Mr. Mahal, Thrice-Glimpsed

The onetime Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr. depicted in youth, middle age, and as an elder statesman. For Taj Mahal, who turns 83 in a matter of weeks, retirement is obviously a dirty word

As you’re probably aware, the blues masters Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ are collaborating for a second time—the first was in 2017—on a tour and an album. Hearing the news put me especially in mind of the duo’s senior member. Taj Mahal turns 83 in May, and I’ve been writing about him for more than half of his life. I wrote a review of his eponymous first album when I was 15. My first piece of music journalism appeared in The Voice, the Rockland Country Day School’s weekly newspaper, in May 1968. (RCDS, no longer in business, was in the New York City suburb of Congers. It was a hive of hippies-to-be, a still largely larval species in 1968.

I’m by no means intimate with Taj Mahal’s entire, massive body of work, choosing instead to check in on the man’s doings every few decades. I’ve written at least four pieces about Mr. Fredericks Jr., who adopted his stage name for reasons that remain murky—something about recurrent dreams about Mahatma Gandhi and world peace. The most recent of the four stories was published on April 18, 2022 in Tidal Magazine. Entitled “Old Blues Was Us,” it was about Ry Cooder’s and Taj’s first collaboration since that first, 1968, Taj album. I’m not going to revisit it here; most of it appeared as my Substack of November 14, 2023. I am going to share the three other articles: that teen effort of ‘68; a New York Times essay from November 1998, and a July 2023 Stereophile Magazine review of Savoy, Taj’s 50th or so album (and first jazz album). Snapshots, taken at widely divergent times, of a splendid career. ¹ ²

Taj Mahal, as I note elsewhere, was one of the few young Black musicians—he was 25 when Taj Mahal came out—to embrace the folk/blues revival then in flower. Here, from the RCDS Voice, are my earnest musings on that first, eponymous album. I led off with a jacket-cover quote from the artist:

“‘Well,’ said Taj, ‘all this talk about things is dumb and depressin’. [Taj Mahal’s black vernacular was an affectation; he was a college graduate.] It’s like Shakespeare. They take him and have big discussions about him and bounce him off satellites around the moon. But he was written for the common people. You know, you and me. That’s really what he’s about.’

“Those are the words,” I wrote, “of one Taj Mahal, homespun philosopher, ‘New York City field hand’ and Blues singer. Taj Mahal and his music represent an important musical trend: the mixture of blues & rock.

“His first album, entitled simply Taj Mahal, consists of eight traditional blues, each done with his band and given a modern, electronic treatment. Despite what a few country blues purists might say, the songs take on a new dimension. They are not overwhelmed by this louder approach. Taj’s version of ‘Statesboro Blues,’ for instance, written by Blind Willie McTell, a Georgia bluesman in his prime in the ‘20s and ‘30s but active into the ‘50s, becomes a powerful, driving piece it never really was before.

Album #1…. The slide-guitar mastery of Jesse Ed Davis (see several references below) on, for instance, “Statesboro Blues,” probably piqued the great slide guitarist Duane Allman’s interest in the technique. The song itself became an Allman Brothers Band standard.

“The album starts off with ‘Leaving Trunk,’ by Sleepy John Estes—a shouting, medium-tempo blues. Taj Mahal’s strong and expressive voice, plus his virulent mouth harp (harmonica), are clearly in charge from the beginning. Mahal’s close-mike harp technique—he cups the microphone as well as the harp in his hands—produces a sound unique in all blues. His playing is perhaps not as complex as that of other harp players, but it is raw and overpowering.³

“‘E Z Rider,’” I continued, “Taj Mahal’s arrangement of a blues standard, contains his best harp solo. At any time, the harp could be an organ, or perhaps an accordion. ‘Dust My Broom,’ first recorded by Robert Johnson, the great Delta singer of the Thirties, is done pretty much the same way as it was twenty years ago by Chicago blues bands, the only song which doesn’t go through any important transformation.

“‘Everybody’s Got to Change Sometimes’ and ‘Diving Duck Blues’ are perhaps the most important songs on the album. Both instrumentally and vocally, these two are perfect blends of older bluesmen and modern rock singers, notably Wilson Pickett or Sam and Dave. Whether Taj is consciously striving for a mixture of blues and rock or whether it comes naturally, without much thought or deliberation, he and his music will have an impact on both of these musical forms. Taj Mahal is capable, right now, of bringing the blues to those who have previously listened only to rock.”

Thus my eager-beaver entry into music journalism. The names “Ry Cooder” and “Jesse Ed Davis” meant nothing to me, nor did the interesting fact that although Ry Cooder was, at 21, already one of pop music’s great slide guitar players, he plays no slide on Taj Mahal, just rhythm guitar and mandolin. The slide guitarist was Jesse Ed Davis, a citizen of the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, one of pop music’s most sought-after session guitarists before his tragically early death from a heroin overdose.

Onwards, then, 30 years, to a critical essay by a music journalist in his mid-’40s, whose work appeared often in the Sunday New York Times’s Arts and Leisure section. By November 1998, Taj Mahal had widened and deepened his orbit to include much of the world’s musics. Applauding his global investigations, I nonetheless had some misgivings about the three-CD collection Taj Mahal In Progress & In Motion.

An Odyssey That Began In the Blues and Grew

By Tony Scherman NOV. 29, 1998

“EMERGING in the late 1960's as an anomaly—one of the few young black musicians to embrace the folk-blues revival—Taj Mahal flirted with rock stardom but quickly proved himself too much of a maverick to pursue the bottom line. Grounding himself in the folk blues of the Afro-American South and always returning to it, he followed his curiosity into an ever-widening orbit: the sounds of the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific.

“A master of blues and folk styles on guitar, banjo and harmonica and a commanding singer with a raw, immediately recognizable baritone, Taj Mahal, now 56, has about the deepest and widest roots of any pop-music performer today. As the 54-song, three-CD retrospective ‘In Progress and Motion (1965-1998)’ amply shows, he's pop's Walt Whitman, an optimist endlessly proclaiming his oneness with the world's vernacular music. 'I don't see myself as stuck over here and the natives are over there,' he once told an interviewer. 'I am the natives.'

“The first two disks of 'In Progress and Motion' (Columbia/Legacy AC3K 64919) hew closely to the blues, in various settings: electric (Taj Mahal's late 1960's quartet, featuring Jesse Ed Davis, a marvelously spare guitarist known for playing one note where others would have played five) was one of the best rock bands of its day); solo acoustic (lovely, ragtime-style guitar and banjo renditions of venerable blues like 'Fishin' Blues,' 'Stagger Lee' and 'Railroad Bill'), and patently eclectic (the sprawling ensemble, for instance, that the artist led circa 1971, its centerpiece a rollicking, almost lascivious-sounding tuba section).

“In six early 1970's tracks, all but one previously unreleased, Taj Mahal's backup singers—they're more like interlocutors—are the not-yet-well-known Pointer Sisters, sounding like a looser, less pious Sweet Honey in the Rock. These performances, four of them live at a record-business convention, are among the collection's highlights.

“The third and final CD documents Taj Mahal's world-music adventures, which were sparked by an epiphany that rejoined him with his West Indian ancestry. The 1971 album 'Happy to Be Just Like I Am’ dipped into Bahamian sounds; 1974’s 'Mo Roots' dipped deeper into reggae (Taj played a significant role in popularizing reggae in America). Taj Mahal, a native of New York City, ranged farther and farther abroad; his most recent album, this year's 'Sacred Island,' explores the sounds of his adopted home, Hawaii.

The original version of “Johnny Too Bad,” by the Jamaican group the Slickers, was known in the USA before Taj’s 1974 version. The Slickers’ “Johnny Too Bad” was part of the soundtrack to the movie The Harder They Come. Movie and soundtrack album were released in the USA in February 1973.

“As fine as some of Taj Mahal's world-beat syntheses are, they lack the bite, humor and drive of his blues and rock. Taj Mahal may yet make a world-music masterpiece, but so far, his most lasting music comes from his pre-international years. His high point remains the 1969 double album 'Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home.' It's almost as if Taj Mahal knows this—at the end of the third CD's global odyssey, he circles back to wrap up this engrossing career summary with the pop/soul tune that gave 'Giant Step' its name: ''Take a Giant Step,'' by those well-known world-beat composers Carole King and Gerry Goffin.”

And a quarter-century after that piece came this one: a July 2023 review for Stereophile of Taj’s album of the same year, Savoy. To fans familiar with Taj Mahal’s personal history, his first jazz album was far from an anomaly. His father was a jazz pianist and arranger who met his mother at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. The Savoy was publicized in the ‘30s as “the world’s finest ballroom,” and it may indeed have been, home of the great Chick Webb Orchestra, whose singer was a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald.

Taj Mahal: Savoy
Stony Plain Records (auditioned as CD). 2023. John Simon, Manny Moreira, prods., Gabriel Shepard, eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****½

Henry St. Claire Fredericks, Jr.'s adopted surname should be Marvel, not Mahal, because marvelous is what the man is. At 81, having put out God-knows-how-many albums, Taj shows no signs of slowing down. Given his readiness to explore and synthesize genres, from acoustic blues to reggae to Indian classical music, it's odd that Taj has never before made a jazz album.

It turns out that he was to the idiom born. Taj's father, a gifted jazz pianist and arranger, met his mother in 1938 at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom. Four years later, Taj was born, not many blocks from that renowned nitery. Savoy, in other words, is the long-delayed first volume of Taj's musical autobiography.

Taj strolls in chattily on "Stompin' at the Savoy," the first of a generous 14 tracks, filling us in on his and the club's intertwined histories. We're treated to his delightfully nimble, previously unexhibited (to these ears at least) scat singing on four tracks, and to the novel effect of a blues harp, Taj's, soloing over jazz horns on the Benny Golson composition "Killer Joe." A growly Maria Muldaur joins Taj on Frank Loesser's 1944 "Baby, It's Cold Outside." On hand as co-producer and pianist is the major producer John Simon (The Band, Leonard Cohen, Blood, Sweat & Tears, etc.), also 81, whose arrangements for the four-piece horn section are punchy and precise.

Hearing Taj Mahal sing Ellington's "Mood Indigo" and "Do Nothing 'Til You Hear From Me," the Gershwins' "Lady Be Good" and "Summertime" (jauntily uptempo), Mercer and Arlen's closing-time rumination "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)," and nine other reimagined classics is an unalloyed pleasure, just one more from an endlessly creative master.—Tony Scherman

Thus the word on Fredericks Jr.’s Opus 50 (approximately). The following year, 2024, brought Swingin’ Live at the Church in Tulsa, essentially a blues album featuring a six-piece band led by Taj on vocals, guitar, banjo, ukelele and piano. The record won Taj his fifth Grammy, for Best Traditional Blues Album. And coming out this May 23, one week after Taj Mahal turns 83, is Room on the Porch, the new Taj/Keb’ collaboration. How many 83-year-old musicians have released four albums in the last four years? How many duo albums are coming out this year whose participants’ combined age is 156? Just one, it’s safe to say. Unless Mr. Nelson and Mr. Dylan have plans.

1. These reprinted versions of my pieces contain a few factual corrections and other edits.

2. It’s next to impossible to make an accurate count of Taj Mahal’s albums if one includes compilations, collaborations with more than one other artist, and other non-standard formats. There are some 45 studio and live albums, but Taj appears on far more albums than that, including reissues with newly included material.

3. In my April 18, 2022 Tidal Magazine piece on Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, I look back fifty-plus years to “the trumpetlike harmonica blast that opens Taj Mahal,” and then quote Taj. ‘Nobody could squawk like that, not even if I showed them,’ says Taj, who has never lacked for self-esteem.”