The Jazz Side of Taj Mahal

By Josef Woodard I Jun. 27, 2023

“I’ve known these songs all my life, but I saw that there wasn’t enough attention on the older music,” Mahal says.
(Photo: Jay Blakesburg)

It may come as a surprise to find that the artist known as Taj Mahal — born Henry Fredericks Jr. — has officially jumped into the realm of jazz for his new album, Savoy. Classic tunes from the jazz standard book are treated with Mahal’s gravelly-yet-sweet vocals, delivered with a supple sense of swing and marinated with choice scatting interludes.

This twist comes on the heels of his delectably unpolished gems of last year’s country blues reunion with old ally Ry Cooder, Get On Board (Nonesuch), laureled by a well-deserved Grammy in the Best Traditional Blues category this year.

But, then again, elements of surprise, blurring of genres and roots research have been central to the 80-year-old Mahal’s long and discovery-enriched musical life. Surprise is no surprise for him by now, even this deep into his self-defined and self-directed game.

In fact, the essence of his new jazz venture taps a personal foundation of his life, or even a prehistorical gleam in his parents’ eyes. Savoy (Stony Plain) refers to the legendary Savoy Ballroom, the influential seed bed of jazz in his hometown of Harlem, going back to the ’30s. It was there that his parents literally met, forging the union that would produce Mahal’s family.

After studying agriculture and animal husbandry at Amherst College in Massachusetts, music grabbed hold of Mahal’s heart and future. He headed west to Los Angeles and formed Rising Sons with fellow blues/roots enthusiast Cooder, then went solo, then went every which way in a career spanning a vast discography, a few Grammy awards, occasional acting turns, avid musicology and now life as a very hip and influential senior musical statesman.

Although Mahal — an innately hard-to-pigeonhole artist — is considered generally as a proponent of country blues and American rootsiness, his curiosity and hands-on engagement in music of the wider world and its impact on American music. To that list, thanks to his new album, we can add jazz standards, à la Savoy fare.

With deceptively simplicity, he said, “I just love music, man. I’ve been lucky to have it. There’s not a day goes, I don’t hear it, or listen to it or play it or make my connection with the Caribbean, South America, Central America, Africa. I’ve always been thinking about it.”

DownBeat caught up with the peripatetic, multitasking Mahal — officially based in Berkeley, California, these days — while he was in New York City. He was there in his capacity as the New York University Steinhardt 2022–’23 Americana artist-in-residence, and was preparing for a panel discussion with Krystal Klingenberg (curator of music at the National Museum of American History) and Leyla McCalla, from the collective Our Native Daughters (which also includes Rhiannon Giddens). What binds these artists, and many others on the roots music reclamation movement in America, is a deep-diving commitment to both uncovering American musical histories — including lesser-known pockets of Black American experience and culture — and giving those sources new life for a new and expanding audience.

Of the pending panel, Mahal explained, “It’s gonna be kind of an armchair situation, with students being able to talk to somebody who’s had a long career in the music and been their own person, and done whatever they wanted to do — as opposed to follow along and paint-by-numbers, sing by overdub.”

Mahal naturally fell, almost hypnotically, into his known status as a walking, dancing encyclopedia of musical data and important names, stylistic family trees and the expanding universe of his research.

This interview has been edited for consistency, style and length.

Joe Woodard: In your livestreaming project “Roots Rising” during the lockdown, you hosted such artists as Allison Russell — who released the much-acclaimed album Outside Child — Ranky Tank and others. In a way, they’re following in your footsteps. Are you getting a sense of cross-generational influence from your example among younger roots-based musicians?

Taj Mahal: Pretty much. I started being a great dad, starting out with Keb’ Mo’ and Guy Davis. There was also Eric Bibb. There’s more out there than meets the eye. One of the things I want to do, going forward, is to create some kind of a pathway for those guys to be seen hiding in plain sight because of the way the old business is set up, and translating into the new business. It still isn’t giving them any visibility.

Keb’ Mo’ and I did this amazing album [the Grammy-winning album TajMo (Concord, 2017)] and went on tour. We started out 2014, thinking about this thing. Then we got it done, toured it in 2016. We went traveling around the country and around the globe and it was happening wherever we went. But it just didn’t resonate outside of that. But those things don’t deter the creativity from sneaking in the middle of the night and whispering in your ear. And that’s all I really care about.

Woodard: I assume you’re referring to the corporate machinery, which controls the public media pipelines. Still, with these artists you’re mentioning, I go to their shows and there’s a strong following. Do you feel that a kind of grassroots energy is keeping roots music alive, off to the side of the mainstream?

Mahal: It actually has been, all along. When I started out and was playing music and seeing what else was out here, I discovered that there was a kind of parallel universe of people knew who Lightning Hopkins was and appreciated Son House and Bill Monroe and Mike Seeger. And, you know, it goes on, with Mississippi John Hurt and Sleepy John Estes and Elizabeth Cotton … I could go just rattle on for hours.

Those (old) songs were left hanging out in some vault underground. My objective is to keep that corridor open. That’s bringing the inspiration to me every day, every hour, every minute.

Woodard: You have rescued a lot of things from various vaults over the years.

Mahal: Look at the first album. I’m recording with the Rising Suns. The group breaks up around all the politics and stuff. We all break up as friends. That’s the really great thing. But we were all signed individually to the record company.

By this time, I knew “Statesboro Blues” as a 12-string guitar tune I found on a country blues album put out by Sam Charters [Country Blues (Folkways Records)] in 1959. In fact, there’s probably about five songs up in that album that I’ve taken in and created a new song for the era that I was coming through. Jesse Ed Davis heard “Statesboro Blues.” I left him alone with it for a while. That’s how he arranged it, with the slide guitar. He actually was the first person I ever saw play slide, like Muddy Waters played slide. And it was in standard tuning, not open tuning.

That’s what Duane Allman saw and heard, got a hold of and came out. Duane and Greg were really big fans of ours. We were all playing together around that time. When Duane got fed up with the West Coast and went back to Macon, that’s when finally Greg got back there and that scene went down. Duane brought that album over and sat in bed, with a broken arm and went like, “Hey, I can do this.” That jump started Southern rock. It was the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd …

I only found out just a few years ago that Jesse Davis (1944–’88) was kind of rankled, because everybody thought Ry Cooder was playing slide, because he was on the record and known for his slide playing. But it clearly says on the record, “Jesse Davis, lead guitar; Ry, rhythm guitar.” I was so sorry to have heard this secondhand, long after this man had passed on in this world, because I would’ve piped up right away in every interview I ever had, making sure that people knew them.

Woodard: There weren’t many slide players in the public ear back then, so Ry must have seemed the ripe guess.

Mahal: I can almost empathize with ’em, but it’s hard because this is a great music, man, and needs a lot of respect. You gotta really dig in. Yeah, there’s a lot. I’ve lived with it for 70 years now.

They don’t know. They don’t know Sonny Roads, Black Ace [BK Turner], Good Rockin’ Robinson [LC Robinson], Chuck Berry. Then I started hearing “Sacred Steel” music — Jewel and the Keith Dominion, the Campbell Brothers, Calvin Cook and Sunny Treadway. I had no idea. Even farther, I had no idea about the whole United House of Prayer, where their choir is like 40 to 60 trombones.

Woodard: Ah, yes, the gospel trombone tradition. The more the better.

Mahal: Oh, yeah. The more the better. I mean, they have a tuba, a baritone horn. They got a snare, they got a bass drum, they got cymbals, and they got hi-hat and tambourines. Oh, my God [laughs]. That stuff is ridiculous. It’s beautiful.

Woodard: Savoy is a fascinating album. I’ve just been soaking it up. It also represents a new wrinkle in your already varied discography, given its jazz focus. Can you tell me about the genesis of it?

Mahal: Well, the genesis is where I started. My dad [Henry Saint Claire Fredericks Sr.] was a classically trained West Indian from Saint Kitts and Nevis, about 200 miles southeast of Port San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the British Commonwealth. And the tradition in the Caribbean is that everybody thinks that if you’re African, you have this natural rhythm. So when you’re young, they get you to play classical. They say that “at some point or another, you’re gonna be influenced by the contemporary music of your time.”

So now, if you got the ability to play classical, and then you can take those abilities and those sensibilities to jazz, ragtime, such as the way it was with Scott Joplin. I was in that movie, too, with Billy Dee Williams [Scott Joplin, 1977].

Anyway, my dad was like that. My mom was a gospel-singing school teacher, graduated in 1937 from South Carolina State, in early childhood development. She came up and they met at the Savoy. My dad became a composer and copyist. So he used delivering some charts for Chick Webb as a way of getting in to be able to see this new phenom, Ella Fitzgerald. And my mom was there with her girlfriends. He came over and checked them out. And, you know, I’m the harmonic between all that meeting [laughs].

Then my father traded a music career for being basically a day laborer. Although my mother was college-educated, he was self-educated in his own life, a very bright man. In the exchange for having a big family, he didn’t mind going to work. But he had a grand piano in the house, and then we had an upright later on. He collected all the records, and kept up with the music through records. So I grew up listening to Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Earl Hines, Nat “King” Cole, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Helen Hughes and Hazel Scott.

[Regarding the songs chosen for Savoy], these were songs I was closely related to. Like “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good To You” — I was in single digits when I first heard that. My thought was, “Wow, I can’t wait to grow up so I can figure out what that means.” [laughs] I’m certainly well enough grown to have experienced whatever the heck that’s all about, to be able to sing it with authority.

I’ve known these songs all my life, but I saw that there wasn’t enough attention on the older music. They weren’t just old and in the way. And it’s not old, either, [that impression is] just because of the mindset here, the construct, the paradigm here in this 500-year-old experiment. These started in the early century — no television, no telephones, no corporate music, no satellite. And they connected that music up, generation to generation.

It’s compounded. But inside of this experience, yesterday seems like it’s 500 years ago. A lot of people say, “Man, you crazy.” No, it’s not that long. You’re not paying attention to it. You get to be an anthropologist or ethnomusicologist, or any of those “ologists” out there, where you going back and looking at these songs. Let me think who else did some old songs, besides Linda [Ronstadt]. Well, Rod Stewart made an attempt at it. Attempt is the word. We won’t go there. [laughs]

Woodard: And Savoy marked a reunion and a fresh approach with your longtime creative partner John Simon, who served as producer and arranger on the album. How did that come about?

Mahal: John and I have known each other since 19, since he was working with Blood, Sweat & Tears. I came into a session that he was doing when he was a staff producer at CBS. He also worked with The Band, Leonard Cohen and many other people. This guy did some fantastic work, but the work that really stays with me, aside from The Band, is his work with Marshall McLuhan. I’ve lived long enough to see what Marshall was talking about. In fact, you and I are communicating over it. The medium of our time is our electronic secretary. The medium is the message, you know?

John was a piano player for my albums Natural Blues, Giant Step and The Old Folks At Home. But then there was Sounder and The Real Thing, with Howard Johnson and Orchestra. I did an album with [tuba player] Howard Johnson called Right Now! and we toured in Germany. I was able to do some different things, which opened my chops up. I did a thing with Kip Hanrahan, on the Conjure album [Music For The Texts of Ishmael Reed, American Clave, 1984]. I did some things with Jules Holland, and I did a piece for The Divine Secret of the Yaya Sisterhood. I started opening up.

I wanted to do album of all these kinds of tunes, but bring in a bunch of different female singers, like Dee Dee Bridgewater or maybe Lady Bianca. And then I would be a part of that. But then as we got going with it, we decided that we’d go with me and see where that was gonna work.

Woodard: It does work. The album brings out this jazz side of your musical being, as if it was always there in your bloodstream and lineage, on such songs as “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear From Me,” “Killer Joe” and others. Was it an easy process for you to get into the jazz vocalist head space?

Mahal: No, it is with me all the time. It’s very easy to come from where jazz is and not know anything about what’s underneath it. For me, I knew that it was built on something. You can’t start building your temple from John Coltrane, where he’s like really fully out there. You gotta start somewhere. Why was all this negativity toward the older music? That’s the only way people knew how to do it. They didn’t know how to take what they needed and leave the rest.

I’m interested in passing along something positive from generation to generation. I just didn’t really want those voices to be lost out there, and those styles of music. Personally, I didn’t care whether or not it was a career to make money. I would be just as happy being a farmer playing on playing on the weekend or at night when I got done with work, because the music really was, for me, my personal therapy. I wasn’t really out to try to win over the world.

Woodard: You have strong attributes as a jazz vocalist, including being a fine scatter and having that quality of what we could call jazz phrasing. It seems to come really natural to you. Were there particular jazz singers that you had a thing for? I’m hearing Louis Armstrong and Louis Jordan, for instance.

Mahal: Well, I like jazz. I like Jordan. I like Slim and Slam, and my Godfather is Buddy Johnson. When I was growing up, a lot of his music used to be around the house my parents had. They talked about him a lot. When I was 8 or 9 years old, I met him and his band. My mother cooked for about three days and set up these guys with armloads of food to go back on the bus. That was actually one of the highlights for my young life — the musicians and so much incredible energy. It still buzzes me now, the thought that some day I’d like to have a band myself, and these things have been accomplished.

Woodard: You set things up nicely with the opening track, “Stompin’ At The Savoy,” with a short spoken-word piece telling the tale of your parents’ fateful meeting at the Savoy. It sets the stage of what’s to come. Do you consider Savoy a concept album of sorts?

Mahal: No. That was right off the top of my head. None of that was written down. All I gotta do is look inside my life and just have a conversation. That’s what records were with me. People really talk to you on records.

Woodard: You could be at a stage where you bask in nostalgic revery over what’s gone by, but you seem to be moving forward all the time. Is that fair to say?

Mahal: Yeah. I’m taking my signal from some American musicians, but I take my deeper signal from musicians from another continent, born in a musician clan and class, who have been musicians for generations.

When I was in Africa in 1979, we visited 13 countries as musical ambassadors from the United States. I remember one of the conversations, when a guy came up to me, an African brother, who said, “My brother, tell me, what do you do?” And I said, “Oh, I play music.” He says, “Yes, yes, I knew that. But what do you do?” [laughs]

We went back and forth with this like a couple, three times. And then I realized what he was asking me, and I said, “I’m a farmer.” He says, “Oh, good, good, good.” Music is like breathing there. [laughs] DB