Sun. Jul. 12: TAJ MAHAL & THE PHANTOM BLUES BAND -7:30pm-
Tix: $79.50 ($96.35 through Ticketmaster, $86.50 at the Birchmere Box Office)
Taj Mahal doesn’t wait for permission. If a sound intrigues him, he sets out to make it. If origins mystify him, he moves to trace them. If rules get in his way, he unapologetically breaks them. To Taj, convention means nothing, but traditions are holy. He has pushed music and culture forward, all while looking lovingly back.
“I just want to be able to make the music that I’m hearing come to me — and that’s what I did,” Taj says. The 82-year-old is home in Berkeley, reflecting on six + decades of music making. “When I say, ‘I did,’ I’m not coming from the ego. The music comes from somewhere. You’re just the conduit it comes through. You’re there to receive the gift.”
Taj is a towering musical figure — a legend who transcended the blues not by leaving them behind, but by revealing their magnificent scope to the world. “The blues is bigger than most people think,” he says. “You could hear Mozart play the blues. It might be more like a lament. It might be more melancholy. But I’m going to tell you: the blues is in there.”
If anyone knows where to find the blues, it’s Taj. A brilliant artist with a musicologist’s mind, he has pursued and elevated the roots of beloved sounds with boundless devotion and skill. Then, as he traced origins to the American South, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, he created entirely new sounds, over and over again. As a result, he’s not only a god to rock-and-roll icons such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, but also a hero to ambitious artists toiling in obscurity who are determined to combine sounds that have heretofore been ostracized from one another. No one is as simultaneously traditional and avant-garde.
Over the years, Taj had also emerged as a mind-boggling, multifaceted player. In addition to the guitar, he has become proficient on about 20 different instruments — and counting. “There weren’t an awful lot of people still playing these instruments that came from my culture,” Taj explains. “Not that they didn’t before, but nobody was playing them in the time I was. But I wanted to hear them. So I watched people play, got one, sat down, remembered the music that I was listening to, and started picking it out on the mandolin or banjo or 12-string.”
Taj didn’t slow down as he entered the 21st century. Maestro, marking the 40th anniversary of his recording career and featuring a global mix of voices ranging from Angelique Kidjo to Los Lobos to Ziggy Marley to Ben Harper, dropped in 2008. In 2017, his highly anticipated collaboration with Keb’ Mo’ — TajMo — netted Taj his third Grammy. Their partnership continued in 2023-24 when they regrouped to record the follow up TajMo record due out in Spring 2025. 2022’s Grammy for ‘Get on Board’ with Ry Cooder, Taj’s live record from the Church Studio in Tulsa, ‘Savoy’ are amongst a few of the several projects he is either touring behind or currently in the works, as Taj remains excited by fresh young voices trying new things and exhumed treasures that have been buried too long.
As Taj thinks about the dozens and dozens of albums, collaborations, live experiences, and captured sounds, he finds satisfaction in one main idea. “As long as I’m never sitting here, saying to myself, ‘You know? You had an idea 50 years ago, and you didn’t follow through,’ I’m really happy,” he says. “It doesn’t even matter that other people get to hear it. It matters that I get to hear it — that I did it.”
Website: https://www.tajblues.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tajmahal
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tajmahalblues/
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1aTDTChWWyiJH3SEnYrdVp
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TajMahalMusic
