About
Taj Mahal doesn’t wait for permission. If a sound intrigues him, he sets out to make it. If origins mystify him, he moves to trace them. If rules get in his way, he unapologetically breaks them. To Taj, convention means nothing, but traditions are holy. He has pushed music and culture forward, all while looking lovingly back. “I just want to be able to make the music that I’m hearing come to me — and that’s what I did,” Taj says. “When I say, ‘I did,’ I’m not coming from the ego. The music comes from somewhere. You’re just the conduit it comes through.”
Taj is a towering musical figure — a legend who transcended the blues not by leaving them behind, but by revealing their magnificent scope. “The blues is bigger than most people think,” he says. “You could hear Mozart play the blues.”
A brilliant artist with a musicologist’s mind, he has pursued and elevated the roots of beloved sounds with boundless devotion and skill. As he traced origins to the American South, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, he created entirely new sounds.
Quantifying Taj’s significance is impossible, but people try anyway. He appreciates the accolades, but his motivation lies elsewhere: “It matters that I get to hear it — that I did it.”