TAJ MAHAL CELEBRATES FOUR DECADES
OF BLUES, ROOTS, REGGAE AND BEYOND
New Album Maestro Includes Guest Appearances
By:
Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Angelique Kidjo, Los Lobos, Ziggy
Marley and more
Also Available On Limited Edition 40th Anniversary Collector’s
Double LP
The mythology of American blues is filled with images of the
lone musician standing at the crossroads, caught in that gray
area between light and shadow, cutting impossible deals with
dark forces, offering up nothing less than his soul as collateral.
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal, a two-time GRAMMY®
winner and one of the most influential American blues and
roots artists of the past half-century, has made no Faustian
deals in his long and distinguished career, but he stands
at an important crossroads nonetheless. In his never-ending
exploration of the complex origins and underpinnings of American
music, he has forged a four-decade career by gathering and
distilling countless musical traditions from a range of geographical
and cultural sources: the Mississippi Delta, the Appalachian
backwoods, the African continent, the Hawaiian islands, Europe,
the Caribbean and so much more. Taj Mahal doesn’t just
stand at the crossroads. He is the crossroads.
On September 30, 2008, he makes his Heads Up International
debut with the worldwide release of Maestro (HUCD
3164). This twelve-track set – his first U.S. release
in five years – marks the fortieth anniversary of Taj’s
rich and varied recording career by mixing original material
with chestnuts from vintage sources and newcomers alike. Guests
on this anniversary gala include Ben Harper, Jack Johnson,
Angelique Kidjo, Los Lobos, Ziggy Marley and others –
many of whom have been directly influenced by Taj’s
music and guidance. read more
TAJ
MAHAL CELEBRATES FOUR DECADES
OF BLUES, ROOTS, REGGAE AND BEYOND
New Album Maestro Includes Guest Appearances By:
Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Angelique Kidjo, Los Lobos, Ziggy
Marley and more
The mythology of American blues is filled with images of the
lone musician standing at the crossroads, caught in that gray
area between light and shadow, cutting impossible deals with
dark forces, offering up nothing less than his soul as collateral.
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Taj Mahal, a two-time GRAMMY®
winner and one of the most influential American blues and roots
artists of the past half-century, has made no Faustian deals
in his long and distinguished career, but he stands at an important
crossroads nonetheless. In his never-ending exploration of the
complex origins and underpinnings of American music, he has
forged a four-decade career by gathering and distilling countless
musical traditions from a range of geographical and cultural
sources: the Mississippi Delta, the Appalachian backwoods, the
African continent, the Hawaiian islands, Europe, the Caribbean
and so much more. Taj Mahal doesn’t just stand at the
crossroads. He is the crossroads.
On September 30, 2008, he makes his Heads Up International debut
with the worldwide release of Maestro (HUCD 3164).
This twelve-track set – his first U.S. release in five
years – marks the fortieth anniversary of Taj’s
rich and varied recording career by mixing original material
with chestnuts from vintage sources and newcomers alike. Guests
on this anniversary gala include Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Angelique
Kidjo, Los Lobos, Ziggy Marley and others – many of whom
have been directly influenced by Taj’s music and guidance.
But Maestro is much more than just a tribute to past
glories. It captures the same level of intensity and depth that
has characterized every one of Taj’s recordings since
his self-titled debut album in 1968. Simply put, four decades
have done nothing to dilute his energy quotient. “The
one thing I’ve always demanded of the records I’ve
made is that they be danceable,” he says. “This
record is danceable, it’s listenable, it has lots of different
rhythms, it’s accessible, it’s all right in front
of you. It’s a lot of fun, and it represents where I am
at this particular moment in my life.”
In addition to the standard CD release, Maestro will
also be available on vinyl in a Limited Edition 40th Anniversary
Collector’s Double LP (HULP 8164).
The set opens with “Scratch My Back,” a song made
famous by soul shouter Otis Redding in the 1960s. When Taj and
his early band, the Rising Sons, opened for Redding at the Whiskey
A-Go-Go in Los Angeles, the up and coming bluesman was immediately
hooked by Redding’s fiery stage presence. “There
were very few artists who grabbed me the way Otis Redding did,”
he says. “If anyone was an example of what I wanted to
do with music, he certainly was it. His ability to take someone
else’s song and make it his own, and at the same time
not lose the essence of the original song, was just fantastic.”
“Scratch My Back” is one of four tracks on Maestro
to reunite Taj with his Phantom Blues Band, the combo that backed
him on two GRAMMY® winning recordings, Señor
Blues in 1997 and Shoutin’ in Key in 2000.
The reggae-flavored “Never Let You Go,” co-written
by Taj and his daughter, Deva Mahal, features shared vocals
by father and daughter against a backdrop by premier Latin rockers
Los Lobos. No newcomer to her father’s musical projects,
Deva first recorded with Taj as a pre-teen more than 15 years
ago, when he made a number of children’s albums on the
Music for Little People label. Los Lobos re-appears a few tracks
later in the boozy and rollicking “TV Mama,” a tune
written by Willie Turner and delivered here in a style reminiscent
of seminal electric blues guitarist Elmore James.
Ben Harper joins in on the vocals on “Dust Me Down.”
Written by Harper, this jagged and gritty tune is the latest
chapter in a longstanding association between these two musicians
hailing from separate and distinct generations. Harper’s
grandparents, proprietors of the Folk Music Center and Museum
in Claremont, California, were fans of Taj who booked him to
play numerous gigs at the center many years ago. “Later
on, I met their grandson,” says Taj. “I coached
him with his guitar playing when he was a teenager. He really
had a sensitivity to the music, and over the years we’ve
done some performing and recording together.”
Jack Johnson steps in to share vocals on Taj’s well-known
“Further On Down the Road.” Taj’s banjo and
harmonica juxtaposed against the horn riffs provided by the
Phantom Blues band give the song a vibe that’s equal parts
down home blues and vintage Stax.
In “Black Man, Brown Man,” Taj takes a trip to the
islands with the help of Ziggy Marley and his six-piece band.
“It was a tune that came to me back in the ‘70s,
when we were in the midst of recording a lot of that Caribbean,
African and Latin music,” Taj explains. “I thought
it would be a good song for Ziggy and I to do. It not only has
a nice reggae vibe, but it addresses a timely topic.”
The collaboration on this track represents the third generation
of Marleys with whom Taj has now been associated. Reggae icon
Bob Marley, along with Jamaican bassist/keyboardist/producer
Aston “Family Man” Barrett, helped record and mix
Taj’s 1974 album, Mo’ Roots (Family Man
also played piano on the Mo’ Roots track, “Slave
Driver”). Two decades later, Taj enlisted Bob Marley’s
mother, Cedella Marley-Booker – Ziggy’s grandmother
– to record an album of African children’s songs
on Music for Little People in the early ‘90s.
The exotic African ballad “Zanzibar” was co-written
by Taj and Afro-European songstress Angelique Kidjo, who shares
the vocals. The track also features Toumani Diabate on kora,
a 21-string harp from west Africa. Taj had long been a fan of
Toumani’s father, Gambian kora master Sidiki Diabate.
“Toumani happened to be here in the United States, and
the two of us ended up on a radio program together,” Taj
explains. “We played some music on this program, and that
just sealed it for both of us. We knew that some kind of musical
project would be in our future.” The result was Kulanjan,
a 1999 collaborative recording that featured Taj, Toumani and
a sextet of west African instrumentalists and vocalists.
Taj pays tribute to New Orleans icon Fats Domino with “Hello
Josephine.” He’s aided here by the New Orleans Social
Club, the Crescent City quintet whose ranks include Ivan Neville
on B3 and George Porter on bass. “I’ve been a Fats
Domino fan for years,” says Taj. “He did something
with the blues that made it so melodic and bouncy and danceable,
in a way that was different from all the other New Orleans cats.
And I loved playing with the New Orleans Social Club. They play
so well together, and this tune swings really hard.”
The set closes with Taj and the Phantom Blues Band serving up
a swaggering, roadhouse rendition of the Willie Dixon/Bo Diddley
classic “Diddy Wah Diddy.” In the end, as in the
beginning, it’s always about the blues, always about making
people move.
“With his record, as with all my records, I want people
to roll back the rug and go for it,” says Taj. “This
record 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.”
Composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Taj Mahal is one
of the most prominent and influential figures in late 20th century
blues and roots music. Though his career began more than four
decades ago with American blues, he has broadened his artistic
scope over the years to include music representing virtually
every corner of the world – west Africa, the Caribbean,
Latin America, Europe, the Hawaiian islands and so much more.
What ties it all together is his insatiable interest in musical
discovery. Over the years, his passion and curiosity have led
him around the world, and the resulting global perspective is
reflected in his music today.
Born Henry St. Claire Fredericks in Harlem on May 17, 1942,
Taj grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father was a
jazz pianist, composer and arranger of Caribbean descent, and
his mother was a schoolteacher and gospel singer from South
Carolina. Both parents encouraged their children to take pride
in their diverse ethnic and cultural roots. His father had an
extensive record collection and a shortwave radio that brought
sounds from near and far into the home. His parents also started
him on classical piano lessons, but after only two weeks, young
Henry already had other plans about what and how he wanted to
play.
In addition to piano, the young musician learned to play the
clarinet, trombone and harmonica, and he loved to sing. He discovered
his stepfather’s guitar and became serious about it in
his teens 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.
Springfield in the 1950s was full of recent arrivals, not just
from around the U.S. but from all over the globe. “We
spoke several dialects in my house – Southern, Caribbean,
African – and we heard dialects from eastern and western
Europe,” Taj recalls. In addition, musicians from the
Caribbean, Africa and all over the U.S. frequently visited the
Fredericks home, and Taj 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 record
companies of the day largely ignored.
Henry studied agriculture at the University of Massachusetts
at Amherst in the early 1960s. Inspired by a dream, he adopted
the musical alias of Taj Mahal and 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, Taj also mingled with various blues legends,
including Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Buddy
Guy, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Sleepy John Estes.
This diversity of musical experience served as the bedrock for
Taj’s first three recordings: Taj Mahal (1967),
The Natch’l Blues (1968) and Giant Step
(1969). Drawing on all the sounds and styles he’d absorbed
as a child and a young adult, these early albums showed signs
of the musical exploration that would be Taj’s hallmark
over the years to come.
In the 1970s, Taj 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).
Taj’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 Taj 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,
Taj 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, Taj 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 player Toumani Diabate (the kora is
a 21-string west African harp). He recorded a second album with
the Hula Blues Band, Hanapepe Dream, in 2003. Zanzibar,
a European release, followed in 2005.
Taj continues to tour internationally, doing as many as 150
shows per year throughout the U.S., Europe, Australia, New Zealand
and beyond.
He joins the Heads Up International label in the fall of 2008
with the worldwide release of Maestro. This twelve-track
set – his first U.S. release in five years – marks
the fortieth anniversary of Taj’s rich and varied recording
career by mixing original material, chestnuts borrowed from
vintage sources and newcomers alike. This anniversary gala includes
performances by Ben Harper, Jack Johnson, Angelique Kidjo, Los
Lobos, Ziggy Marley and others – many of whom have been
directly influenced by Taj’s music and guidance.
“The one thing I’ve always demanded of the records
I’ve made is that they be danceable,” he says. “This
record is danceable, it’s listenable, it has lots of different
rhythms, it’s accessible, it’s all right in front
of you. It’s a lot of fun, and it represents where I am
at this particular moment in my life. This record 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.”
