Midway through his playfully masterful 17-song set Thursday night at The Pabst, Taj Mahal paused to remind the audience just why they’d come.
"You came here ‘cause it was gonna happen," he said.
And happen it most certainly did.
From the opening instrumental shuffle reminiscent of T-Bone Walker replete with his signature head-wagging, hip-churning physicality through the thoroughly lovely island inflected lilt of "Loving in My Baby’s Eyes" in his encore, Taj embodied his grand, unassuming, but carnally persuasive vision of the living African diaspora.
"Thought we’d open right up with the blues, get your blood boiling," he remarked before launching into "Done Changed My Way of Living," his first vocal number of the night. (As a footnote, that number is a particular highlight of his most recent album "MKUTANO," a collaborative project recorded in Zanzibar with the Cultural Musical Club. The Cultural Musical Club, on their debut tour of the U.S., will coincidentally be performing at 1 p.m. Sunday as part of the Global Union Festival at Humbolt Park.) It was clear from the git that we were in for an easy flowing pageant of hard-won but delightfully casual mastery.
This decade has unfolded as a grand return to the guitar for Mr. Mahal. After spending much of the '90s demonstrating his front man prowess whilst traveling with the Phantom Blues band, Taj has stripped back to a trio format and rushed into the breach with a stinging, ringing, and altogether righteous single-line solo style that is a most welcome complement to his unparalleled rhythmic finger-style approach.
In the vocal department, he slides between his own clear impassioned upper range to a burnished, intimating, ever-so-masculine purr with stops at all stations in between including a dead-on Howlin’ Wolf-inspired nasal shake. This chameleon-like shading (which could come off as mere trickeration in lesser hands) was put to grand effect in an ominously throbbing tale of a lover so fine, "You did a rat-ta-tat tattoo on this heart of mine. You make a strong man holler, make a weak man lose his home." Paced by Kester Smith’s clenched hi-hat and the insistent, dead-simple throb of Bill Rich’s bass, Taj turned the wolf loose on the strong man and delivered the weak man line with an excruciating tenderness reminiscent of his ballad singing on his landmark "The Real Thing" album of 1971.
The glory of seeing this versatile performer forty years after his emergence on the scene is in encountering the enduring sass and fervor of his earliest work enriched and informed by the kind of gravity, authority, and offhand delight one achieves only through the sort of tireless devotion to exploration he has exhibited through the twists and turns of a restless, searching career.
Bill Rich, who played on the aforementioned 1971 release and with Taj for two decades following that, is the kind of steady foil that allows Taj’s rhythmic nods and feints to starkly charm and sting. Their ease and lightheartedness with one another is a joy to behold.
Trinidadian born Kester Smith anchored Taj’s sublime Caribbean-inflected bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s and his subtle, implied Carnival is just the ticket for their reinvigoration of their prescient previous breakthroughs.
Years ago, Taj remarked at a workshop that African-Americans use the song to get to singing. Through the course of his set, familiar lines, blues commonplaces, would find themselves inflected in stirringly singular ways in different tunes, riffs and rhythmic displacements against steady backdrops reinforced a fresh and open-ended sense of play. One delightful exchange came in the hypnotically insistent theme called "Zanzibar" with a lovely, tiptoeing, increasingly abstracted conversation between Taj’s amplified acoustic and Rich’s chiming harmonics on his electric bass.
Able to draw the audience into singing with him at a moments notice, switching tone on his guitar conjuring the starkness of John Lee Hooker one moment, the snap of Albert King the next, the impossible tenderness of Mississippi John Hurt or his own pan-Caribbean Joseph Spence-informed dancing hybrid of a thump (An absolutely efflorescent thicket of a syncopated guitar solo on his still glorious pulse-beat "Corinna" rushes to mind), Sublimity is close at hand and in plain view of the alley whenever Taj Mahal is in town.
May he quickly return.
"You came here ‘cause it was gonna happen," he said.
And happen it most certainly did.
From the opening instrumental shuffle reminiscent of T-Bone Walker replete with his signature head-wagging, hip-churning physicality through the thoroughly lovely island inflected lilt of "Loving in My Baby’s Eyes" in his encore, Taj embodied his grand, unassuming, but carnally persuasive vision of the living African diaspora.
"Thought we’d open right up with the blues, get your blood boiling," he remarked before launching into "Done Changed My Way of Living," his first vocal number of the night. (As a footnote, that number is a particular highlight of his most recent album "MKUTANO," a collaborative project recorded in Zanzibar with the Cultural Musical Club. The Cultural Musical Club, on their debut tour of the U.S., will coincidentally be performing at 1 p.m. Sunday as part of the Global Union Festival at Humbolt Park.) It was clear from the git that we were in for an easy flowing pageant of hard-won but delightfully casual mastery.
This decade has unfolded as a grand return to the guitar for Mr. Mahal. After spending much of the '90s demonstrating his front man prowess whilst traveling with the Phantom Blues band, Taj has stripped back to a trio format and rushed into the breach with a stinging, ringing, and altogether righteous single-line solo style that is a most welcome complement to his unparalleled rhythmic finger-style approach.
In the vocal department, he slides between his own clear impassioned upper range to a burnished, intimating, ever-so-masculine purr with stops at all stations in between including a dead-on Howlin’ Wolf-inspired nasal shake. This chameleon-like shading (which could come off as mere trickeration in lesser hands) was put to grand effect in an ominously throbbing tale of a lover so fine, "You did a rat-ta-tat tattoo on this heart of mine. You make a strong man holler, make a weak man lose his home." Paced by Kester Smith’s clenched hi-hat and the insistent, dead-simple throb of Bill Rich’s bass, Taj turned the wolf loose on the strong man and delivered the weak man line with an excruciating tenderness reminiscent of his ballad singing on his landmark "The Real Thing" album of 1971.
The glory of seeing this versatile performer forty years after his emergence on the scene is in encountering the enduring sass and fervor of his earliest work enriched and informed by the kind of gravity, authority, and offhand delight one achieves only through the sort of tireless devotion to exploration he has exhibited through the twists and turns of a restless, searching career.
Bill Rich, who played on the aforementioned 1971 release and with Taj for two decades following that, is the kind of steady foil that allows Taj’s rhythmic nods and feints to starkly charm and sting. Their ease and lightheartedness with one another is a joy to behold.
Trinidadian born Kester Smith anchored Taj’s sublime Caribbean-inflected bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s and his subtle, implied Carnival is just the ticket for their reinvigoration of their prescient previous breakthroughs.
Years ago, Taj remarked at a workshop that African-Americans use the song to get to singing. Through the course of his set, familiar lines, blues commonplaces, would find themselves inflected in stirringly singular ways in different tunes, riffs and rhythmic displacements against steady backdrops reinforced a fresh and open-ended sense of play. One delightful exchange came in the hypnotically insistent theme called "Zanzibar" with a lovely, tiptoeing, increasingly abstracted conversation between Taj’s amplified acoustic and Rich’s chiming harmonics on his electric bass.
Able to draw the audience into singing with him at a moments notice, switching tone on his guitar conjuring the starkness of John Lee Hooker one moment, the snap of Albert King the next, the impossible tenderness of Mississippi John Hurt or his own pan-Caribbean Joseph Spence-informed dancing hybrid of a thump (An absolutely efflorescent thicket of a syncopated guitar solo on his still glorious pulse-beat "Corinna" rushes to mind), Sublimity is close at hand and in plain view of the alley whenever Taj Mahal is in town.
May he quickly return.
