45 f 2 Bluespersons 2
They call this TajMo, the collaboration between blues veteran Taj Mahal and mere sixty-something Keb Mo. Jamie Renton gets his twenty minutes.
ome musical pairings seem so right, you wonder why they haven’t happened earlier. One such is TajMo aka The Taj Mahal and Keb Mo Band, a collabora- tion between the two bluesmen which has resulted in an album on Decca and a well- received international tour. Although of different generations (Mahal, born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, is 75, Mo – Kevin Roosevelt Moore to his mum – a decade younger) these two stalwarts share a lot. A rocking grits-and-honey sound, an open- ness to influences beyond the standard twelve-bar boogie, a strong social con- science and enough infectious good humour to melt the stoniest of hearts.
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While they’re in London to play the Shepherds Bush Empire, I catch up with the affable duo in the bowels of the BBC. Just
one of many interviews they’re doing that day. Experience has taught me, the bigger the name, the shorter the time you get to talk to them. These two are about as big as they get in the roots music scene, so I’m only allotted 20 minutes for my interview. “Jamie from fRoots. How you doin’ man!” says Taj, by way of greeting. I interviewed him a decade back (see fR 268). Does he really remember me? Seems to. But then he is the undisputed Gentleman of the Blues.
Taj may be genial, but he knows his own mind. He kicks the interview off by telling me about a quote he read from a producer he’d worked with. “He said ‘You get artists like The Pointer Sisters. When you’re working with them, you gotta go find the material, you gotta rehearse them… all those different kind of things, before the whole thing gets together. But you get somebody like Taj Mahal, your best
bet is just to stay out of the way. ’Cos he knows what he wants to do. He knows how to work with the engineers and musicians. You don’t have to pick no songs for him.’”
“It’s a capture mode,” chips in Keb. “Yeah, no Svengali mode,” adds Taj They’re quite the double-act these two.
Very much at ease with each other’s compa- ny, finishing off each other’s sentences. “I first met Taj face-to-face in 1993,” explains Keb. “I’d already seen him in concert quite a few times by then because I was, kind of like, not stalking him but… stalking him!” Not for the last time in the interview, they both break down in laughter.
“You kept coming back,” says Taj “to see ‘Is he doing the same stuff? No, he’s doing different stuff. He’s in a different place… but he’s still on that same good- foot!’”
Photo: Jay Blakesberg
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