Taj Mahal, Blues is walking and Jazz is talking!

BluesWax Sittin' In With

Taj Mahal

The Maestro Interview

Part One

By Don Wilcock

Taj Mahal

Don Wilcock for BluesWax: When you decided to make Maestro was that a conscious decision to celebrate the 40th anniversary or did it just happen by coincidence?

Taj Mahal: I actually wasn't thinking about it. There was a lot of things that came together. I mean it was like we hadn't done a record in a while and I wasn't happy with the music business at all and I was looking for a better deal if I was going to put music out. I wasn't making too much headway in terms of what I could actually see was coming across my plate, so I said if I'm recording another album, I want to have some of these ducks in a row. They're always talking numbers. I mean if you want to take - I'll make significant numbers, but at a smaller pace than right out of the box itself, whatever it is they're expecting.

BW: In line with that, I was surprised to have you tell Bill Wax on XM Satellite Radio that you called up Clive Davis and in essence he gave you carte blanche on that first album (Taj Mahal 1967). That shocked me.

TM: These are the early days. This wasn't later on. If I'd probably had a better legal operation, I'd own my own masters, too, or some version of that. As it is, I have my own publicist, but, no, I called Clive, said what I wanted to do. He said, "I don't think I should produce your stuff, but I'll send out some producers. Figure out who you like." Basically, they weren't gonna trust their money with an artist. They sent David Rubinson out. He and I clicked. We understood what we wanted to do. He ran the thing through the company and I did the music and put it together the way I wanted it to be. He left me alone with the music. I left him alone with the business and we both communicated with one another.

I think when you look back at what the product and project was and how it went from that raw first album to a little bit more sophisticated finished withNat'l Blues and then really finally distilled when it got down to the third album the Giant (Step/De Old Folk at Home) double album. Clive was a huge supporter of everybody that was in the record company. He went to everybody's gigs. I saw him everywhere. He was no slouch. He really is a music person and as far as I'm concerned, he's the last man standing. The rest of 'em are fuckin' suits, accountants, and a bunch of lawyers. They could be selling string, shoes, washing machines. Almost all of the albums I've been like totally the guy involved with everything every step of the album. I don't leave a whole lotta stuff to chance.

BW: Was there ever any pressure from any of the other labels to get you to be more focused or more niche-oriented?

TM: A couple different times they tried to do something, but they recognized I was a different type of man. My family is a long way from plantations. My father came out of the Caribbean. So, I wasn't that kind of cat. My parents weren't sharecroppers from Alabama, not that that's a bad thing. I just had the ideas I had and they really figured out, "I guess he likes what he's doing. He's got an audience for it." I mean even a lot of other artists said, "Man, what you're doing is great. All you need is just the one hit and that'll make everything work for you." They were always looking to get a hit. Fortunately, when I started, there was Blues this and Blues Rock and Funk Blues and all kinds of Folk Blues. They would have loved to have some hits.

"I don't care what they thought."

BW: How did it feel as a student at UMass to be singing Blues at a time when everybody thought Blues was a sub-genre of Folk?

TM: I don't care what they thought. You're suggesting that my mind is like everybody's around me. This was coming out of the culture I lived in, R&B, Jazz. It was all being played by the musicians that lived around me. I mean, at UMass we played the music. They were playing Folk music. I had an R&B band. I played with a jug band and I was learning how to play at that time, getting better at my fingerpicking, going out, listening to a lot of people that were happening at that particular time. Most of the other people I heard aside from the guys I learned from I heard on record. It was dance music. It was the music at the moment it was happening. All of those artists were living at that time.

I didn't hear Robert Johnson until I was at university and quite frankly, I wasn't all that impressed by him because the music I heard live from my friends was from people that were my own age or a little older. Listening to Robert I didn't get the experience that everybody else got out of it. It isn't that I don't think he's a great player and don't think now that he's a great player, but at that time I was [like], "Why are they making so much out of this guy? Here are all these real people that are around playing. Why don't they go and visit them?" And a lot of it is because those are the records they got and so that's who they know.

BW: Who were some of the people you were listening to live? Who were some of the musicians who inspired you?

TM: Jimmy Reed was dance music. So, you heard Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry. You heard Bo Diddley. You heard Paul Hucklebuck Williams. You heard John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Rushing, Big Joe Turner, you know. Nine Strings Big Joe Williams. I found all these people who were interested in the older Blues stuff. So, that was pretty nice, you know, but for me there was a clear thing. People on the eastern migration out of the south came north and brought a lot of that music with them, and that music was played pretty much late at night and not during the day. Late evening and even if you were lucky enough to get out and hear a band, towards the end of the night they would play a Blues or start out playing the Blues, or it would be Blues Swing.

BW: You told Bill Wax that Blues is walking and Jazz is talking. I thought that was an interesting statement. Do you want to elaborate on that?

TM: What I was saying is that Reggae gives you back your body, Jazz gives you back your mind, and Blues gives you back your soul, OK? And Blues is the walkin'. It's the walkin' Blues. The bass actually walks through there. That's what they [taught] the walkin' bass, but when you got down to Reggae, Reggae was talkin' to ya. A lot of Bob Marley songs you can totally remember from the bass line 'cause the bass line is a talkin' bass. I mean that was the great thing about [Bob Marley's bass player] Family Man [Aston Francis "FamilyMan" Barrett]. What a great bass line! One of the greatest bassmen in the world.

Taj Mahal's Maestro

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BW: Was that a thrill to play with Bob Marley?

TM: Of course! It was incredible to work with great people and Bob was really great to work with Family Man, his bass player. He was really exciting; an incredible musician. Somebody had to come out of the African Diaspora playing something that was making some sense to me, and Bob came along. He was making a lot of sense. We were contemporaries of each other.

BW: How did you and your daughter decide to collaborate on "Never Let You Go" on Maestro? How did that song develop?

TM: I had ukuleles for a long time. I been listening to them in a lot of different contexts and finally I heard the sound of one that had six strings on it that I really liked the sound of it. It had a harmony string on it. When I was working on the session with Los Lobos, I had "TV Mama." They listened to it and had some ideas of what they wanted to play. All I had was the ukulele part and I just showed them the chords and in very little time, in 15 to 20 minutes we had the tracks rolling. So, then we had this really great track and Steve Berlin put a couple of nice organ parts over it and we were really happy and everybody packed up, getting ready to get out. I'm thinking to myself, "Hey, man. What are you gonna do with this? You got moon, spoon, croon, soon, tune this, you know?" So, I thought about [my daughter]. I called her up and she said, "Yeah, okay. Send me the tracks." So, I sent her the tracks and she sent it back. The background vocals that are on there now are the ones she sent back originally. I replaced her voices 'cause I sung the melody over it that she's singin' on. Then she made some adjustments here and there. But I just thought she did a good job of writing it and it was all on her. I didn't say yea or nay. When it came back, that's what it was.

To be continued...

Don Wilcock is a contributing editor at BluesWax. You may contact Don at blueswax@visnat.com.