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Taj Mahal Quartet At Miner Auditorium
by Steven Roby
Taj Mahal Quartet Miner AuditoriumSan Francisco, CA August 16, 2025 The sold-out Sunday afternoon performance closed a four-concert SFJAZZ residency with a reminder that Taj Mahal keeps tradition not just intact, but in motion. The 83-year-old bandleader entered to Bunji Garlin's “Differentology (Ready for the Road)," clapping in a straw hat and patterned jacket, then settled amid a semicircle of instruments--three guitars, a six-string banjo, and an eight-string ukulele. “We're the musicians, you're the audience...we are both here ...
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Taj Mahal & Keb' Mo': Room On The Porch
by Frank Housh
In 2017 blues legend Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' recorded TajMo, (Concord Records), which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album. Eight years later, the two follow up with Room On The Porch, released May 23, 2025, also on Concord Records. Its ten tracks feel like a cool dive into a swimming hole, long forgotten by the crowds posing by the hotel pool. The album begins with the title song's shuffling welcome. Taj Mahal said, “That started ...
Continue ReadingTaj Mahal: The Blues Is Eternal
by Doug Collette
Over the course of his fifty-plus years of active musicology, Taj Mahal has explored all manner of roots music, but he always returns to his main influences in the blues. His delving into reggae and Caribbean styles has not only illuminated the links connecting the genres, but also increasingly honed a feel for sharp musicianship that was ever-so-incisive to begin with on his eponymous debut album in 1968 for Columbia Records. A pair of successive albums from the man born ...
Continue ReadingTaj Mahal: Savoy
by Steve Yip
Folk/blues practitioner Taj Mahal's Savoy is to be savored. As one of the custodians of the blues, Mahal has long been a legend in his own time. This collection traverses a cultural-musical continuum in an indispensable residency in the annals of Black American music. The namesake of this album--the Savoy on Lenox Avenue in Harlem--was known as The World's Finest Ballroom and Home Of Happy Feet. In the pre-Civil Rights era, the North claimed formal equality, but segregation ...
Continue ReadingTaj Mahal: Savoy
by Dave Linn
Savoy, from Taj Mahal, is the latest entrant in the crowded field of pop music artists trying their hand at the fertile songbook of old big-band, swing-era standards. Unlike most, Mahal's roots show he's well suited to the task. He was born in Harlem in 1942. He grew up in a musical family, and his parents were both involved in the arts. His father was a jazz pianist and arranger, working with Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, and Fletcher Henderson among ...
Continue ReadingRy Cooder and Taj Mahal: Get on Board: The Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
by Nenad Georgievski
There is an African proverb that says “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." The intimacy and the dynamics of the duet setting have long appealed to virtuoso guitarist Ry Cooder. During his expansive six decade career, he has released several adventurous duets and collaborative albums with luminaries such as guitarist Ali Farka Toure, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt or Manuel Galban, to name but a few. Get on Board is ...
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