Taj Mahal is one of those happy contradictions of popular music. Originally a blues musician, and still essentially one, he is nevertheless only 28 years old and a university graduate. Though Taj is black, his initiation into the world of blues was more through scratchy recordings than the songs relatives and neighbors sang.

The younger generation of black blues musicians, like Junior Wells, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and the late Magic Sam, with whom he might off-handedly be compared, are older than he is and the products of an indigenous local scene (Chicago). Taj is Harlem-raised and a recent citizen of Los Angeles.

Naturally, the differences in age, background, education and geography manifest themselves in the music. While Junior, Buddy, etc., play city blues, Taj plays the country blues electrified. That is, his band does. Taj himself plays a National steel-bodied guitar, occasionally amplified, mouth harp, banjo and fife. Junior Wells, of course, plays harp, but harp is also frowned upon in certain young Chicago blues circles for being too down home. And none of the young Chicago guitarists would ever play a National.

Yet it would be equally wrong to lump Taj with figures of the white blues revival like Bloom-field, Butterfield and Clapton. Among these and other white musicians, an inordinate emphasis was placed on instrumental virtuosity; Taj is a jack of many instruments and a master of none. And though Taj's kind of music is more often played by white musicians than black ones today, one can hardly call Taj's blackness incidental. Both his and the young white musicians' music depend on a studied re-creation of defunct and dying forms, yet Taj's vocal timbre, diction and inflection lend his performances an authenticity and authority which many white musicians lack.

It is Taj's combination of earthiness and musical breadth and sophistication which enables him to do some of his most challenging material. Not a folk artist in the literal sense, he effectively resurrects and updates older material. His first album, Taj Mahal, was the cornerstone of his style: country blues of Sleepy John Estes, Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson electrified, in both senses, by one of the most exciting bands of the Sixties–including Jesse Edwin Davis on lead guitar and Ry Cooder on rhythm. Its one flaw was that of a novice: in the manner of Bob Dylan's first album, the singing was overly exuberant and unsubtle.

Natch'l Blues was smoother hewn, if no less compelling, and was more of a planned, coherent album. Here, he was rewriting traditional material for his own purposes. Out of "Corinna," performed at various times by Joe Turner, Roy Peterson and Bob Dylan, Taj created something entirely his own, just as he juggled verses and generally calmed down "Rollin' and Tumblin'" to make "Done Changed My Way of Living." The album was also notable for his taking entirely non-blues songs, like the traditional "The Cuckoo," and giving them a blues treatment, and for his baptism into soul music, with William Bell's "You Don't Miss Your Water" and Sam and Dave's "A Lot of Love."

This incipient diversification reached full, schizophrenic expression on his double album Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home. Giant Step contained a couple of pop tunes like the Goffin and King "Take a Giant Step" and "Farther On Down the Road," but mostly it was Natch'l Blues again, with material, this time, less carefully selected and performances more haphazard. It can probably best be seen as the companion to Taj's pet project Ole Folks, a collection of ancient folk tunes sung and played by Taj unaccompanied. Ole Folks was certainly not a strong commercial concept, and Giant Step may have been tagged on as a way of justifying it. A major disappointment on the heels of Natch'l Blues, it exists in retrospect as a pretty agreeable album.

I wish I could say The Real Thing signifies a daring new direction in Taj's music, or a reaffirmation of his earlier enthusiasms, but, almost by definition, it does neither. A live album is often a way of marking time, a means of fulfilling contractual obligations with as little sweat as possible. Taj, a while back, dropped out of show biz and travelled to Spain, where he did some street singing and generally took it easy. No doubt his latest musical incarnation/creation is still gestating. The Real Thing is a diverting, relaxed, but essentially anticlimactic record of old and old-sounding material performed at the Fillmore East. It offers nothing new or improved over the first two albums, and continues the artistic limbo of the third.

The most noticeable change is the addition of horns. Not saxes and trumpets, which would suggest some kind of soul revue, but four tubas, with an occasional fluegelhorn or sax. This must be Taj at his most tongue-in-cheek; the tubas, unwieldy instruments that they are, succeed most at sounding humorous. On "Tom and Sally Drake," a banjo reel, a single tuba serves a structural function by lining out the bass, but on something like "Diving Duck Blues," from the first album, the angularity of the basic riff is blunted by the tubas. Because of the eccentric instrumentation and sheer number of musicians (ten in all), some of the cuts sound disorganized even when they are not.

The rest of the material is a mixed bag. There is the late-hour, "Trouble in Mind"–like "John, Ain't it Hard," the solo "Fishin' Blues" from De Ole Folks At Home, and the jazzy "Big-Kneed Gal" on which the horns fill in more predictably. "Ain't Gwine Whistle Dixie" has become an extended jam, during which Taj introduces the individual band members. "You Ain't No Street Walker Mama, Honey But I do Love The Way You Strut Your Stuff," occupying all of side four, is even longer than its title. On it, Taj works out on chromatic harmonica. I prefer Davis' guitar-playing to John Hall's, who is the guitarist on this set, but the bass and drums of Bill Rich and Greg Thomas are not surpassed by Taj's previous sidemen.

Of course it should be remembered that it is one thing to perform to an audience, and quite another to play to a reel of tape. The audience at the Fillmore that night, I suspect, walked away with a bit of the energy which eluded the grooves of this record. (RS 91)

BEN GERSON