Weekend Nights with Taj Mahal on Axis of Logic | Music and Entertainment |Axisoflogic.com

Selected works by Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal - Come On In My Kitchen

My Creole Belle

If The River Was Whiskey

The Calypsonian

~ Intermission - Drinks in the Lobby ~

Dust My Broom

The Hula Blues Band - Hanapepe Dream

Gotta lay back and close your eyes for this one ... an instrumental

The New Hula Blues

Editor's Note: Taj was born in Harlem, New York and grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts. His mother was the member of a local gospel choir and his father was a West Indian jazz arranger and piano player. As a boy he enjoyed some of my favorites like Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk. His dad and mom taught him a sense of pride in his West Indian and African ancestry through stories they told to him. His dad was a musician and his musical friends from the Caribbean and Africa often visited in their home, among them Ella Fitzgerald. Taj began studying the clarinet, trombone and harmonica and when he was only eleven years old his father was killed in an accident at a construction site.

His mother later remarried and he got his first lessons on his stepfather's guitar from a neighbor when he was 13. Taj began working on a dairy farm when he was 16 years old and became farm foreman at age 19 in Palmer, Massachusetts, a rural community where I have visited many times. He's quoted as saying, "I milked anywhere between thirty-five and seventy cows a day. I clipped udders. I grew corn. I grew Tennessee redtop clover. Alfalfa." He still believes that people should grow their own food, "You have a whole generation of kids who think everything comes out of a box and a can, and they don't know you can grow most of your food."

His stage name, Taj Mahal, came to him in his dreams about Gandhi, India and an eastern world view. He attended the University of Massachusetts. Despite having attended a vocational agriculture school and majored in animal husbandry and minoring in veterinary science and agronomy. But later he decided to go into music and in college he started a rhythm and blues band called Taj Mahal & The Elektras. In 1964 he moved to Santa Monica, California, and formed the Rising Sons and worked with Ry Cooder and Jessie Lee Kincaid. His was one of the first interracial bands of the time.

He once said that his 1999 album Kulanjan, which features him playing with the kora master of Mali's Griot tradition Toumani Diabate, brought him to full circle to his musical and cultural underpinnings. Through that he was able to become one with his African roots and he thought this as his "coming home." He changed his name to jali, Dadi Kouyate and said of his experiences in Africa,

"The microphones are listening in on a conversation between a 350-year old orphan and its long-lost birth parents. I've got so much other music to play. But the point is that after recording with these Africans, basically if I don't play guitar for the rest of my life, that's fine with me....With Kulanjan, I think that Afro-Americans have the opportunity to not only see the instruments and the musicians, but they also see more about their culture and recognize the faces, the walks, the hands, the voices, and the sounds that are not the blues. Afro-American audiences had their eyes really opened for the first time. This was exciting for them to make this connection and pay a little more attention to this music than before."

Taj Mahal's music is great - but as great as it is, he as a fellow pilgrim is much more.

- Les Blough, Editor
Axis of Logic