ALL TIME’S LIKE THE PRESENT FOR TAJ MAHAL
- Jun 30
- 4 min read
IT WAS, IN ONE SENSE, an accident of timing – not least because it was meant to happen a week earlier but misunderstanding or misadventure had put the kybosh on that first attempt at conversation – that the death of Clive Davis, a giant of mixed reputation but rare name recognition for a record company executive, coincided with this call to Taj Mahal who has a new album out called, appropriately enough, Time.
But in truth, for Mahal – whose real name is Henry Saint Clair Fredericks Jr, but where’s the earthy blues realism and spiritual adventure in that? – when you’ve been making music for more than 60 years, been on this earth for more than 80 years, and been across so many strands of the music industry for ever, the chances are any time you’re talking you might be asked about the death of some or other legend/giant/contemporary/well known figure.
And the chances are good you encountered them. In this case, back in the late ‘60s in Los Angeles when Davis was Columbia label president and Taj Mahal was suddenly single (musically speaking) as his bi-coastal and bi-racial group with another blues-and-more guitarist Ry Cooder, Rising Sons, split on the wheel of record company indecision and Mahal’s self-titled first album slid by without much attention.
“There’s good Clive and bad Clive, or good Clive and other Clive, I’ll put it that way,” says Mahal, wryly. “But for me I checked in with him after Rising Sons basically debacled because a lot of things collided that didn’t work in our favour. The music was there, the musicians were there, but all the legal stuff that went into putting the group together in those days was really difficult.
“People went off in their different directions and I decided after a year and a half of being outside I should call and check in with the record company and say, hey, I’m a signed artist here and I have ideas and I would like to record them. So I did. And instead of calling the stock boy in the mail room [he laughs] I called the president of the company, made a pitch to his secretary and Clive called me in a couple of hours.”
Davis sent a producer, David Rubinson, gave them studio time and some cash – “we became like the Damon Dash and Jay-Z relationship,” chuckles Mahal today: “Damon did the business and Jay-Z did the music” – and the resulting album, The Natch’l Blues, straddled stripped down folk blues, electrified city blues and punchy, brassy soul in a way that was the first indication of his career-long idea that borders, like label executives, were slippery things best ignored.
If the Tulsa sound – a mix of blues, rock, country, swing and folk strands – has an embodiment it is a man who is not from there, Taj Mahal. But even that combination of styles doesn’t cover all he does and has done, as his musical forays go west to the Pacific islands, south to Mexico and South America, east to Africa and Europe, and for all we know, north to Alaska! (One of his other appearances in 2026, because why only release one album in your 85th year, is Adios Ke Aloha Waves Of The Same Sea, featuring David Hidalgo of LA’s trans-border band Los Lobos, Sonny Lim from Hawaii’s Big Island and Mexican/American band Loz Cenzontles.)
“The music comes to me in whatever spiritual, energetic, creative pathway, DNA, culture and that’s like the water you’re swimming in,” he says, pointing out that his job was to dive in. To that end, of Rising Sons and of himself back then, he has said “we were interpreters, researchers, composers”, a combination that challenged the people who ran the business who maybe weren’t any of those. Is that how he still sees himself?
“I would switch them around: composer, researcher, interpreter,” Mahal says. “But in any combination it works. The common denominator, and I’ll change the word Africa for the word continent, the common denominator in all that I do is the Continent. And our relationship after having been thrust into the western world and creating all these different musics.
“I can rattle most of them off right now,” he adds, and in case you doubt him, he promptly does, from the obvious blues, gospel and jazz, through calypso, salsa and merenge, to candombe, cumbia “and on and on and on and on”.
“Every one of them is connected to the Continent and that means it’s connected to me. I can hear it, it comes through my DNA, it’s a relative ringing the bell somewhere.”
When he engages with music that’s either new to him or not one he’s worked in before does he look for the common ground or does he look for what is furthest from what he might have done before?
“When I hear new music, regardless of where it’s coming from, if I hear somebody like Ofra Haaza, a Yemeni artist unfortunately no longer with us, they had these traditions where they had these five gallon oil pans they would put up on their shoulder and bang out rhythms on them. I feel it,” Mahal says. “I don’t do it by comparison, I do it by feel. If I’m in Dublin and I hear somebody playing a pipe and there’s a bodhran and a guitar and somebody clogging, you can feel it. And then there’s certain kinds of music that I hear emotionally.”
As two of his longstanding collaborators who can be heard across Time, percussionist Tony Braunagel and bassist Larry Fulcher, like to say, it is a shared dialect. “Music is a language,” Fulcher has said. “If you understand it, you can get with other people who understand it and have a musical conversation.”
And when it comes to that conversation, says Mahal, “I can sit and talk to somebody all day long.” Just ask him how.
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