Blues Man Taj Mahal Still Kicking After 40 Years In The Biz

At 66, Taj Mahal says he still has left quite a few musical stones unturned.

"There's so much music out there, you could have a series of a thousand lifetimes and still not do it all," says the Harlem-born, Massachusetts-reared musician who plays the Tarrytown Music Hall, New York Friday.

Calling venerable singer/composer/multi-instrumentalist a bluesman might be accurate, but it's certainly doesn't tell the whole story.

In his more than four decades as a working musician, Mahal has flavored his sound with Caribbean, Hawaiian, African, Appalachian and Latin spices. He has been accompanied by brass bands, steel pans, and played reggae with more than one Rasta man.

His new CD, "Maestro," celebrates the 40th anniversary of his first recording, "Taj Mahal," and presents examples of the many styles he has explored and absorbed.

It features guest artists such as Ziggy Marley, Los Lobos, Ben Harper, the New Orleans Social Club, Angelique Kidjo and African kora master Toumani Diabate.

"I started rounding up songs, and making a laundry list of folks I wanted to talk to about being on it," Mahal says. "Some of them I didn't know."

Blending all of his varied influences has never been a problem for Mahal.

"Music is our planetary language, the language of our existence on this planet," he says. "You don't have to know what people are saying, but you can still hear it and understand."

When he was still a child known as Henry Saint Clair Fredricks, "the musical language came to me. There was something in it that I recognized," he says. He adopted the name Taj Mahal in his early 20s.

As much as Mahal loves blues and roots music, he is dismayed by the narrow focus of the mainstream music business.

"Where's the indigenous music that continues the tradition of the gourd with one string or a guy pounding on a drum," he asks. "If it's not tied to a buck or a pretty girl's butt, the music executives don't know how to deal with it."

He keeps an ear open to hip-hop and other contemporary music, citing artists such as Andre 3000 of Outkast and Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley as particularly interesting.
"If you're too obsessed with what came before, you don't see what's happening in front of you," Mahal says. "You have to take full advantage of the time you're in. If you're paying attention, there's a whole lot of stuff going on out there."

Though he likes hip-hop beats, "I don't always like the content, but that's their blues."4

Singer Shemekia Copeland will open Friday's Tarrytown concert. She has a Grammy nomination and a bevy of Blues Music and Living Blues awards under her belt.
This is one of Copeland's final stateside gigs before going for Iraq and Kuwait to entertain the troops.


The Reggae News Agency

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