Taj Mahal

By the late '60s the blues had evolved from a humble, outlaw Southern folk style and grown into one of the most influential musical forms of the 20th century. Any aspiring bluesmen faced a choice: they could either revisit the music's past glories or accept the difficult challenge of reinventing it once again.

Taj Mahal did both. Born Henry St. Clair Fredericks in 1942, he enjoyed a middle-class life and a college education in Springfield, MA, far away from the Delta. But from the beginning he showed a keen musical intellect and curiosity about the potential of the blues, and over the years he has boldly taken it to new places: to reggae, to sunny Calypso, to India, and even to its deep roots in West Africa.

His first group, Rising Sons, was formed in Los Angeles with a fellow blues traveler, Ry Cooder. Though signed to Columbia, the group's music remained in the vaults for more than 25 years; probably for the best, since its Paul Butterfield-like electric boogies were nothing new, and its versions of several Taj Mahal standbys ("Statesboro Blues," "Corinna," "Dust My Broom") were better served on later solo albums.

As a solo artist, Taj emerged as a stylish and lovable devil with a wide-brimmed hat and a dandyish bandana around his neck: a John Lee Hooker for the Woodstock generation. "Leaving Trunk," "Statesboro Blues," and "EZ Rider" balance tight, rock-tinged grooves with the narrative looseness of a born raconteur. The Natch'l Blues is even better, with the gorgeous keyboard-based ballad "Corinna" and even more confident discursiveness on "She Caught the Katy and Left Me a Mule to Ride" and "Going Up to the Country, Paint My Mailbox Blue."

Giant Step and De Ole Folks at Home, separate albums long packaged as a double, are the pinnacle of Taj's early career. Covering Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Band, and the Monkees, he shows that he can make anything his own, using the blues not for self-pity or mere sexual braggadocio, but as a sensitive tool for revealing a song's life force. Stripped down in the extreme, De Ole Folks links him with Lead Belly, his closest blues ancestor. On "A Little Soulful Tune," he conjures the childlike pleasures of song with a true minimum of sounds: just his voice and handclaps.

Mo' Roots has the first of his many excursions into Caribbean music, including a cover of Bob Mar-ley's "Slave Ship" that burns with all the passion and authority of the original. After further testing the island waters on some now-deleted Columbia discs, Taj signed to Warner Bros. in 1976 and released three heavily calypso- and reggae-influenced albums. Collected on Sing a Happy Song, they show a bluesman who has found sweetness and peace in steel drums and a lyrical steel guitar.

After some dormant years, Taj returned in 1986 for the difficult third phase of his career, which was marked by a mix of first-class musical ambassadorship and dull bluesploitation. Taj belatedly brought him into the Miami Vice age with cold synths and mechanical beats, though the distant chime of steel drums and Taj's Howlin' Wolf-like growls put a ghost in the machine. Still, it's an embarrassment, as are the shamelessly commercial albums he made for Private through the mid-'90s. From Dancing the Blues to Phantom Blues to Senor Blues, he's painting by numbers for an audience that is certainly easy to please: Dancing was nominated for the contemporary blues Grammy and Senor won it.

At the same time, Taj was doing some of his most ambitious and intelligent work. Mumtaz Mahal, a collaboration with two Indian musicians, N. Ravkiran and V. M. Bhatt, is pretty far out there, though there are moments where Taj's blues heartily shakes hands with the bending, wailing Indian quartertones. Better still are Sacred Island, his greatest and most heartwarmingly sweet blues/calypso experiment, and Kulanjan, recorded with the master Malian musician Toumani Diabate. Like Cooder on his Talking Timbuktu album with Ali Farka Toure five years before, Taj digs deep into the blues' African roots with wide eyes and plenty of licks to trade. Hanapepe Dream brings the blues to Hawaii, Taj's island home since the mid-'80s.

Along the way Taj has made some great oddball albums, including several excellent children's discs. In Shake Sugaree's cheerful sing-alongs and rambling autobiographical asides, he seems like the very reincarnation of Lead Belly. Mule Bone collects his songs for a play written by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston that was lost for decades. And on his soundtrack for the 1972 film Sounder (long out of print), he expertly evokes the hard life of sharecropping-era southern blacks.

Of the many collections, none captures the full breadth of Taj Mahal's talent and ambition. Most rely on the market-proven blues standards and avoid or ghettoize his experiments; only In Progress and in Motion, an excellent three-CD box, combines them, and even then his first five years gets two discs and everything else is crammed onto the third. Avoid The Best of the Private Years: It picks from everything except Sacred Island, which is the only Private disc worth listening to. -- (BEN SISARIO)



From the 2004 The New Rolling Stone Album Guide