Why anybody called Henry Saint Claire Fredericks would want to change his name to that of an Indian restaurant is beyond me but Taj Mahal is a great man for the names. His grandparents were from St Kitts his grandmother s side were Careys from a place called Irishtown and the other side were Shiels from County Cork. At least, that s the plantation they were on! he laughs.
And the names of the great musicians are a swirl in his head Son House, Sleepy John Estes, Jimi Hendrix, Horace Silver, Washboard Sam, John Lennon any wonder then that the music we re used to conditioned, as we all are, by record companies and radio. My favourite subject too and luckily Taj Mahal can talk the hind leg off a goat.
It s sort of like how most Americans view Irish music. They see a person up there doing a jig and that s all they know. They don t know about the bodhran, they don t know about the great penny whistlers, the great mandolin tradition, the great banjo tradition, the great accordion tradition and the different types of songs. There is generally a tendency to find just one thing that s supposed to describe you.
I personally resent how over the years groups of individuals have described us through their inability to understand us. Sometimes they do have some understanding but refuse to acknowledge it or are certainly in very big denial about it.
While the young Taj Mahal was securing a degree in animal husbandry, he was already a familiar performer in the coffee-houses of Boston. In 1965, his Rising Sons collaboration with Ry Cooder led to a recording contract and the first of his 36 albums the latest, Seqor Blues, is clear evidence that he is a wise and boundless musician. He was part of the Rolling Stones Rock N Roll Circus, he has worked with everyone from Miles Davis to Jimi Hendrix, he speaks five languages, he reads philosophy, and he has kindly offered to cook me a fine seabass with a salad of sorts. Musically, too, he s up for just about anything.
My first awareness of music was probably before I could talk. I used to listen around for a kind of music that basically sounded like it was talking to me. Both my parents were musically inclined. My mother was a great singer and she sang to all of her kids when they were in utero, when she was carrying them and nursing them, all that kind of thing. If there was some kind of community occasion like a wedding or a christening or a funeral she would get to sing the Lord s Prayer. That kind of southern sound and gospel came in from her.
Then my father s side is the Caribbean, the Latin energy and jazz and be-bop. So I definitely heard music but I think if it was anything in particular it was probably gospel music. It wasn t really any particular song. It was just a style and a feeling that this stuff was exciting whenever people sang it.
We talk for a bit about Solomon Burke and the great Bahamian virtuoso Joseph Spence the greatest , according to Taj. There s no doubt that Mr. Mahal knows his onions, but given that not everybody has read their history of American music, has he encountered any surprise from critics and fans that there is, for instance, a Hank Williams number on his current album? After all, most people think of Taj Mahal as a blues singer.
Well, what was Hank doing? he asks. Hank was hanging out in the damn honky-tonks! That was part of the problem of the real straight, white, Southern Confederacy type of guy. He hung out in honky-tonks and he did go listen to the blues. Early country music in America is seriously cut out of the pattern of these guys trying to sing the blues. At the time the cultures were very close together. And so, over the years, because they stayed dedicated to the language of the music, the language evolved. When you hear country, I don t care where you are, you always can hear that guitar when it plays!
Certainly, people like Taj Mahal (and also Ry Cooder) have always been in the business of playing music from whatever source. But more importantly they seem to have an appropriately broad view of American music as a treasure not just for the converted in Europe but for Americans themselves. Taj welcomes a growing awareness that there is, to state the obvious, much more to American culture than Coca-Cola and stadium rock.
Little bit, by little bit, by little bit, it s happening, he says. There are books and articles being written. You have to realise when you talk about the development of the music we re talking about somewhere within the last hundred years and that s really not a long time. If you study history in my street, your street or their street, you ll see that the types of swings and changes that we ve grown accustomed to have happened over a pretty short time and they are intense. There are still people sharpening a stick to spear a fish and that s the only way they know how to do it. And you and I are talking over thousands of miles using technology and talking about music that we have in common.
It s hard for people to make heads or tails of all these different things. I m interested, you re interested. But a lot of people are saying, hey listen, if I can just get to work and put some beans on the table and the old lady ain t beatin me over the ears, maybe I ll get down the pub and kick back a pint of Guinness!
That was the third reference to Guinness in our conversation, and proper order too (and it was at this point that the seabass and fried bananas made an appearance), but back on the subject of the music, I suggested that people will always want to hear the real thing something believable, rootsy or whatever as opposed to what is presented to them by record companies, radio stations etc. And that, in this regard, Taj Mahal has always been a great educator.
Oh yeah! he enthuses. In the 60s the music that was influencing the innermost part of American culture and the counterculture was music from up to a hundred years before. America had the largest generation of youth on the planet who had grown up together, were in contact with one another and were going through similar changes. They were looking for values which were misplaced at the time. And in looking for those misplaced values, many of us sought an older time and tried to draw some information to help us have a better life in terms of the type of consciousness we had that moment.
Now, 30 years later, there s been quite a few music changes and we have a group of young people here who are again looking for something that has more substance to it. They also have a right to question the elders, to ask What did you do? Or What did you hear? Or What can you impart? Or What kind of spin do you have on this picture?
The title track of the CD, Seqor Blues , is a Horace Silver tune. It also features numbers from the repertoires of James Brown, Otis Redding, Washboard Sam, Delbert McClinton, Hank Williams, Louis Armstrong, T-Bone Walker and Marvin Gaye. Apart from indicating that Taj Mahal is in possession of a fine record collection, it is refreshing to think that a record company can nowadays cope with such an ostensibly mixed bag.
But it s all connected, he explains. It s all connected to the blues. I m not going to let these people define me, I m sorry, I m not going to wait around for them to define nothin that I m doing. Never did and never will. I mean, how many times were they wrong? They re wrong all the time! Rap, they said it would never amount to anything! Now who s controlling rap and who ran it into the ground with gangsta rap? They re wrong all the time! They re the ones! Meantime, the notes are building up in the bank accounts. But they don t want to know when it suits them. They say African-American monolith Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg Boom! Whack! I m not downin those guys, I like a lot of the stuff they put together. I don t always like the content but I understand that that too shall pass!
Since I ve always been out there, I don t know whether I ve got a head start. Or maybe I m just plain hard-headed? If it fits for me and it s zebra stripes going one way and plaid the other, if it works for me, then that s it. I ve watched everybody jump around on what s here today and gone tomorrow, and I don t see them being any better off than if you make up your mind and commit to it and go ahead and do it.
I mean, how many therapists are there out there telling people that you have to go for the brass ring? How many self-help books? How many people are making millions of bucks out of this kind of thing? But then, whenever you actually do your own thing they all stand back and say, oh no, this is too scary!
I am rather interested in Horace Silver s Seqor Blues as Taj s choice of the title track. It seemed a long way from Taj Mahal sitting on his lonesome with only the guitar for company. I confess that I had wondered how himself and the band would tackle it, but that when I heard it, it made perfect sense.
Well, you see, Horace Silver s situation is similar to mine. His mother was African-American and his father was from the Cape Verde Islands. He grew up in Connecticut about 90 miles away from me and heard Jimmie Lunceford and all those big bands that came through in the 20s and 30s. But he also got to hear a lot of the great blues bands that were travelling with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and early Dinah Washington.
But he wasn t connected to the social mores that stop people enjoying the music people saying I m a churchgoer, I can t listen to the blues! or I m a jazz player, I m from the conservatory and I learnt how to read! He wasn t like that. That s why I like Horace and Bobby Timmins organ players like Richard Groove Holmes, Shirley Scott, all that Blue Note stuff. I was into all of that. I grew up listening to all of that, man!
Everybody thinks I m this odd guy but they have no idea it s about the music, it s about the culture. Everybody in the culture is not the same person. A lot of these people have no idea. I mean, they re human beings, so when are they going to use their brains?
And so we laughed over thousands of miles, rambled on about Washboard Sam, anticipated that tasty seabass and the man himself threatened to go out for a pint when he gets to Dublin. Let s all take him out on the town! n
Taj Mahal Wonder of the World plays the Red Box on July 18th. Seqor Blues is out now on BMG/Private.