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Music CD - Taj Mahal: Taj Mahal
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Music CD: Taj Mahal
Artist: Taj Mahal
List Price: $11.98
Our Price: $6.44
Your Save: $ 5.54 ( 46% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Sony
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Average Customer Rating: 
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Tracks:
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1. Leaving Truck
2. Statesboro Blues
3. Checkin' Up On My Baby
4. Everybody's Got To Change Sometime
5. E Z Rider
6. Dust My Broom
7. Diving Duck Blues
8. The Celebrated Walkin' Blues
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Binding: Audio CD
EAN: 0074646585825
Format: Original recording remastered
Label: Sony
Manufacturer: Sony
Number Of Discs: 1
Publisher: Sony
Release Date: 2000-09-05
Studio: Sony
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Confusion... overlap betwen this record "Taj Mahal"and the Roots 'n' Blues reissue "Taj's Blues"
Comment: first, I would say I think Taj Mahal is a great performer! I've seen Taj Mahal perform a few times here in Amsterdam during the last 10 years, and live he's a sensation!
But I'm a bit confused, I hope some of the blues experts, here on Amazon can help me out. Both this album, "Taj Mahal", and the Roots 'n' Blues series reissue "Taj's Blues" (I love that series!) claim to be a reissue of his first album. And of course there is a overlap in songs. (and to have all the songs you have to buy both?) Could someone help me out? what's the story about this?
JB, Amsterdam
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best Blues Album of All-Time!!!
Comment: When I first heard Taj Mahal's debut album in the late 60's, I was simply astounded at the sheer quality of this music. There is not one bit of filler on this album, which remains an incredible listen nearly 40 years later. This album, more than any other album I ever bought, had the biggest influence of my life. Prior to this album, I had never been into pure blues. But, this album changed that forever, as I now have a personal music library filled with dozens and dozens of great blues albums. Backed by some great musicians, including guitarists, Ry Cooder and Jesse Ed Davis, this album never lets up, from the opening song "Leaving Truck" to the closing number "The Celebrated Walkin' Blues". This album changed my musical horizons and remains one of my most treasured albums. Taj Mahal made a lot of great albums, but he never made one better than this.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Taj Mahal's Groundbreaking Debut Improves with Age
Comment: It's hard to believe that 40 years have elapsed since Taj Mahal recorded his self-titled album. I can honestly say that Taj's debut album DID change my life because he opened the world of delta blues to me and transformed me from a suburban garage rocker into a fanatical avid collector of worn out 78 rpm of Mississippi blues recorded in the 1920s and 1930s. I learned most of my blues chops on guitar from listening to this album over and over.
Technically this isn't Taj's first album but it's the first album that most music fans heard Taj Mahal on. Both "Giant Step" and "De Ole Folks at Home" were released earlier and combined into a second release after the success of this self titled album.
Taj's album led me to appreciate the significance of blues players like Robert Johnson, who was a forgotten and obscure figure in the world of popular music before Taj Mahal. It was the first time I ever heard anyone play an open tuned guitar in the blues bottleneck style. I remember using a screwdriver and a newly purchased book of open tunings for guitar to imitate Jesse Davis' trademark southern fried guitar sound. A year later everyone from Duane Allman, Eric Clapton to Taj's own session player Ry Cooder had albums out playing bottleneck blues in the vintage style of Robert Johnson.
Nobody, not even John Fahey or Paul Butterfield did more than Taj Mahal to expand the audience for authentic blues to a crossover audience of suburban white kids who were living in the psychedelic renaissance of such great bands as the Doors, Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience when Taj's debut was released.
Most extraordinary is the success of Taj Mahal's self titled album had a ripple effect on the careers of many obscure blues players who able to quit their day jobs and start gigging again, because of the reawakened interest in Mississippi blues.
The late Walter "Furry" Lewis, a Memphis based blues guitarist once told me that Taj Mahal was responsible for his return to active gigging in the early Seventies. Furry with some help from fans managed to get put his battered Martin guitar out hock at a local pawn shop and Furry's second career began as he was pushing 80 years of age. Taj wasn't the only musician to bring the blues to a younger rock and roll audience but Taj was significant because he was one of the few younger black musicians who still played blues in 1967.
The reason why you can still find an old Blind Willie Johnson or Charley Patton album still in issue at Amazon is because players like Fahey, Al Johnson, Paul Butterfield and Taj Mahal stubbornly refused to let the blues tradition wither away and die in the late Sixties and early Seventies.
Taj specifically designed his first album appeal to a broader rock music audience without compromising the integrity of the vintage blues he was playing. He took blues out of the hands of the archivists and breathed life back into it with his charismatic performances.
At the time of this album's release I saw the Taj Mahal Band perform a few times and it was a juggernaut of a band with a sledge-hammer drum and bass sound designed to appeal to rock music fans. Even as Taj experimented with his hybrid rock and blues fusion, he never strayed far from his authentic roots in Mississippi, Georgia and Texas country blues.
For instance, a San Francisco hippie fan of Big Brother and the Holding Company or the Grateful Dead could readily appreciate the elements of both rock and roll and blues in Taj Mahal's music. As a result, Taj's music helped to open the doors of the both the Fillmore and Avalon to some of his elders B.B. King, Albert King and Muddy Waters.
Part this album's appeal is Taj's magnificent full throated mastery of blues harmonica but equally important is guitarist Jesse Davis' blues drenched slide guitar and lead guitar playing. Jesse only stayed with the Taj Mahal band for two short years but the exuberance and the sheer joy of their collaboration can be heard on songs like "Leaving Trunk" and "Statesboro Blues." It's hard avoid the impulse to dance to these songs because the slow blues tempo is revved up to a mid-tempo shuffle.
Kiowa native American guitar Jesse Davis was the glue that held the funky blues sound of the band together. Davis began his career playing the unlikely gig as country music star Conway Twitty's guitarist. Davis' versatility and mastery or roots music earned him a reputation as a top gun Fender picking session guitarist. Following Davis' departure from the band Taj moved on to a sparse acoustic sound that had a wide sweep of influences as diverse as blues, ragtime, jazz country music, Brazilian, African music, reggae and other global folk music.
Taj was never quite as electrifying on stage as he was with Jesse Davis at his side. After Davis' departure, Taj's solo live shows were a showcase of his own stylistic diversity and his virtuosity on a dozen musical instruments. Both Taj and Jesse were college graduates with an academic interest in blues but when they hit the stage together, both Taj and Jesse played with the blackheart soul of the man who met up with the devil at the crossroads and signed on with Satan to play the blues. Unfortunately Jesse's demon was alcohol and the firewater finally consumed him in 1988.
When all is said and done this early self-titled album by Taj Mahal will be the most significant of his long career. Taj didn't accept the conventional wisdom and stood up and demanded his music be listened to on it's own merits. Taj Mahal's debut album was a blast of fresh air in the psychedelic jungle that was popular music in 1968. 40 years later, this well worn relic of an album sounds more inspired and authentic than any the bling-bling jive by any rapper in the current jungle of hip hop music.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a pioneer modern bluesman w/killer debut album
Comment: I would urge any blues cd collector to posses this album; with his raspy voice, hard guitar playing and mezmorizing harp playing, each and every song is solid. I especially like 'Leaving Truck' and "Checkin Up on my Baby' but they are all good on this cd. Even the linear notes and photos on this reissue are interesting.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the best debut albums ever by a contemporary bluesman
Comment: One of the most prominent figures in late 20th century blues, singer/multi-instrumentalist Henry St. Clair Fredericks played an enormous role in revitalizing and preserving traditional blues.
His self-titled debut album was recorded in August 1967, and came out just as several established blues stars ventured into psychedelia and rock n' roll at the insistence of their record companies.But not Taj Mahal. These arrangements may be updated when compared to what Robert Johnson or Willie McTell did thirty-five years earlier, but it's still the blues, genuine, mostly acoustic blues, dominated by harp and howling slide guitar.
These lean, stripped-down arrangements were alien to most record producers at the time, and they are part of the reason why this album holds up so well.
The best of these eight songs count among the best, catchiest, grooviest blues I have ever heard, and I have heard a lot!
Taj Mahal vocals are powerful and confident, he has a great sense of timing and melody, and he is backed by a magnificent band which includes lead guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and the multi-talented Ry Cooder.
(A facsimile of the original LP artwork is included, giving their names as "Jessie Edwin Davis" and "Ryland Cooder". Taj Mahal calls his band "a son of a Texas sharecropper, a Hungarian Jew, a wild-eyed Irishman, and a crazy Swamp Spade!") Taj Mahal's hard-hitting renditions of "Dust My Broom", "Leaving Trunk" and "Statesboro Blues" are nothing short of magnificent; powerful, strongly rhythmic songs, perfectly arranged. And the nine-minute version of Son House's "Walkin' Blues", which sees Taj Mahal playing both harp and rough, gruff slide guitar, is simply awesome.
The whole record is a compelling amalgam of stylistic and technical achievements, filled with blues influences of the 1920s and 30s, but also making use of stereo sound separation and state-of-the-art recording technology.
One of the best blues LPs of the 60s.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Taj Mahal's been chasing the blues around the world for years, but rarely with the passion, energy, and clarity he brought to his first three albums. Taj Mahal, The Natch'l Blues and The Real Thing are the sound of the artist, who was born in 1942, defining himself and his music. On his self-titled 1967 debut, he not only honors the sound of the Delta masters with his driving National steel guitar and hard vocal shout, but ladles in elements of rock and country with the help of guitarists Ry Cooder and the late Jessie Ed Davis. This approach is reinforced and broadened by The Natch'l Blues. What's most striking is Mahal's way of making even the oldest themes sound as if they're part of a new era. Not just through the vigor of his playing--relentlessly propulsive, yet stripped down compared with the six-string ornamentations of the original masters of country blues--but through his singing, which possesses a knowing insouciance distinct to post-Woodstock counterculture hipsters. It's the voice of an informed young man who knows he's offering something deep to an equally hip and receptive audience. Soon, Mahal turned his multicultural vision of the blues even further outward. The live 1971 set, The Real Thing, finds him still carrying the Mississippi torch, while adding overt elements of jazz and Afro-Caribbean music to its flame. But it's overreaching. His band sounds under-rehearsed, and the arrangements seem more like rough outlines. Nonetheless, these albums set the stage for Mahal's career. (For a condensed version, try the fine The Best of Taj Mahal.) Today, he continues to make fine fusion albums, like 1999's Kulanjan, with Malian kora master Toumani Diabate, and less exciting but still eclectic recordings with his Phantom Blues Band. --Ted Drozdowski
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