New Interviews:
John Gorka at Falcon Ridge 2007
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Mike Craver at Philadelphia Folk Festival 2007

Falcon Ridge Folk Festival 2007

Philly's 46th Anniversary

Taj Mahal in Norristown, 1980 

Photos from Taj Mahal Web site:  http://www.tajblues.com/

[When Taj Mahal came into the interview room backstage at the Norris Theatre after his concert on Feb 24, 1980 with the Universal Rhythm Band, the first

thing I did was hand him a copy of the Fall 1979 issue of The Folk Life quarterly, opened to the page where I’d described his show-stopping concert at

the Philadelphia Folk Festival with Bai and Dembo Konte, the father-and-son griot duo from the Gambia.

 

He read the piece over slowly and carefully, settling himself comfortably in his armchair, lighting up an old briar pipe, and finally leant back to listen

to the questions, leaning forward and gesturing with his pipe when he had an especially emphatic response to a question, then leaning back again comfortably to
listen to where the next question was taking him.

 

By now, this interview has perhaps at most historical value, since Taj Mahal has gone on to become one of our elder statesmen in linking Africa and the

United States of America thro the griot tradition which he has of course come to represent on both sides of the Atlantic. I would like to thank him again

for the time he afforded this interviewer at that time.]

 

JMcL: “Drums and Shadows” is the title of a WPA book about memories of Africa among Georgia coastal blacks in the 1930’s – going back to the generation

which endured and survived slavery, and is probably all dead by now. When you’re working with Bai and Dembo Konte – and the Universal Rhythm Band – do

you find something of “drums and shadows” about what you’re doing with them?

 

Taj: Oh yeah, I’ve always had those kinds of images in my mind since I could remember getting pretty clear what my heritage was about - my father spoke

pretty clearly and pretty positively – and progressively – about our heritage and about the various things we had to do with our lives. So without ever

having read that book, I think if you’re brought up in the right way, and you’ve got good kinds of music, and have some kinds of links to it, you’ll

have some sort of affinity with it. I never remember reading any books along that line – you’re the first person who ever talked to me about anything like

that. The thing I picked up on was Paul Oliver’s “African Retentions in the Blues.” I saw a lot of things that were, and then there was someone who did a

really excellent piece of work on it, so I really paid a lot of attention to it. As I see it, different times, there are Afro-Americans and Jamaicans,

there’ll be Africans in the band, because we’re all spawned on soul off of Africa, we have the same kind of retention. Some people are a lot stronger, in

places like South America, where the Yoruba culture or whatever cultures are actually being carried on, and carried forth as tradition.

 

JMcL: There’s a line I saw in Booth Maternity Hospital in Philadelphia last Summer, where my youngest son was born. It was on a poster, and it said, “I

have only two things to give my children: roots, and wings.”

 

Taj: Hah!

 

JMcL: Would you ever see yourself as offering that to Afro-American children, if for example you were to offer school programs through such avenues as the

Philadelphia Folksong Society’s “Odyssey” programs of folk music in the public schools – say with Bai and Dembo Konte…?

 

Taj:  Be glad to do it. That’s a wonderful thing to do. Because I think that for me, personally, I’ve been able to season what I’ve been doing, so it’s

really “in the pocket,” it’s not wandering around out there, waiting to settle. And young children really are fascinated by it, by the music, and

somehow they are able, mysteriously… to know this music. It’s a part of the universal song, and it’s part of the individual song. I somehow feel we are

approaching and age where it’s possible for everyone almost instantaneously to hear the same thing, you know what I mean? I like the idea of school programs

– it sounds very good.

 

JmcL:  What kinds of programs would you do, if you did a school program?

 

Taj:  For me, I think I’d just break down the different types of music, non- instrumental music, vocal, rhythmic things, body rhythms, and certain kinds of

songs that talk about this and that – “Candy Man” is always a good tune – “Fishing Blues,” things like that. And then take a song that everybody can

have an idea of how the melody goes, or play a piece of music and have everybody join in the chorus together. And then do visuals, to show everybody

where it came from, how the slaves were taken from the West Coast of Africa, bringing with them part of what you’re hearing, and it’s been here for four,

six hundred years or whatever…. Well, you know, there’s lots of ways to communicate it, a lot of good ways,

 

JMcL: That piece you have in your hand there, about stopping the show with Bai and Dembo Konte at Philly – will you be stopping any more shows with them

this coming festival season?

 

Taj: Well, if everything works out, I’m sure there will be some time we will all get together. It depends on our schedules. Mine is not perfectly clear;

I’d like to get together with them if they’re here. I’d really like to get an album done with them – that’s the most important thing right now, that we put

that together.

 

JMcL: And get what you’ve done on permanent record, right. When did you first meet the Kontes?

 

 Taj: Probably… ’74? I met Bai at a festival in West Virginia.

 

JmcL: Was that the John Henry Festival?

 

Taj: Yeah, that’s the first time I had ever met him. And I don’t believe I had heard their records then. I think I saw it somewhere, and I wound up sending

to Marc [Pevar, an old friend of Taj Mahal and the Kontes, politely waiting his turn to interview Taj for NPR], and then we started getting closer.

 

JMcL: That’s a strange, lovely instrument, the kora. I spoke with Dembo in the hotel at Philly, and asked him how old his instrument was, and he said, “Well,

this one is about ten months old, but the instrument is over 700 years old”!

 

Taj: That’s right.

 

JMcL: You first came into prominence singing Delta blues. Did you grow up with that kind of music, was it in your family, or was it something you ran across

later?

 

Taj: No, I didn’t start out with that kind of music, I started out with primarily jazz, and West Indian music. Puerto Rican, Cuban, Panamanian music,

some “high life” [Nigerian – ed], some calypso, you know, a lot of that stuff. It wasn’t until I was grown around 11 or 12 I moved into a neighborhood where

there were a ot of people from Mississippi and parts of the South who carried this with them, and so consequently I got involved.

 

JMcL: What was your first instrument?

 

Taj:  Oh. H’m… Voice… [laughter]

 

JMcL:  Well, I guess that takes care of my next question, because I was going to ask if you still played it – and I guess you do! OK. What was your first,

let’s say guitar?

 

Taj:  My first guitar was, let’s see, an old Kay arch-top with F-holes in it, kind of like what I’m playing now. I like those arch-tops, there’s just

something about them, I like the sound. I reached the point where I wasn’t playing them, and I said, “Well, if I ever get hold of one I’m going back to

playing it.” I played a lot of guitars. I got involved a lot with the National guitar. It gave me a lot of volume. A lot of guitars wouldn’t give me enough,

they’d be ‘way under my own voice.

 

JMcL: When I saw you at Philly, the guitar you were playing wirh Bai and Dembo looked like a little Caribbean tenor guitar. Or was it just your size that

made it look that small?

 

Taj: Yeah, I guess so – it was a regular guitar.

 

JMcL: Robert Palmer, writing in the New York Times about your Carnegie Hall concert a couple of weeks ago, stressed the Afro-Caribbean element in your

playing with the Universal Rhthm Band. He mentioned your starting “Stagolee” by yourself, the band came out and just took it away – from an old ballad into

a calypso. Is that another way of exploring the heritage?

 

 Taj:  Yeah – but I also hear an awful lot of country-and-western music in what they’re doing in the Caribbean too. In the West Indies, in the way the

back-beats are set and so on, and in the melodies too.

 

JMcL:  I remember a couple of years ago hearing a version of John Denver’s “Country Roads” that went, “West Jamaica – Mountain Momma – Take me Home….”

 

Taj:  Toots and the Maytalls! That’s right!

 

JMcL:  Sure – funny as hell! You once said, “The blues ain’t nothin’ but that good old rock-and-roll.” What would you say to somebody who’s coming at it

thro folklore, and who thinks of the blues as ethnic folk music, but rock-and- roll as just bubblegum music?

 

Taj:  Well, the term rock-and-roll as it is understood contemporarily is a mixed-up version of what people said about the blues. It’s what it made you do

– you rock and roll from side to side. And it was a coined phrase [by DJ Alan Freedman, – ed.], and that’s how I used it, what it made you do. You know,

it’s amazing what they called rock-and-roll. There were people surrounded by it, and it took years to get it straightened out what it really was. Oh, some

really good people came out of that! It’s created an incredible thing for the world, you’re always going to be able to deal with it forever, there’ll always

be some version of it.

 

JMcL:  I was listening to Robert Pete Williams, “Rock Me Mama,” which goes on, “like my back ain’t got no bone,” and to me that’s rockin’ blues and it’s into

sex, that’s it.

 

Taj: Alright. Well, “bubblegum rock” is one thing, but what I’ll play – if I played you my top 200 rock hits, they would very rarely run into what everyone

else is playing.  There was a lot of music out there that never got played. See, I look at it as all music. Some things become a hit because you got good

business behind it. Some things become a hit because the people hear it and demand it enough.  Some people really get into it, you know. Now, it’s a

little more controlled, but back in the days when I was listening to rock-and- roll, it went from Bill Doggett to Gene Vincent – and neither one of them was

rock! One was rockabilly –

 

JMcL: Gene Vincent and the Bluecaps!

 

Taj:  - and the other one was a jazzman who played lounge-lizard types of thing, you know. Well, they were pretty hot, for what was going on. We lived

in a multiracial neighborhood, and everybody heard the radio stations play everybody’s music. Everybody liked Fats Domino, for instance. But the regular

musicians around played everybody’s music, so it was real good.

 

JMcL:  How do you go about learning new tunes? Is it a matter of hanging out with other musicians, or…?

 

Taj:  Well, it’s crazy. It’s been so many years since I actually sat down to learn someone else’s tunes. I’ve always got so much goin’ on in my head, and I

might get a guitar and work it out while I’m thinking about it. But there never is any particular amount of time. The idea will strike me, and however

long it takes, that’s how long it takes.

 

JMcL:  I’m thinking about how you got into Afro-Caribbean, or into the Kontes’ music in the first place. How does that happen?

 

Taj:  I’m always listening. There are things that move me, in terms of sound alone – onomatopoeia, you know? Certain sounds make for a certain movement,

and you try to build it up from there. I don’t have any particular way of doing it – sometimes a whole piece of music comes to me, and then it’s a

matter of putting words to it. Sometimes it’s the converse, and adding to that. Sometimes it’s something on the guitar, and I want to keep it, one of those lines. Or a feeling I get from listening to someone. Like that last tune

we played, “Little Brown Jug,” which is an old English ballad, transformed from that thro the folk days. And I never heard nobody play it, and I thought,

it’s such a great song! And I kept waiting for someone else to orchestrate it, it had so many possibilities! So I started working on it, and I taught it to

the band a number of years ago, and we’d bring it out and play it every once in a while, until everybody started liking it and feeling a lot for it. So we

really liked it. Anything that’s got a feeling of life to it, that’s when I’ll bring it along. Til I really feel that they’re living, each time that we play

it. Rather than just being notes – I’ll pass them by.

 

JMcL: How long have you been playing with the Universal Rhythm Band?

 

Taj:  This particular group of musicians, pretty close to five years. Different percussionists have been in and out of the band, but the chords

remain the same. The bass player who’s with me was on the album, “Live and Direct,” but then he was doing other things, so we got ourselves a new bass

player, but now he came back, and he’s been back with the band the last two and a half years.  The drummer has been with us – the sax player – we’ve had

different guitar players, percussionists and so on, but they’re really nice guys to work with.

 

JMcL: Who’s the conga player? Is he from Brazil?

 

Taj:  Jumma Santos. No, he was born here, but raised a lot around the Latins too.

 

JMcL:  The saxophone player also plays a really nice flute. He reminds me a lot of Lloyd McNeill, who played down in the Tin Palace in the Bowery, back

when a friend of mine, Paul Pines, owned the Tin Palace. Now, Lloyd went down to Brazil, and came back up again, and his flute sounds a lot like your guy’s.

 

Taj:  Yeah, well Rudy – his last name is Costa – he’s involved a lot with people from Brazil. He didn’t spend much time down there, but it’s in his

blood. He’s very nice.

 

JMcL:  Ry Cooder, in a recent issue of Rolling Stone, says that “Technology leads people around by the nose.” Maybe he had “Bop Til You Drop” in mind, I

dunno. Your new album, which I haven’t had a chance to hear yet, is that an experimental album too, taking digital technology as far as it can go?

 

Taj: Well, this isn’t digital. This is a totally other process. I just fell into this problem of how to get my music out right. It really relates to being

live to be played right. We never spent no two months or three months or five months in a studio on an album. We’d get in there, and two-three days, that’s

it. Fourteen-fifteen days on an album is really rare for us. We’re usually working, and we don’t usually have that kind of time. We’re road people, and

we play on the road, so our music goes with us wherever we play. There’s lots of people who figure out all kinds of things in rhe studio, then they have to

figure out how to play it when they get on the road! Live, we just put down what we’re gonna do, and then you’re guaranteed that’s what you’re gonna hear.

Either like that, or better than that.

 

JMcL: Seems logical, then, to do direct-to-disc for you.

 

Taj:  Yes, it as a very logical move. It was more challenging to me, too. I mean, rather than sitting around listening to all those overdubs and go back

6,000 times. I can’t stand being in the studio for that! You know, “Are you ready yet?” “Well, we haven’t got this one on this track, and we’ll cut this

one on this track, get the next one off  the monitor” – Stop!! What we did is what we’re hearing, what we’re playing is what we’ll listen back to. Not all

those thousands of things!

 

JMcL:  You know, I met an old vaudeville and radio musician in upstate Pennsylvania – in Hazleton – and old Ralph had played for three radio shows a

day, plus playing for vaudeville three afternoons a week, and the evening shows too, and they ran from one place to the other, and all they had was the

mikes in the studio, do it once and that was it. Just hit your marks and go. Sounds as if your new album is that direct.

 

Taj:  Yeah, that’s it, that’s it. Do it, and do it right.

 

JMcL:  You probably know that in the same issue of Rolling Stone as Ry Cooder’s comment about technology, there was a review of “Live and Direct,” by

Ed Levine, and he’s really bummed out at the album. Would you care to comment?

 

Taj:  I’ll tell you, Rolling Stone don’t like too much. For the life of me, I can’t understand how anyone who spends so much time on it, who takes their

name from an Afro-American musician [Muddy Waters – ed] – who claims to be a beacon in the music industry – they don’t do it that way. I don’t know what

their problem is. I don’t spend much time reading it, I’ll look thro there once in a while, and I’ll see somebody I listened to on the radio. I saw

Rupert Holmes – this guy who’s got the “Pina Colada Song”? – boy, I think this guy is great. For that kind of sound, soft-rock, really nice lyrics, he really

presents a picture, you can clearly see what the guy’s talking about – they just burned his record down! They hassled Joni Mitchell like that, they

hassled the Eagles, and they’ve been well-supported, popular for some time…. So I don’t know.

 

JMcL:  Well, I don’t want to take any more of your time. I hope to see you around the folk festival circuit this Summer.

 

Taj: I hope to be there.

 

JMcL:  Do you think you might be back at Winnipeg?

 

 Taj:  I certainly hope so.

 

 JMcL:  Yeah, I hear Mitch Podolak runs a great festival. Well, I just want to thank you, and close it down.

 

Taj:  My pleasure.

 

 

[As noted, Marc Pevar, an old friend of Taj Mahal and the Kontes, was waiting to do his interview of Taj for NPR, and it was well past time to get out of

his way, with thanks for his patience. We’d covered a surprising number of bases in this interview, and hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And now…

to the headphones!]

 

 

                                               -30-