Legendary blues musician Taj Mahal has a simple message about the wide range of music in his repertoire.
“Jazz will give you back your mind. Reggae will give you back your body,” he said in a phone call Tuesday. “But the blues will give you back your soul, and that’s music that’ll melt in your mind.”
The 84-year-old Mahal is still going strong after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammys last year in addition to a Grammy win for best traditional blues album. He released a new album, “Time,” on May 1 via Resonatin’ Records/Thirty Tigers that delves into the blues with stops in reggae, folk, roots and soul music.
Mahal is also hitting the road for a tour that includes a July 11 stop at the Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall, where he’ll be backed by longtime collaborators the Phantom Blues Band.
In a call Tuesday from northern California, Mahal spoke with TribLive about finding a drummer in Pittsburgh, the new album, recording Bill Wither’s “Time” and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.
Do you have any memories from Pittsburgh shows in the past?
I’ve had several great shows there, but the first great one was back in about ‘71, I think it was. I had the big tuba band that was playing at the Syria Mosque. We were opening for Little Richard, and it was a pretty exciting gig. We met his drummer, he came over to check us out and he really got excited by what was happening. So he tried to get Richard’s band to come over and check us out and they said, “Oh no, we ain’t gonna check them cats out. We’re with Richard.”
So we heard him play. He played really good. The drummer was good, but he was having difficulty pushing the band with them kind of big horns and Bill Rich on the bass around and couldn’t lock in as much, as good as I felt he could, but he was very good. But anyway, our road manager, he found out that Richard was playing out in Las Vegas and went out and we engaged the drummer and said, hey, if he’s interested, we’d like to have him play with us. So he gave his two-week notice and came over and played with us and got to record with us on the second album. The first album was the original drummer. And then the second album, he came in and played, his name was Jimmy Otey. He came and played with us. That’s my one Syria Mosque story.
… But I knew about Pittsburgh through the jazz and through (jazz vocalist) Dakota Staton and the Pittsburgh Crawfords and (team owner) Gus Greenlee. My father used to get the Pittsburgh Courier. We read that in the ‘40s and the ‘50s.
You have the new album “Time” that’s been out for a little bit. It seems to showcase the diversity of your musical interests, so was that purposeful or did it just happen naturally?
Most of the time, most of the music that I’ve been playing since I realized that the industry wasn’t really supporting me — it was people outside of the industry that had direct contact with the music that I played — I just decided that, well, I’m not going to stay in this one genre. I went one, two, three albums in the genre. And then I started moving, jazz, more rural forms of music, a couple of different solo albums, then more roots, which started stretching out to more music.
The common denominator in all of what we’re doing is music from the (African) continent and sub-Saharan DNA and sources of musical styles and people, so that’s what makes all popular music these days, some version of it. I won’t mention names but several major people in the record companies will say, if you don’t have 42% urban music in the foundation of your record company — urban re: black — you can’t have a record company, because that’s where you get your energy.
If you take it back all the way to the beginning of the country, it’s people from the continent who set the energy of commerce and motion in this country. So it’s the same thing, the actual version, a modern version of the same thing. I’m just about the music, man. I’m fascinated with the fact that there’s so much, and I don’t understand why, I mean, to make choices to stay in boxes, with the idea that maybe they might take them this time.
Ask me, sure, I’d love to make Michael Jackson money. But that’s not why I’m here. Whatever you go for, you pay for, so I’m happy with being free enough to be able to do whatever it is I think is music to me. I love my music. I listen to my own music. I know so many artists can’t stand to listen to their own music. Are you kidding me? Why would you make it? You’re the music giver. That wasn’t a part, I never saw that rule in music, in the culture that I come from. No, we want to hear what you did. I find it really, really funny. Here come people who put everything in boxes asking me, do I put them in boxes? No, I don’t put it in boxes.
I imagine that has to be freeing to not be pigeonholed.
On the continent, they’re varying people from Algeria to South Africa, but you don’t put them in a box. They’re there. They’re all different parts of the same thing. I can understand coming out of the early years of the country, into the industrial revolution, there’s always been compression on the workers, the people working their jobs every day. So they don’t have a lot of room to be able to move around. I live a life of a musician, a composer, an artist, an instrumentalist, a singer. I’m into art. I’m into all kinds of different things. I’m involved in agriculture and sustainable farming and permaculture and all those kind of things like that. People don’t talk to me a lot about that, but those are things that concern me. I put out positive music. There’s 60 albums. Find me talking about some bad stuff, not one, you won’t find. It’s always educating, bringing people to light.
I guess it’s never too late to stop learning then, right?
Right, that’s what I’m doing. I literally this morning picked up my guitar, which is never too far away from me when I’m at home, because if I get an idea, I can walk into another room or go get it, but usually there’s one laying around so you just pick it up or open a case. There was a song, I woke up this morning, that my late drummer had been singing but he never finished it, and I woke up and that’s what I sat on side of the bed this morning when I finally started putting everything together, grabbed the guitar and was playing the notes out of it, cracking me up. I remember the notes, so I’m sitting on guitar.
What I’m doing now is a lot of songs that I know but I never played. Some of them are standards, some of them are just things that I heard, just see what the finger is like, changing my hands on the neck of the guitar because I learned how to play — I’m just a natural player. I didn’t study how to hold your hands and where to play all the notes. I’m playing the notes where I feel them. So I’m just still moving along learning. That’s where I’m at.
The title track “Time” was a never-before-heard song by Bill Withers. So how did you hear about that one?
Through a guy named Steve Berkowitz who worked in the industry and knew Bill and was involved with his catalog and heard the song, and he’s been a friend of mine. We’ve known and been around one another since back in the day, my days back at UMass, and he was an engineer at the radio station. He engineered a particular interview that one of the young ladies up at the school did for me for the school while she was there, and then eventually we met one another. He was working for Columbia Records, so he’s been a friend of ours and we were trying to set up a deal to get our music distributed, and so he was involved in an accompanying associate space with us, and he spoke to us about the tune.
I know when I heard the song, I was like, wow. My thought was, see, when Bill jumped out of the business, because people would really get haranguing him, and he was like me, I’m not gonna take that kind of haranguing from no industry, I’m sorry. And here he was, he’d been successful at what he brought, how he did it, and the way he played it, he’d been successful doing that, and they were telling him he needed some kind of rock or loud lead guitar player, need horns and synthesizers and backup chicks, and don’t forget, please move your tempos up and you get out of this kind of tempo.
He hears a song in the natural tempo, that’s where he plays it, but this is the industry over here, and then furthermore, they insulted the man and said he needed to do Elvis Presley’s song of “In The Ghetto.” He said, I don’t live in any ghetto. He said, I’m only singing stuff that I can personally relate to, so why are you gonna try to make me sing a song about the ghetto, so he just got tired of people, picked up and said, hey, I own my own publishing, sayonara, and the horse you rode in on.
But anyway, still Berkowitz thought that this is a great song, and so before Bill passed out of this life, he gave us the nod to do the song, and after I did the song, his wife, on two occasions, once when she first heard what we were doing with it, and then when she finally heard the song mixed and ready to go, she gave us the green light, so of course, that was all those three things were just wonderful to be able to come out. Bill was somebody like myself, strongly opinionated and did things the way we wanted.
In light of the album title of “Time,” does time feel like it moves quicker or does it move slower for you now?
I think time moves faster. No, not faster for me. Time moves, if you’re doing what you really love and you’re not connected by whatever you’re doing to the electric glass minute, atomic clock of the Western world on the planet, supposedly they’re keeping time. They ain’t keeping no time. You’re keeping the time that they’re keeping, but not keeping time. The more relaxed you are in the space that you’re in, it doesn’t fly by.
It moves, but you have to be doing something, you have to be about something. So if you’re just punching in a clock, they got you. Somehow or another, you get into the dredge and the dreary and all of a sudden you wake up one day and go, oh my God, 70 years went by. (laughs) Oh my God. My kids are now 60 years old. It’s like, here we are, and in me, I find my way through the music and the music keeps time moving slower.
If I was farming, it would even be slower. Gardening and farming because you’re moving at the speed that everything moves with the sun and the photosynthesis and the plants grow and the cows eat and the goats eat and the horses eat and the chickens eat and the bees buzz. … You got to find the speed that you want to cruise through this. See a lot of people get thrown in that urban speed, where they don’t ever sit down to a table and have a meal that takes an hour and people talk and relax. They don’t do that anymore so they don’t have that kind of time. So I always make time to do the things that need to get done and watch myself. Hey man, you want it to last? Take it easy.
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You also received a lifetime achievement Grammy last year. What did that honor mean to you?
What does that honor mean to me? That folks have been watching me for a long time, and now they’re not afraid to let me know.
Did it feel good to have that honor? Did it give you a chance to reflect back on your career at all?
Listen my friend, I’m who I am when I came in. I’m not the guy who just now is getting to do all these things that other people do. I’m a griot, an American griot. Take the time to find out what those guys do, and what they do is that they have the ability through music to travel back as far as the 11th or the 9th or the 7th century through the music. That’s what got broken when we were taken from the continent and brought to this country because there were retentions in different kinds of music. And the music of Elizabeth Cotten, Etta Baker, Reverend Gary Davis, Reverend Robert Wilkins, Blind Blake, Blind Boy Fuller, Jim Jackson and Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James and those guys who were string players.
So I found that power, that music, to be able to always have everything in full recall, not reaching, it’s like, no, the work that I’m doing is in front of me. The work that I’ve done is in back of me, pushing me forward along with my ancestors who did the same thing, who gave me this magic to be a part of. Once you discover the magic that belongs to you, then you acknowledge it and you regale it and you work with it. You respect it and respond to it, so that’s what I’m doing. These things are wonderful. I mean, a Lifetime Achievement Award, OK, hey, I guess they were paying attention. I didn’t have no idea that they saw the work that I was doing over this amount of time. I wasn’t looking for an award. I’m looking to hear more people who have heard the music. But obviously, these kinds of things are wonderful to happen to me, but I’m not out seeking awards.
With blues music, is there still a lot of territory to mine within that field? Will it ever run out?
Oh, never. You can never chew all the flavor out of the blues. Are you kidding me?
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source triblive.com ’
