somebody that you might really like to work with.” He said, “Now, he’s an Indian.” I said, “Well, okay. Is there a problem?” He said no. I said, “Well where can I hear this guy?” He says, “Well they’re playing up in Topanga Canyon Corral, him and a bunch of guys. Junior Markham and who was this guy? The Old Boatman I think was playing. Chuck Blackwell. A whole bunch of them had all come out from Oklahoma, behind Gary Lewis and the Playboys and Leon Russell. You know, they saw there was something happening out here and they were playing in a different band. James Burton was part of that thing. So I went up ultimately to hear him play. I just heard five notes and I knew this was the guy. You know? It’s like, first of all he wasn’t derivative. It wasn’t like, “Oh, he’s really great. He’s white and he plays like B.B. King.” No, no. I don’t need that guy. You know, “He’s white and he sounds just like Albert King.” Nope, I don’t need that guy. I’m talking about I don’t care who you are: what is your sound? Who are you? That’s who I wanted in my music, and so when I heard him play, he just … I never heard anybody play like him, you know? I mean, there hasn’t been. I mean, I think probably the closest guy tonally to him would probably be Robbie Robertson.
Robbie Robertson plays kind of understated,
where Jesse can really get out there and sing it up real loud. You know,
I mean Robbie could play that way too, but his tendency is this
wonderful, understated, beautiful tone. Then there’s another guy named
Willie Hona. He’s a Maori down in New Zealand. He’s the only other guy I
heard that had that, just had magic coming from wherever it came from.
So yeah, got hold of him and then the guy Sandy Konikoff who I mentioned
before was the drummer. He kinda grew up in I think Buffalo or
Rochester, and grew up around the real deep music that was happening at
the time. Jazz, groove, Oregon trails. All that kinda stuff. He could
play. I was listening to how he was playing behind Leaving Trunk the
other night, just listening. Just sometimes I go back and listen to the
records, just listen to the bass player. The bass player, Jimmy Thomas,
he was somebody I used to see coming in this club and playing with a lot
of, play with people … See, he was playing with … Who was he playing
with? I’m trying to think. Maybe he was playing behind Big Mama Thornton
or somebody like that. It was good, you know. I thought he should be in
there. Then Cooder came in and played rhythm guitar on most tracks.
Jesse Davis played slide. So basically, I just told them, “Be at the
studio on Monday night.” We had no rehearsal.
None?!
None! I just knew that these guys could play, and I knew that I could walk around and tell each guy what I wanted them to play, and then when we hit, it would all hit. Then I mean, that was one, two … I’d say probably about three, maybe three or four songs on there went that way. Then the other stuff went, Jesse Davis did some arranging. I would sit with him and play the song, and then he’d take his pick and put it in the cleft of his chin and give you a 20 thousand mile stare and hang out there and come back, and then he’d tell Chuck what to play, or Gilmour what to play, or I would tell Gilmour, like, in the case of a specific bass line that I wanted or rhythm that I wanted, just like “Leaving Trunk,”
I told everybody the parts I wanted to play except for Davis and Cooder. Them guys could play, whatever it was. I gave instruction to the drummer and the bass player, I wanted to play. Then we right there on the spot said, “Well how are we going to start this?” I said, “Well okay, I’ll just open it up with a harmonica.” I said, “We’ll do it this way.” Soon as I played that part, Davis knew to just set it up that way. So a lot of it was very telepathic. Because I mean, you know, oftentimes got a call: “Hey man, I got a gig and we got no singer. We need somebody who plays the harmonica. Can you come down?” Sure, come down. You know, “Okay. What key do you want to do it in? G, shuffle, one, two, three.” Then you go.
So these guys were really, just really good. Got
started there. The second record, we were a bit more … By that time, we
really had a group. It was Chuck Blackwell on drums, Gary Gilmour on
bass and Jesse Davis on guitar and me on dobro and harmonica and vocals.
The second record, we got real … it was more crafting what we did. By
the third record, the Giant Step record, we really got more
sophisticated. That was one of the things that I saw happen as the
evolution of the music, and that’s why I put the second album on there,
of all the acoustic stuff. Because I said, “This is like what raw
material sounds like, and older forms of music.” I didn’t realize how
much of a bible that was for so many people. I had no idea. It was just a
whim. Because I listened to a lot, I saw a lot of double albums
arriving in at that time. Basically double albums were like, sort of
more of what went on on the first one, then here’s some more on the
second one. Not bad, but it didn’t inform nobody with anything.
Right.
You talked a little bit before about frustrations with the record
labels. Did they go for the double album right away when you proposed
that?
Yeah. I mean, like I said, David Rubinson did the
business. Whatever it was that I wanted to do. Even when we did the
double album with the tubas and recorded it in New York at the Fillmore,
Wally Heider’s truck was there, and all the equipment plugged in, so we
made that great live record. You know, it’s like, “I dare somebody else
to make a record like that!”
So what changed after you
were getting your own production credit on the records? I mean, I don’t
hear that much of a departure in the sound.
Well, I mean basically he worked pretty much up through, you know, there’s Taj Mahal, Natch’l Blues, Giant Step, and De Ole Folks at Home, and then there was The Real Thing with the tubas. Happy Just to Be Like I Am, and then Sounder, Recycling The Blues and then Oooh So Good ‘n Blues. By then, that’s when I started being involved.
Right. And you produced, was Mo’ Roots, was that the first one you did?
One of them, yeah.
I
remember reading a story about Bob Marley coming to record and finding
that some of the tracks had already been recorded without him.
Well he came, yeah. Yeah, well the long of the story is, I knew some people. I had some people I’m really friendly with in England. When I went over in 1968 to The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. That was Denny Cordell and his people. Rondor Music, I think it was called. There was a woman named Janet Dicker, who was a friend of mine. I think she convinced somebody to send me two copies of Catch a Fire. Maybe one copy and then another one showed up from somewhere else.
I can remember the day I got it. I opened it up, and is aid, “Wow, that looks like a cigarette lighter.” Opened it up and sure enough, it was like a cigarette lighter. Turned it over, and like I said, “Ooh, that’s a rough looking bunch of characters there. Jamaicans here, alright. Wonder what this sounds like.”
I put that thing down on there, and as soon as I heard the bass booming out of the speaker, I said, “They will never play that on AM radio!” And they never did! But anyway, Bob, Rudy became a huge fan. I mean, I’d already listened to Jamaican and Caribbean music through my family. Particularly through my stepfather. Not so much reggae, but a lot of mento and ska, and that kinda stuff, you know? So Bob and those guys had come to the United States and I was keeping my antennas up for them. I think they were on tour with Sly and The Family Stone, and Sly was pretty much full of himself in those days. He couldn’t … You know, he didn’t know who these guys were and didn’t pay any attention until he figured out that the music was actually grabbing the audience. Whoa. He threw those guys off the tour, and just left them all scattered around the Bay Area.
I found out about it, and I was like, really perturbed. I was like, “Are you serious? You mean to tell me that the music that you’re playing, you would be threatened by somebody else playing good music to your audience?” I don’t get that. The audience comes there to see you, and it also hears this group. That means your stock goes up. But he didn’t see it that way. Threw those guys off. I thought it was the worst thing I ever heard of a fellow musician. You know, doing it nationally, let alone internationally.
So I hooked those guys up, and we found kind of a kitchenette, motel kind of place where there was rooms for everybody, and helped them get settled until they could get things. You know, I guess probably get Chris Blackwell involved with them to pull them together. So you know, they were always grateful for that. Not that, no pressures, like just do stuff. Then eventually, I thought about wanting to work or have Bob involved somewhere in around, so he did. Eventually came he and Family Man [Aston Barrett], the bass player, and Skill Cole, the great soccer player and a guy named Augustus Pablo came to my house and kind of had a jam session.
That’s where he came up with the idea of “Talkin’ Blues.” At my house. You know, “Walkin’ blues, your feet are too big for your shoes.” We had a great night playing music and then I got word out to them that I was working in the studio, but by the time we got hold of him or by the time he got there, we had already been down the line because, you know, we were sticking to the schedule and here’s the time you gotta record. But he came in, he was in the studio and he listened to it. Family Man requested that they put more treble guitar tops on the bass. He was, “Put a little more tops on de bass. More tops on de bass, yes, yes. More tops on the bass.”
You’ve experimented
with so many different types of music. That’s just one example, with the
reggae, and I know your stepfather was from Jamaica. Was there any type
of music that you have … When you’re approaching a genre that is not
native to you, or that’s outside of your own experience, how do you
approach it?
Like, what you’re talking, like, what kind, when you say “genre”?
Basically like you have stuck your foot in every single genre. You’ve done folk, blues . . .
I think you’re dealing it from the record company’s perspective.
Ha ha! You may be right!
If
you deal it from culture, how are you going to bring millions of black
people into the Western civilization, in some cases mix them up, and not
in 500 years when we’ve been here and … unless you buy … The land I’m
in is the land I know. Without it, I never bought that. That’s really
clear.
I know, but I guess, how did you just, so confidently . . .
Because
they’re my cousins. They’re my cousins. They’re my relatives. You know,
it’s like, because I listen to, when they play toward our music. See,
when you’re in the Caribbean or even Africa or South America, you hear
American music. You don’t hear American music in boxes. When we’re here,
we hear the world in boxes. You know, it’s, “Oh, this is African
music.” Then, no. It’s like, that’s a real narrow box for what’s Africa,
you know?
Right.
So no. I mean, my thought
is that I’m … I mean, the whole experience of coming out of Africa into
the Western civilization just broke up family, culture, blah blah blah.
So at this point, for me, it’s just connecting the dots between family I
recognize musically. Probably the farthest out one for people to be
able to deal with has been the Hawaiian music, and that came as a result
to me being … As a kid, I would note that some music went through my
head and I didn’t feel it in my body. Some music went through my body
and I felt it in my head, in my soul, my spirit and my heart. The first
time I heard Hawaiian music was somewhere around maybe between seven and
nine years old. I was just shook to the core, how deep that music was
already in there. And I don’t even know these people. My thought then
was, “I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but someday I want to find
out why. What is it about this music and these people that reached me at
that deep level?” Because I’ve listened to a lot of music. From all
different types of sources. Some, I would sit back and let the musicians
that play that music play, because I don’t have any direct relationship
or connection to it, but most of the stuff that I’m involved with has
been, just as I say: getting connected, and familial. You know, after
having been split up in the diaspora, so . . .
Is there anything you wouldn’t try?
Oh, I mean I could jokingly make a heavy metal record.
I bet it would be awesome, though.
Rap isn’t difficult.
Yeah?
No,
not at all. Because I mean, there’s a way. There’s a way to do it. I
mean, as an elder musician I’m not against what the young kids play. A
lot of people think that they have to have an opinion about it, and we
know what we have to say about opinions. You know, I mean the thing is
to me it’s like bebop, you know? Everybody didn’t like bebop either. I
also think it’s kinda funny now, talking to or listening to rappers that
are now 42 and 46 and 50 talking about the youngsters that are coming
along now. Saying, “Gee whiz, that sounds pretty much like what
everybody was saying about you guys when you started.” The only ones
that I know have said something really smart, right, at this point, has
been David Banner. David Banner was really sharp about it. Said, “Hey.
We birthed them, but we didn’t show them the way. We didn’t give them
nothing to work with, so they’re doing what they can with what they
got.” So we were chasing the money, and while we were chasing the money,
we didn’t take care of handing the torch off to them. So then Snoop
Dogg. Snoop Dogg said the same thing. “Hey, I’m a grandpapa now.” You
know? “I’m grown. When I was coming out, they didn’t know what I was
doing either. I didn’t care about them either.” So you know. They’re
going to say what they’re going to say.
You talk about
chasing the money. You’re the last person I’d say, would ever accuse of
doing that in the industry. You’ve always seemed to follow your own
instinct artistically.
Yeah, for good and for bad.
Right,
yeah. I mean, but for good or for bad you’ve been in the industry for
50 years now. That must make you feel pretty accomplished, the fact that
you have never compromised. Or do you feel that you ever have?
I
may have made … I think I made one song probably back in 1970. I worked
with a guy named Bill Greene. We tried to do, you know, make a popular
R&B tune on the Satisfied ‘n Tickled Too album. It was okay, but you know. I already knew the value of what was going on is that with Mo’ Roots,
I had a song called “Why Did You Have to Desert Me?” and “Why Did You
Have To Desert Me?” sold 10,000 copies of a 45 in Philadelphia.
?uestlove said, when I was on the Jimmy Fallon show, ?uestlove said,
“Man, you gotta play that song. We gotta play that song.” He said, “My
aunts used to play that song all the time.” I know a bunch of guys from
Santo Domingo, they loved it because there’s a whole section there I’m
singing in Spanish. They really loved it. So I knew it was a matter of
the record company understanding what it was that I was doing, and going
for it. But no, they didn’t get it. I mean, at different times I’ve
locked horns with them and then I just stopped. I would never compromise
the music. It’s just like, “No, you don’t understand. This needs to
happen, and if you don’t understand it and they don’t understand it, I
can’t help you, but I’m not leaving my pathway here.”
Yeah. What do you hope from this entire career, pouring your heart and soul into music, will be the lasting legacy of Taj Mahal?
I am still . . .
I’m sorry, I just heard how pretentious that sounded . . .
No,
I’m still busy at it, so I mean, it’s like you know. I mean, I don’t
know. It’s like one of the biggest questions that’s asked of me, people
go like, “Oh my God, you’re really great. Blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah. I remember seeing you … Are you still playing?” I go like, “I
guess we still have work to do.” You know?
Right!
Yeah,
because they don’t know. I mean, what has happened that they don’t
realize is their information system has gotten … It’s important for
somebody to have a hold to it, because they can monetize it. So they’re
monetizing it with that which works for them. I mean, anytime they
wanted to blow up my spot because of how I had my publishing set up and
my business set up, I stood to win. So you know, whatever. It’s not
something to worry about.
You mentioned listening to “Leaving Trunk” earlier. How familiar with your own catalog are you?
Very.
… I listen to it anytime I want to. Especially now that stuff’s on, you
know, on YouTube. Plus what I have myself, you know, I’ve gone and
loaded my laptop up with all the stuff. I mean, I’m not like no wizard
of computer or digital age, but you know, I can do stuff and get stuff
and ask questions. Figure out, you know.
What sort of advice you’d give to our students who are starting out in the music industry?
You’ve
gotta learn as much as you can. If I can think of anything that I
probably wish I had done a little bit more, it’s spend more time
learning about the music industry and business. You know? I mean, I’ve
done pretty good with it. I was able to put my kids through school and
that’s been always a big thing with me, and not end up at the end of the
whole thing with college debt. None of my children have college debt
whatsoever. You know, we did it kind of like as it went along. And I’m
very happy about that. I mean, pretty much beside me being who I was
doing things the way I was doing, I was able to take care of my family
and see that my kids were educated. That’s really good.
https://radiopublic.com/music-is-my-life-G1V9Yr/s1!b499b
022: Taj Mahal
Emerging in the late 1960s as an enthusiast of blues and folk music, Taj Mahal has spent his career bending genres to his own signature style. His work includes moving explorations in jazz, funk, reggae, country, rock ‘n’ roll, and more. He has worked with everybody from Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters to the Rolling Stones to Bob Marley and the Wailers. His songs have been covered by Eric Clapton, the Black Keys, the Blues Brothers, Natalie Cole, and more.
Taj Mahal Shares His Deep Passion For Music: “I’ve Never Known Life and Breathing Without Music”
The great American musician, Taj Mahal (born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks), is, at heart, an essentialist. The music he loves is often the distilled essence of a genre or style, rather than the pomp and circumstance that can be fashioned out of it.
Sometimes that means putting a subtle but modern spin on an old folk or blues classic. Sometimes that can mean just playing the root, third and fifth the way the first blues men and women did it hundreds of years ago. In that same way, Mahal, who was born in Harlem, New York, and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, has labored many of his adult years as a farmer, working the earth, growing crops and looking after livestock. This is important stuff, he reminds. And he’s right. It builds soul and character from the earth up.
American Songwriter caught up with the 78-year-old Mahal to ask him about how he first came to music, what it was like for him to toil on farms, why he’s intrigued by Hawaiian culture and what he loves most about music.
American Songwriter: When did you first find music as a young person?
Taj Mahal:
Music has always been there. I’ve never known life and breathing
without music. Both my parents were musical. I came up when the culture
was musical, before the real big money was being made on records and
entertainment. So, most of the music was at home, within the culture.
Even though there were records—records in those days were basically
advertisements for you to come and see us play live. Not play it live. But play live.
You know, come and dance. I grew up in a different era in music. I’ve
always known it. It’s never been like, ‘I heard Elvis Presley and I
started moving my hips!’ [Laughs]
AS: How did you decide to invest in music, to want to do it professionally?
TM:
Well, my father was a professional musician who actually quit his
professional playing days and traveling when he and my mom got together
and started a family. He kept a baby grand piano and really good record
player and records. That was kind of his way to be able to stay
connected to the music and hear what was going on. So, I just heard
music around all the time and I had a piano [at home] that I could play a
little bit. I liked music but I wasn’t really thinking about, ‘It would
be wonderful to find an instrument that you fell in love with.’ I tried
this one, I tried that. I tried trombone, clarinet. I messed with the
piano a little bit. I liked all these instruments when they were in the
hands of somebody who knew how to use them.
I came into the world listening to Count Basie, Jimmy Lunceford, Jimmy Cleveland, Jimmy Rushing, Louis Jordan, Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine. On and on. Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Helen Humes, Marian Henderson. It was marvelous, music everywhere.
And then the 50s came along and we’re still listening to all the hot music that eventually turned into the inspiration for rock ‘n’ roll, which was kind of confusing. It was like, ‘Okay. Why is it rock ‘n’ roll over there and it’s something discarded over here?’ But nonetheless, what was discarded always felt better than what was rock ‘n’ roll.
Somewhere around [when I was] 14 or 15, after the loss of my dad, my mother remarried a couple years later and my stepfather came with a guitar—he was from Jamaica. My mother was American, from the south, South Carolina. Anyway, the first guitars that I can really remember distinctively knowing the sound of, probably came from the Nat “King” Cole Trio. Maybe some old Gene Autry or some old Hank Williams stuff, but mostly I can remember hearing those guitars. Then in the early ’50s, I started hearing some of those Chicago blues players. Not a lot. There just seemed like there was a lot of music that was just not being attended to. And I got busy paying attention to it.
Then a neighbor of mine moved from North Carolina, a boy about my same age. One thing led to another and I told him I had a guitar and he said he played guitar and I brought the guitar out. He certainly could play it. So, I hung out with him. And then up the street from me, a family came in from Clarksdale, Mississippi. So, they were playing the Mississippi blues right up the street five doors away. I would just go hang around with them. I realized around that time that this was the roots of what everybody was playing—the roots of Elvis Presley and all those guys that were playing. So, I hung out with them and listened to them play and just got really inside it. I had little groups, little doo-wop groups and by that time I was picking and messing with the guitar and listening to—I was a big Jimmy Reed fan. He and Chuck Berry.
I recognized that a lot of younger guys were not paying attention to the older music and that was, I thought, a shame that they just let the music go. So, I got involved. I think one of the things that was really great was that I went to college at the University of Massachusetts. I was studying agriculture. That coincided with all that big folk music and folk explosion and all that kind of stuff. Those folk festivals started including a lot of older blues people. So, that was real good. I got a chance to really get a close-up of people like Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, Skip James and Yank Rachell, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Reverend Gary Davis, Reverend Robert Wilkins, Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, all those guys.
AS: What do you like about the distilled roots and origins of music? Why was that a particular focus?
TM:
Oh, why wouldn’t it be? Because I looked around. If you were Scottish,
you had Scottish folk dancing. If you were Greek, you had Greek folk
dancing. If you were Irish, you had Irish folk dancing. Well, okay, here
we are. It’s the product, the transference of the ancestral information
from one generation to the next. So, now we’re creating it here in this
country. And because somebody else is controlling the narrative, we’re
letting go of what is ours. I said, ‘okay, I can understand that if
people think that it’s old and maybe they don’t see it in terms of
what’s happening now, but how about taking some of that stuff and maybe
dressing it up in modern times.’ And that’s exactly what I did.
You start out listening to records that I made, “Leaving Trunk” is an old, acoustic, folk blues song from Sleepy John Estes. But you hear me play it and it’s got another thing. It’s got the modern swing to it, modern sounds to it. But the lyrics are the same. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing. Quite frankly, I wanted to be in the good graces of my ancestors. I didn’t really care about—I mean, I am very, very humbled that I have an audience that loves me. But I also know that my ancestors are happy that I went in the direction. I just didn’t go like, ‘I’m modern now, I’m going to drop this right here.’ No. And fortunately because of that there are a bunch of youngsters who are coming up now who picked up that same thing—Stevie J Blues, Marcus Cartwright, Kingfish Ingram, Shawn McDonald, Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, Keb’ Mo’! Guy Davis, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Valerie Turner, Rhiannon Giddens, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, all those people.
It’s just that this music speaks to me. It’s channels and roots go in and [there] are branches of the tree that make music here. For the people who aren’t interested in where it comes from, they can like whatever and do whatever they want. But there is a significant group of us that are human beings on this planet, we’d like to know where things come from.
AS: As a teenager you worked on a farm, milking cows, growing
corn, alfalfa. What did this lifestyle teach you and why did you
choose it?
TM: I lost my father when I was
twelve-and-a-half years old. This was a guy who was a brilliant
musician, brilliant composer, who couldn’t make his living as a musician
when his family came along. So, he got a job. He first worked in a
brass foundry and then he worked the rest of his work life as a tire
molder for U.S. Rubber in factories, making big truck tires. This guy,
the light of all our lives, got taken away from us in a tragic accident
that happened when a piece of equipment that he was trying to load
[crushed him]. My father always said, ‘One of the things you need to
always know is that when you walk in the door with your job, you want to
walk out the door with that job. That job leaves with you.’ And so, I
took a look at it. I saw all these dads and moms and uncles and aunts,
cousins and grandparents, working these jobs that to me were great to be
able to raise a family, but they didn’t do anything for that person.
So, for me, it was important to know how to work and I don’t mean work. I mean work. Get up in the morning at quarter-past four and have seventy-five cows to milk, and clean and feed calves, horses and sheep, chickens and rabbits, dogs and all that kind of stuff and work the land. Because that’s an important thing—It’s a very important thing.
Of course, that led me to be concerned about ecology and alternative energy, solar, wind, thermal, geo-thermal. All kinds of stuff like that. It kept me really busy because a lot of stuff was developing in all those years. But it was really important for me to be able to pick up an instrument and sit there and whatever it is that I thought I wanted to play on it, I could.
AS: You also spent some time in Hawaii. Does that connect to this appreciation of music and working the land?
TM: Yes,
Hawaii connected before. My dad had a big radio—Firestone radio. A
radio-record player and the radio station had shortwave and longwave
radio on it. It also had pre-sets for Havana, Cuba; London, England;
Buenos Aires; Honolulu. And one day, I punched it in on Honolulu as a
kid about eight-years-old, and the most amazing music came out that
completely played down to the core. Some music plays inside my head,
other music comes in and floods my whole spirit. Some stuff is directly
made to dance, some stuff you’re moving as soon as you hear it. But this
was some great Hawaiian music. To me, that was the real sound.
That was from the early ’50s—maybe ’50 or ’51. There was a guy named Arthur Godfrey and he had a radio program and then he had a television program. He was a ukulele player, he always had one sitting around. He played baritone and concert. He also had a Hawaiian woman on the show, named Haleloke, and my two brothers and I we were all very much in love with Haleloke, because she could dance and do the Hula and we were excited by it. And little bit by little bit, you hear this and that from Hawaii and you go, ‘Wow, what is it that makes them play that real beautiful sustained, slow notes?’ Eventually, over the years, going back and forth trying to figure out what the heck is happening.
When I moved to Hawaii [in the 1980s] I found musicians to work with. They wanted to learn the blues turnarounds and I wanted to learn the Hawaiian turnarounds, which were really different. They play them and they don’t even think about me. We play them and we don’t even think about them. But you try to learn each other’s music. The Hawaiians borrowed a lot from blues and jazz and R&B and all kinds of stuff to make their music. So, you know, here we were.
AS: Let me ask, just simply, how do you feel today, how are your spirits?
TM:
Personally, I feel energized by having sixty years on the road and all
of a sudden having to sit down. I really appreciated it. And I am
appreciating it. Getting a chance to rest, and think about things and
how I’m going to come out of this, and where I’m going to land when I
come out of this pandemic or global lockdown or whatever you want to
call it—global reset. Somebody said it’s ‘Nonfiction science fiction.’
So, yeah, I’m in good shape. I’m very positive, just working on the next
moves.
AS: I heard there might be some music in the works?
TM:
Listen, if I release all the music I had today, the people would be
scared. I’ve been working on music, there’s all kinds of ideas. People
are finding all these different shows I’ve done on radio programs and
they’re showing up on the internet. But yeah, we’ve got music. We’ve
always got music, man. We’ve got plenty of music. It’s just figuring out
how to make sure it gets out and gets out maximally to as many people
as possible.
Keb’ Mo’ and I just recently were on the road in 2017, we did a record. People are still saying, ‘Oh my god, I just got the record! It’s really great.’ We came and we did. I don’t wait around for people to tell me what to do. I get busy. I’ll tell you, one of the things I really appreciated about Prince. Prince was always at least three albums ahead of whatever music was on the street. Because that way, whatever they do, you’re playing the music that you’re feeling. Every time it came for me to make another album, I did the music that I felt at that moment. Now people say, ‘You opened my eyes and ears to so much more music.’ That part’s really good. You get some people to do that, then it’s really great.
AS: What do you love most about music?
TM: What
do I love most about music? The fact that every person on this earth
has the ability to really connect to it. Most do, but some don’t. I
think most of it is that it’s the universal language of our whole cosmos
here. It’s just fantastic. I’m real proud that my ancestors gave me the
wherewithal to be inside of it and be a part of it and to breathe it
and play it and share it. For that, I am eternally grateful to them.
http://www.thecountryblues.com/artist-reviews/taj-mahal/
Acoustic, Folk, and Country Blues In the 21st Century: From Traditional to Modern
Taj Mahal
A pillar of the contemporary blues, Taj Mahal was born as Henry St. Claire Fredericks in Harlem in 1942. He named himself after the famous Indian palace because it came to him in a dream. There had to be some explanation for it, because his real name sounds real good. Over the last four decades he has been one of the most important forces in the revival and continuation of the traditional blues, while infusing an amalgam of sounds, from Caribbean to African into the music.
Taj Mahal was one of the important blues-revivalists of the 1960s, and profoundly influential on scores of blues fans and players who were first introduced to the blues through his music. Notably, he was one of the few African-American blues stars, preservationists and revivalists, who started their career playing primarily to the “new” blues audience. The old-guard blues musicians, Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell and all those guys, were just being “rediscovered” and previously obscure true folk-blues musicians like John Jackson and John Cephas found a receptive new audience in the burgeoning blues-revival audience that was opend up by people like John Hammond and Taj Mahal. He came on the scene as the “real deal”, a black bluesman from Harlem, cultural heir to the African-American experience. That gave him instant credibility with the largely white, young audience of college students and hippies. He introduced them to the old songs like “Statesboro Blues,” “Fishin’ Blues” and “Corinna, Corinna,” and they, in turn, sought out the origins of the music. No different than his compatriots, the musical movers and shakers like Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, John Hammond and Jorma Koukonen, this generation looked to the original blues for material and inspiration, but were not the originators. They took a music that had seen its popularity wane among African Americans and revitalized it, a path that started in the middle of the 20th Century and continues to today.
Taj Mahal was instrumental in that progress, but he never stood still. Like Ry Cooder, Corey Harris and other adventurous spirits, he ventured into African-and world roots music, from Mali to Haiti, from Hawaii to wherever. He kept the blues alive, but was not afraid to make it progressive, innovative and new. All music changes and evolves, or it faces extinction. Taj Mahal is a true master of the genre and a musicologist of the first degree, a man without whom a website like this in the 21st Century would be unimaginable.
Recommended starter:
His 1968 debut “The Natch’l Blues” stands as one of the seminal albums of the blues revival.
“Fishin’ Blues” is a song often attributed to Taj Mahal, who popularized it. However, it is an old song that was originally recorded by Henry Thomas. Like many of his generation, Taj Mahal found it on the Anthology of American Folk Music, the Harry Smith Collection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal_(musician)
Taj Mahal (musician)
Taj Mahal in 2005
Taj Mahal (born Henry Saint Claire Fredericks on May 17, 1942) is an American blues musician, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, actor, and film composer. He plays the guitar, piano, banjo, harmonica, and many other instruments,[1] often incorporating elements of world music into his work. Mahal has done much to reshape the definition and scope of blues music over the course of his more than 50-year career by fusing it with nontraditional forms, including sounds from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Hawaii, and the South Pacific.[2]
Early life
Mahal was born Henry Saint Claire Fredericks, Jr. on May 17, 1942, in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, New York. Growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts, he was raised in a musical environment: his mother was a member of a local gospel choir and his father, Henry Saint Claire Fredericks Sr., was an Afro-Caribbean jazz arranger and piano player. His family owned a shortwave radio which received music broadcasts from around the world, exposing him at an early age to world music.[3] Early in childhood he recognized the stark differences between the popular music of his day and the music that was played in his home. He also became interested in jazz, enjoying the works of musicians such as Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson.[4] His parents came of age during the Harlem Renaissance, instilling in their son a sense of pride in his Caribbean and African ancestry through their stories.[5]
Because his father was a musician, his home frequently hosted other musicians from the Caribbean, Africa, and the US. His father was called "The Genius" by Ella Fitzgerald before starting his family.[6] Early on, Henry Jr. developed an interest in African music, which he studied assiduously as a young man. His parents encouraged him to pursue music, starting him out with classical piano lessons. He also studied the clarinet, trombone and harmonica.[7]
When Henry Jr. was eleven years old, his father was killed in an accident at his construction company, crushed by a tractor when it flipped over. It was an extremely traumatic experience for the boy.[6] Mahal's mother later remarried. His stepfather owned a guitar which Henry Jr. began using at age 13 or 14, receiving his first lessons from a new neighbor from North Carolina of his own age who played acoustic blues guitar.[7] His name was Lynwood Perry, the nephew of the famous bluesman Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. In high school Henry Jr. sang in a doo-wop group.[6]
For some time he thought of pursuing farming over music. His passion began on a dairy farm in Palmer, Massachusetts, not far from Springfield, at age 16. By 19, he had become farm foreman. "I milked anywhere between thirty-five and seventy cows a day. I clipped udders. I grew corn. I grew Tennessee redtop clover. Alfalfa."[8] Mahal believes in growing one's own food, saying, "You have a whole generation of kids who think everything comes out of a box and a can, and they don't know you can grow most of your food." Because of his personal support of the family farm, Mahal regularly performs at Farm Aid concerts.[8]
Henry chose his stage name, Taj Mahal, from dreams he had about Mahatma Gandhi, India, and social tolerance. He started using the stage name in 1959[9] or 1961[6]—around the same time he began attending the University of Massachusetts. Despite having attended a vocational agriculture school, becoming a member of the National FFA Organization, and majoring in animal husbandry and minoring in veterinary science and agronomy, Mahal decided to pursue music instead of farming. In college he led a rhythm and blues band called Taj Mahal & The Elektras. Before heading for the U.S. West Coast, he was also part of a duo with Jessie Lee Kincaid.[6]
Career
Mahal moved to Santa Monica, California, in 1964 and formed Rising Sons with fellow blues rock musicians Ry Cooder and Jessie Lee Kincaid, landing a record deal with Columbia Records soon after. Jesse Ed Davis, a Kiowa native from Oklahoma, joined Taj Mahal and played guitar and piano on Mahal's first four albums. The group was one of the first interracial bands of the period, which may have hampered their commercial viability.[10] However, Rising Sons bassist Gary Marker later recalled the band's members had come to a creative impasse and were unable to reconcile their musical and personal differences even with the guidance of veteran producer Terry Melcher.[11] They recorded enough songs for a full-length album, but only released a single and the band soon broke up. Legacy Records did release The Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder in 1992 with material from that period. During this time Mahal was also working with other musicians like Howlin' Wolf, Buddy Guy, Lightnin' Hopkins, and Muddy Waters.[7]
Mahal stayed with Columbia for his solo career, releasing the self-titled Taj Mahal and The Natch'l Blues in 1968. His track Statesboro Blues was featured on side 2 of the very successful Columbia/CBS sampler album, The Rock Machine Turns You On, giving a huge early impetus to his career. Giant Step/De Old Folks at Home with Kiowa session musician Jesse Ed Davis, .[12] During this time he and Cooder worked with the Rolling Stones, with whom he has performed at various times throughout his career.[13] In 1968, he performed in the film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. He recorded a total of twelve albums for Columbia from the late 1960s into the 1970s. His work of the 1970s was especially important, in that his releases began incorporating West Indian and Caribbean music, jazz and reggae into the mix. In 1972, he acted in and wrote the film score for the movie Sounder, which starred Cicely Tyson.[13] He reprised his role and returned as composer in the sequel, Part 2, Sounder.[14]
In 1976 Mahal left Columbia and signed with Warner Bros. Records, recording three albums for them. One of these was another film score for 1977's Brothers; the album shares the same name. After his time with Warner Bros., he struggled to find another record contract, this being the era of heavy metal and disco music.
Stalled in his career, he decided to move to Kauai, Hawaii in 1981 and soon formed the Hula Blues Band. Originally just a group of guys getting together for fishing and a good time, the band soon began performing regularly and touring.[15] He maintained a low public profile in Hawaii throughout most of the 1980s before recording Taj in 1988 for Gramavision.[13] This started a comeback of sorts for him, recording both for Gramavision and Hannibal Records during this time.
In the 1990s Mahal became deeply involved in supporting the nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation.[16][17] As of 2019, he was still on the Foundation's advisory board.[18]
In the 1990s he was on the Private Music label, releasing albums full of blues, pop, R&B and rock. He did collaborative works both with Eric Clapton and Etta James.[13]
In 1995 he recorded a record fusing traditional American blues with Indian stringed instruments, Mumtaz Mahal, accompanied by Vishna Mohan Bhatt on mohan veena and N. Ravikiran on chitravina, a fretless lute.
In 1998, in collaboration with renowned songwriter David Forman, producer Rick Chertoff and musicians Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nile, Joan Osborne, Rob Hyman, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm of the Band, and the Chieftains, he performed on the Americana album Largo based on the music of Antonín Dvořák.
In 1997 he won Best Contemporary Blues Album for Señor Blues at the Grammy Awards, followed by another Grammy for Shoutin' in Key in 2000.[19] He performed the theme song to the children's television show Peep and the Big Wide World, which began broadcast in 2004.
In 2002, Mahal appeared on the Red Hot Organization's compilation album Red Hot and Riot in tribute to Nigerian afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. The Paul Heck produced album was widely acclaimed, and all proceeds from the record were donated to AIDS charities.
Taj Mahal contributed to Olmecha Supreme's 2006 album 'hedfoneresonance'.[20] The Wellington-based group led by Mahal's son Imon Starr (Ahmen Mahal) also featured Deva Mahal on vocals.[21]
Mahal partnered up with Keb' Mo' to release a joint album TajMo on May 5, 2017.[22] The album has some guest appearances by Bonnie Raitt, Joe Walsh, Sheila E., and Lizz Wright, and has six original compositions and five covers, from artists and bands like John Mayer and The Who.[23]
In 2013, Mahal appeared in the documentary film on Byrds founding member Gene Clark, 'The Byrd Who Flew Alone', produced by Four Suns Productions. Clark and Mahal had been friends for many years.[24]
In June 2017, Mahal appeared in the award-winning documentary film The American Epic Sessions, directed by Bernard MacMahon, recording Charley Patton's "High Water Everywhere"[25] on the first electrical sound recording system from the 1920s.[26] Mahal appeared throughout the accompanying documentary series American Epic, commenting on the 1920s rural recording artists who had a profound influence on American music and on him personally.[27]
Personal life
Mahal's first marriage was to Anna de Leon.[28] He refers to Anna in the song "Texas Woman Blues" with the spoken words "Señorita de Leon, escucha mi canción." That marriage produced one daughter, the novelist and teacher Aya de Leon. Taj Mahal married Inshirah Geter on January 23, 1976 and together they have six children. His daughter Deva Mahal appeared on one episode of Dating Around.[29]
Musical style
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Mahal leads with his thumb and middle finger when fingerpicking, rather than with his index finger as the majority of guitar players do. "I play with a flatpick," he says, "when I do a lot of blues leads."[7] Early in his musical career Mahal studied the various styles of his favorite blues singers, including musicians like Jimmy Reed, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, Big Mama Thornton, Howlin' Wolf, Mississippi John Hurt, and Sonny Terry. He describes his hanging out at clubs like Club 47 in Massachusetts and Ash Grove in Los Angeles as "basic building blocks in the development of his music."[30] Considered to be a scholar of blues music, his studies of ethnomusicology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst would come to introduce him further to the folk music of the Caribbean and West Africa. Over time he incorporated more and more African roots music into his musical palette, embracing elements of reggae, calypso,[12] jazz, zydeco, R&B, gospel music, and the country blues—each of which having "served as the foundation of his unique sound."[3] According to The Rough Guide to Rock, "It has been said that Taj Mahal was one of the first major artists, if not the very first one, to pursue the possibilities of world music. Even the blues he was playing in the early 70s – Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff (1972), Mo' Roots (1974) – showed an aptitude for spicing the mix with flavours that always kept him a yard or so distant from being an out-and-out blues performer."[12] Concerning his voice, author David Evans writes that Mahal has "an extraordinary voice that ranges from gruff and gritty to smooth and sultry."[1]
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Taj Mahal believes that his 1999 album Kulanjan, which features him playing with the kora master of Mali's Griot tradition Toumani Diabaté, "embodies his musical and cultural spirit arriving full circle." To him it was an experience that allowed him to reconnect with his African heritage, striking him with a sense of coming home.[4] He even changed his name to Dadi Kouyate, the first jali name, to drive this point home.[31] Speaking of the experience and demonstrating the breadth of his eclecticism, he has said:
The microphones are listening in on a conversation between a 350-year-old orphan and its long-lost birth parents. I've got so much other music to play. But the point is that after recording with these Africans, basically if I don't play guitar for the rest of my life, that's fine with me....With Kulanjan, I think that Afro-Americans have the opportunity to not only see the instruments and the musicians, but they also see more about their culture and recognize the faces, the walks, the hands, the voices, and the sounds that are not the blues. Afro-American audiences had their eyes really opened for the first time. This was exciting for them to make this connection and pay a little more attention to this music than before.[4]
Taj Mahal has said he prefers to do outdoor performances, saying: "The music was designed for people to move, and it's a bit difficult after a while to have people sitting like they're watching television. That's why I like to play outdoor festivals-because people will just dance. Theatre audiences need to ask themselves: 'What the hell is going on? We're asking these musicians to come and perform and then we sit there and draw all the energy out of the air.' That's why after a while I need a rest. It's too much of a drain. Often I don't allow that. I just play to the goddess of music-and I know she's dancing."[5]
Mahal has been quoted as saying, "Eighty-one percent of the kids listening to rap were not black kids. Once there was a tremendous amount of money involved in it ... they totally moved it over to a material side. It just went off to a terrible direction. ...You can listen to my music from front to back, and you don't ever hear me moaning and crying about how bad you done treated me. I think that style of blues and that type of tone was something that happened as a result of many white people feeling very, very guilty about what went down."[32]
Awards
Taj Mahal has received three Grammy Awards (ten nominations) over his career.[1]
- 1997 (Grammy Award) Best Contemporary Blues Album for Señor Blues[19]
- 2000 (Grammy Award) Best Contemporary Blues Album for Shoutin' in Key[19]
- 2006 (Blues Music Awards) Historical Album of the Year for The Essential Taj Mahal[33]
- 2008 (Grammy Nomination) Best Contemporary Blues Album for Maestro[19]
- 2018 (Grammy Award) Best Contemporary Blues Album for TajMo[34]
On February 8, 2006 Taj Mahal was designated the official Blues Artist of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.[35]
In March 2006, Taj Mahal, along with his sister, the late Carole Fredericks, received the Foreign Language Advocacy Award from the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in recognition of their commitment to shine a spotlight on the vast potential of music to foster genuine intercultural communication.[36]
On May 22, 2011, Taj Mahal received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He also made brief remarks and performed three songs. A video of the performance can be found online.[37]
In 2014, Taj Mahal received the Americana Music Association's Lifetime Achievement award.
Discography
Albums
- 1968 – Taj Mahal
- 1968 – The Natch'l Blues
- 1969 – Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home
- 1971 – Happy Just to Be Like I Am
- 1972 – Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff
- 1972 – Sounder (original soundtrack)
- 1973 – Oooh So Good 'n Blues
- 1974 – Mo' Roots
- 1975 – Music Keeps Me Together
- 1976 – Satisfied 'n' Tickled Too
- 1976 – Music Fuh Ya' (Musica Para Tu)
- 1977 – Brothers
- 1977 – Evolution (The Most Recent)
- 1987 – Taj
- 1988 – Shake Sugaree - Taj Mahal Sings and Plays for Children
- 1991 – Mule Bone
- 1991 – Like Never Before
- 1993 – Dancing the Blues
- 1995 – Mumtaz Mahal (with V.M. Bhatt and N. Ravikiran)
- 1996 – Phantom Blues
- 1997 – Señor Blues
- 1997 – Taj Mahal and the Hula Blues AKA Sacred Island (1998; with The Hula Blues Band)
- 1999 – Kulanjan (with Toumani Diabaté)
- 2001 – Hanapepe Dream (with The Hula Blues Band)
- 2005 – Mkutano Meets the Culture Musical Club of Zanzibar
- 2008 – Maestro
- 2012 – Hidden Treasures of Taj Mahal CD1 unreleased 1969-1973
- 2014 – Talkin' Christmas (with The Blind Boys of Alabama)
- 2016 – Labor of Love (recorded in 1998)
- 2017 – TajMo (with Keb' Mo')
Live albums
- 1971 – The Real Thing
- 1972 – Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff
- 1972 – Big Sur Festival - One Hand Clapping
- 1979 – Taj Mahal and The International Rhythm Band - Live & Direct
- 1990 – Live at Ronnie Scott's AKA Big Blues
- 1996 – An Evening of Acoustic Music
- 2000 – Taj Mahal and The Phantom Blues Band Live - Shoutin' in Key
- 2004 – Taj Mahal Trio - Live Catch
- 2007 – World Blues (recorded in 1971; reissue with additional material on a 2019 LP)
- 2012 – Hidden Treasures of Taj Mahal CD2 Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1970
- 2015 – Taj Mahal & The Hula Blues Band: Live From Kauai
- 2016 – Live In San Francisco 1966
- 2020 - Taj Mahal Live - Live American Radio Broadcast AKA Johnny Too Bad - Live American Radio Broadcast AKA Taj Mahal - Ultrasonic Blues - The Full WLIR New York Broadcast 1974 AKA Live at Ultrasonic Studios
- 2020 - The Underground Pipeline - Gainesville, FL Broadcast 1978
Compilation albums
- 1980 – Going Home
- 1981 – The Best of Taj Mahal, Volume 1 (Columbia)
- 1992 – Taj's Blues
- 1993 – World Music
- 1994 – Taj Mahal - The Rising Sun collection No. 3 (reissued in 2004 as Sugar Mama Blues)
- 1998 – In Progress & In Motion: 1965-1998
- 1999 – Blue Light Boogie
- 2000 – The Best of Taj Mahal
- 2000 – The Best of the Private Years
- 2001 – Sing a Happy Song: The Warner Bros. Recordings
- 2003 – Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues – Taj Mahal
- 2003 – Blues with a Feeling: The Very Best of Taj Mahal
- 2005 – The Essential Taj Mahal
- 2014 – Sweet Mama Red
- 2019 – Taj Mahal - Ten songs for you
Various artists featuring Taj Mahal
- 1968 – The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
- 1968 – The Rock Machine Turns You On
- 1970 – Fill Your Head With Rock
- 1985 – Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed
- 1990 – The Hot Spot – original soundtrack
- 1991 – Vol Pour Sidney – one title only, other tracks by Charlie Watts, Elvin Jones, Pepsi, The Lonely Bears, Lee Konitz and others.
- 1992 – Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder
- 1992 – Smilin' Island of Song by Cedella Marley Booker and Taj Mahal.
- 1993 – The Source by Ali Farka Touré (World Circuit WCD030; Hannibal 1375)
- 1993 – Peace Is the World Smiling
- 1997 – Follow the Drinking Gourd
- 1997 – Shakin' a Tailfeather
- 1998 – Scrapple – original soundtrack
- 1998 – Largo
- 1999 – Hippity Hop
- 2001 – "Strut" – with Jimmy Smith on his album Dot Com Blues
- 2002 – Jools Holland's Big Band Rhythm & Blues (Rhino) – contributing his version of "Outskirts of Town"[38]
- 2002 – Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Volume III – Lead vocals on Fishin' Blues, and lead in and first verse of the title track, with Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Alison Krauss, Doc Watson
- 2004 – Musicmakers with Taj Mahal (Music Maker 49)
- 2004 – Etta Baker with Taj Mahal (Music Maker 50)
- 2007 – Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino (Vanguard) – contributing his version of "My Girl Josephine"
- 2007 – Le Cœur d'un homme by Johnny Hallyday – duet on "T'Aimer si mal", written by French best-selling novelist Marc Levy
- 2009 – American Horizon – with Los Cenzontles, David Hidalgo
- 2011 – Play The Blues Live From Lincoln Jazz Center – with Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton, playing on "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "Corrine, Corrina"
- 2013 – "Poye 2" – with Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba on their album Jama Ko
- 2013 – "Winding Down" – with Sammy Hagar, Dave Zirbel, John Cuniberti, Mona Gnader, Vic Johnson on the album Sammy Hagar & Friends
- 2013 – Divided & United: The Songs of the Civil War – with a version of "Down by the Riverside"
- 2015 – "How Can a Poor Boy?" – with Van Morrison on his album Re-working the Catalogue
- 2017 – Music from The American Epic Sessions: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – contributing his version of "High Water Everywhere"
Filmography
Live DVDs
- 2002 – Live at Ronnie Scott's 1988
- 2006 – Taj Mahal/Phantom Blues Band Live at St. Lucia
- 2011 – Play The Blues Live From Lincoln Jazz Center – with Wynton Marsalis and Eric Clapton, playing on "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" and "Corrine, Corrina"
Movies
- 1972 – Sounder as Ike Phillips
- 1976 — Part 2, Sounder as Ike Phillips
- 1977 — Scott Joplin as Poor Alfred
- 1977 – Brothers (composer)
- 1987 — The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains as Bones
- 1991 – Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey as Gatekeeper
- 1992 — Zebrahead (composer)
- 1995 — Once Upon a Time... When We Were Colored as Mr. Will
- 1996 – The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus as Himself
- 1998 – Outside Ozona as Dix Mayal
- 1998 – Six Days, Seven Nights as Entertainer
- 2000 – Songcatcher as Dexter Speaks
- 2002 – Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood as Swing Band Singer
- 2004 — Killer Diller as J.R. Cox
- 2017 – American Epic as Himself
TV Shows
- 1977 - Saturday Night Live: Episode 048 Performer: Musical Guest
- 1985 - Theme song from Star Wars: Ewoks
- 1992 – New WKRP in Cincinnati – Moss Dies as himself
- 1999 – Party of Five – Fillmore Street as himself
- 2003 – Arthur – Big Horns George as himself
- 2004 – Theme song from Peep and the Big Wide World
Taj Mahal complete 2020 interview
Taj Mahal - Fishin' Blues
Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' - She Knows How To Rock Me
Taj Mahal - Walking Blues
The Taj Mahal Trio - Festival de Jazz de Vitoria
Taj Mahal Ry Cooder Statesboro Blues
TajMo - Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' - "Don't Leave Me
Taj Mahal - Catfish Blues
TAJ MAHAL - STATESBORO BLUES
Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' perform 'Diving Duck Blues'
Taj Mahal - Leaving Trunk
Taj Mahal / Corrina
Taj Mahal - Going To The River
Taj Mahal Interview | Music Is My Life Podcast
Ta̤j̤ Maha̤l̤ -HD remastered [Full Album HQ]
TajMo - Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' - All Around The ...
TajMo': The Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo' Band - Jazz San ...
Taj Mahal - Mule Bone [Full Album]
Taj Mahal - Blues With a Feeling (Live)
Taj Mahal solo - live in Germany 1995
