Music for Grownups: Taj Mahal Does It All

Taj Mahal, 66, celebrates 40 years in the business of music on "Maestro," an album of American, African, and Caribbean music recorded with friends Los Lobos, Ziggy Marley, the New Orleans Social Club, the Phantom Blues Band, and bassist Bill Rich and drummer Kester Smith from his current touring trio.

 

Although he's best known as a blues singer, that's just the tip of Taj's musical obsessions, which also include folk, R&B, funk, reggae, the music of Hawaii, and West African music—all of which are represented on "Maestro."

 

Just don't call it a career overview. "I could spend the rest of my life doing 'career overviews,'" said Taj with a laugh, speaking from his current headquarters in Berkeley, Calif. The former Henry St. Clair Fredericks has recorded more than two dozen albums since "Taj Mahal," his 1968 debut. "Señor Blues" won a Grammy Award for best blues album in 1997 as did "Shoutin' in Key" in 2000.

 

"Maestro" is, if anything, an album of inclusion. It reflects Taj's zest for the vast musical riches of America and the African Diaspora. He has made it his life's mission to open up that world to a hundred or so audiences each year.

 

"This stuff is all connected, man," said Taj of "Maestro," which ranges from "Never Let You Go," a sweet reggae tune cowritten with his daughter, Deva, and performed with Los Lobos, to the earthier Willie Dixon standard, "Diddy Wah Diddy." He bemoaned the cultural isolation of many Americans, "especially those who have no connection to their ancestors."

 

On the other hand, Taj characterized his career as a lifelong attempt to explain to himself why the rumbas and mambos he heard growing up moved him as much as B.B. King, Elmore James, or John Lee Hooker did. "All that stuff's connected for me," said Taj, who was born in Harlem and raised in Springfield, Mass. "It's all stuff I've been interested since I was a kid. So that's what I set about doing, once I realized that it's working for all of us. This is our interior national language. We're connected to the world and we have a responsibility to hear it and to give back to it."

 

Taj explained the gap separating "Maestro" from his prior album, 2003's "Hanapepe Dream," by his reluctance to work with record companies that want to "take everything that you got," especially his publishing rights. "Maestro," however, was released on Taj's independent Kandu label, in conjunction with much larger Heads Up International. Taj hopes Kandu will also become a place for his children to "do what they do." This includes rap and hip-hop, about which he expressed mixed feelings.

 

"Rap and hip-hop started as telling stories, so people could understand what the heck was happening in the [African-American] community," said Taj. "It was a forum to build a discussion like we did for thousands of years before we were brought to the United States. We're following our own tradition in modern times. Sometimes I don't want to hear the content, but I'm not mad at rappers. You can say what you want, but they got paid."

 

Hip-hop is just another point on a musical map that, on "Maestro," extends from the West Coast to New Orleans and then on to Jamaica and Africa. Taj recorded "Zanzibar" with Benin-born singer Angelique Kidjo ("a good friend of my late sister, Carol, who lived in Paris") and Senegal's Toumani Diabate, a virtuoso of the kora (a 21-stringed lute). In New Orleans he recorded Fat Domino's "Hello Josephine" with Crescent City piano king Henry Butler as well as bassist George Porter and guitarist Leo Nocentelli from legendary funk group the Meters.

 

Taj saves his most admiring words for Los Lobos, the great Mexican-American roots group that emerged during Los Angeles's punk-rock heyday. "Then they went back and did 'La Pistola y el Corazón,'" said Taj, "which was like, 'These are our roots, man.' I was like, OK! That's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about some cats who know who they are, who know where their stuff comes from, and who know the value of it."