![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/tajmo2.jpg\")
<\/p>\nTaj Mahal is a timeless artist who\u2019s always been ahead of his time. The singer-songwriter-guitarist was making Americana and world music long before either musical genre had been coined. He\u2019s earned many accolades\u2014three Grammys, ten Grammy nominations, the Americana Music Association\u2019s Lifetime Achievement Award, an honorary Doctorate\u2014and released more than 30 albums under his own name.<\/p>\n
His most recent project finds him working within the blues idiom, and collaborating with another acclaimed artist, fellow singer-songwriter-guitarist Keb\u2019 Mo\u2019. Released in May 2017, the duo\u2019s album, TajMo<\/i>, earned this year\u2019s Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Blues Album.<\/p>\n
Yet somehow Taj Mahal has not become not a household name. \u201cI\u2019ve been a performing artist all these years,\u201d he says, \u201cwhile the popular side of the music business has been record sellers. So they haven\u2019t been out touring. I have<\/i> been out touring, and I\u2019ve always had my finger on the pulse of people in the live situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He says that working as a live performer sets him apart from those thought of primarily as recording artists. \u201cIt\u2019s a different kind of scene for me, one where I\u2019ve earned my living the old-fashioned way,\u201d he explains. \u201cI\u2019m actually going out and playing 95 to 150 dates a year, and that\u2019s been steady since the end of the \u201860s.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Taj Mahal\u2019s body of work doesn\u2019t fit neatly into most people\u2019s idea of a popular artist: find a successful style, and stick closely to it. In one sense, his style is difficult to pin down. His albums have explored the traditional and pop music of the Caribbean Islands, his ancestral Africa and the south Pacific; with guitarist Ry Cooder he was in the Rising Sons, one of the first multiracial rock bands signed to a record deal. And he was co-billed with John Lennon and Jethro Tull in the 1968 film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Taj Mahal doesn\u2019t view his body of work as especially confusing. \u201cI can take a guitar and go anywhere to the ends of the earth,\u201d he says. \u201cI can be in the steppes of Mongolia, and if I play what I play, somebody\u2019s gonna say, \u2018Oh, you play blues,\u2019 because of the sound of the music. Most all of popular music is fueled by the movement of Africans into the Western world. And then that music went back out, and it has fueled popular music the world over.\u201d<\/p>\n
As an example, he points to his 1997 Grammy-winning album Se\u00f1or Blues<\/i>. \u201cIt\u2019s a minor blues set in a kind of Latin groove. And it\u2019s flat-out jazz!\u201d To Taj Mahal, it\u2019s all connected. \u201cI grew up listening to all these kinds of music, and I could hear the roots connected to one another. You can\u2019t spread African people between the North Pole and the South Pole in the western hemisphere and then have 420 years of development and all of a sudden say that they\u2019re not connected,\u201d he insists. \u201cThat\u2019s kind of crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like many musicians and ethnomusicologists, Taj Mahal thinks of music as universal. \u201cIt\u2019s our intergalactic language,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can go anywhere in the world: \u2018I don\u2019t know what they\u2019re saying, but that sure feels good.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
And Taj Mahal\u2019s latest work\u2014on record and on his current tour\u2014with Keb\u2019 Mo\u2019 is an example of his fondness for creative collaboration. \u201cIt\u2019s always<\/i> been about playing together,\u201d he says. \u201cIt took a village; that\u2019s how I grew up. \u201cI grew up with the bands of Basie and Lunceford and Ellington and Eckstine and Armstrong: all those guys.\u201d<\/p>\n
Keb\u2019 Mo\u2019 and Taj Mahal made TajMo<\/i> their way. \u201cWe took our own money and took our own time in producing it,\u201d Taj Mahal says with a warm laugh. \u201cThis was not sharecroppers on a plantation going up to the big house.\u201d<\/p>\n
No matter what style he\u2019s working in at any given moment, Taj Mahal\u2019s music always rings true, even if it doesn\u2019t always conform to commercial norms. He uses a food metaphor to make his point: \u201cSo many of us have been trained by the commercial industry that if the oranges don\u2019t look like they\u2019ve been spray painted with orange paint, they might not be sweet! You don\u2019t get the real thing any more.\u201d But with the music of Taj Mahal, you always do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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