The Maestro
For Taj Mahal, the blues
is about happiness, and whatever you need to do to get it happening.
“The
blues is always in great shape, man,” Taj Mahal expounds cheerfully. “The blues
is like oranges, apples, bananas, pineapples… it’s always gonna be there.”
Taj
Mahal aught to know. He’s been playing the blues (in one form or another) since
the early ‘60s. He’s taken this genre and bent it to his whim, he’s become a legend, he’s part of the blues, of its lore and its history. Now that BB is
coming to the end of his magnificent career, and Buddy Guy won’t be around
forever, it’s players like Mahal, Robert Cray, Keb’ Mo’, Eric Bibb, who are
becoming the next crop. The blues just keeps on going.
“It
depends on when the [last time was] you got up next to it and realised how good
it is – it doesn’t matter if you haven’t had much education, or you’ve got a lot of education, it’s the same place,”
he says passionately. “And if it’s good, it’s gonna lift you up, and that’s the
object of it, to lift you outta the doldrums, get you beyond yourself, into a
good space with your life.
“And
it expresses all kinds of emotions. The language of our galaxy, our universe,
of our solar system, it’s music man, that’s just the one – you don’t have to
understand a specific language, but you understand that language.”
I
put it to Mahal that the language of the blues has evolved over the years, and
that this music must do so in order to survive. Granted, that pure form of the
genre that began this whole thing is aural gold, but times change, new things
happen. “Well, it does have to evolve, it’s had various incarnations, but you
know, a fish is a fish,” he laughs.
“I
mean, you’ve gotta know how to catch it and all, and also prepare it and cook
it,” he says, continuing with his analogy, “but the blues is always like that. There’s
always room to learn the old style, and a new style – come up with something,
add your touch to it, it’s quite wonderful. And it’s time more people see it
like that and don’t see it as something that’s static, which doesn’t move.”
It
seems Mahal doesn’t put much stock in the notions espoused by purists, who
disregard anything other than the pre-war style of blues, as not ‘real’ blues. For
Mahal, as he’s demonstrated over the past half a century, the blues is about a
range of emotions coming together to create something joyous, something real,
something raw and free that has the potential to go anywhere. It doesn’t have
to be 12-bar, to be the blues.
Mahal
is a modest one too, deflecting my earlier observation that the blues now rest
in the senior hands of himself, Cray et al. “Yeah, Robert, certainly Keb’ Mo’,
and there’s a lot of guys you don’t know,” he says, omitting himself from the
list, despite the fact he’s at the top of it, in the minds of many a blues fan.
“It’s just they’re not high enough on the ‘food chain’ for people to see ‘em. Michael
Burks, man, he was fantastic… Ronnie Baker Brooks, he’s just incredible. There
are some incredible people out there.”
So,
the blues then, is destined to survive for a long time yet? “As long as the
people are acknowledged and respected,” Mahal nods. “It won’t go away… people
get mislead by mediocrity, you know? Dumbing everybody down with the music… but
the blues isn’t going away.”
To
Mahal, the blues is a celebration. It’s also a way of life. And it’s something
which can stretch out in any way it pleases, still stemming from a certain
place and ideal (that’s what makes it
the blues), but embracing what it needs to, to make people feel good.
I’m
in agreement with Mahal when he says this. Younger players, here in Australia,
like Shaun Kirk and Claude Hay, older ones like Geoff Achison and Lloyd
Spiegel, older ones still like Chris Wilson, Dutch Tilders, Hat Fitz – it’s all
blues, no matter how it’s coming out.
“Yeah,”
he smiles. “Your anthropologists and your ethnomusicology types, they all
wanted it to stay in the same spot, and that’s ok. But the essence of it all… it translates in a lot of different ways.” That
it does, and in the hands of a master like Mahal, the blues in in good hands,
and will be for a long, long time to come.
Samuel J. Fell
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