Music City Blues Spring Festival: at Centennial Park (Nashville, TN) Mon. May 27, 2013

Music City Blues Spring Festival

Presented by The New Hope Foundation

National blues giant and multiple Grammy winner Taj Mahal will be the headline act at the 2013 annual Memorial Day Blues Festival in Centennial Park. To date, Taj Mahal will be the most prominent blues musician to play this free Memorial Day festival. Record attendance will be expected in Centennial Park on West End Avenue to hear this musical treasurer perform.

Centennial Park

Mon. 5/27/13
Show: 10:00 AM
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Taj Mahal

Bio | Upcoming Events

Blues

Berkeley CA

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REVIEWS

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Robert Christgau
Pop Matters
Forced Exposure
Robert Christgau
Pop Matters
The Guardian
All About Jazz
Entertainment Weekly
Robert Christgau
Robert Christgau
Tiny Mix Tapes
All About Jazz
Hour
All About Jazz
Jazz Reviews

Taj Mahal - The Best of the Private Years (from Robert Christgau)

The best was discovering the black music the '60s folkie missed ("Mockingbird," "Ooh Poo Pah Doo")....

Taj Mahal - Maestro (from Pop Matters)

Folk blues artist Taj Mahal has been putting out recordings for 40 years. He has a distinctive style of playing the guitar with his thumb and middle finger that adds syncopation to his leads, and a recognizable vocal style. His voice is simultaneously gruff and sweet, like someone sandpapered his throat and then coated it with honey. As a result, it's always been easy to identify a Taj Mahal song after hearing just the first few notes. The problem with this is that many of his albums sound t...

TAJ MAHAL - Taj Mahal (from Forced Exposure)

Taj Mahal's 1967 album debut helped set the table for the joyous marriage of traditional blues and the revolutionary sound of '60s rock 'n' roll. Spotlighting Mahal's gritty vocals, the David Rubinson-produced album features fretboard whiz Ry Cooder along with guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, a player who loudly fused his uncanny sense of melody with a no-nonsense, electrifying delivery. Even better, our Sundazed edition is an exact repro of the ultra-scarce mono version of this landmark longplayer, ta......

Taj Mahal - Shoutin' in Key: Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band Live (from Robert Christgau)

Love so much music and there's always more songs waiting ("Honky Tonk," "Ain't That a Lot of Love")....

Taj Mahal - The Best of the Private Years (from Pop Matters)

Taj Mahal is a extraordinary musician. His music flows between blues, boogie-woogie, rock and roll, country all mixed up with musical bits from the Carribean, American South, West Africa, Hawaii, New Orleans, and even Appalachia. He has played with Eric Clapton, Bonnie Rait, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan among others (rather, they played with him!). He has even sung the Top Ten list on the Late Show with Dave Letterman. Taj Mahal mixes guitar-based blues with dobro, organ, kazoos, even tubas......

Taj Mahal - Maestro/The Natch'l Blues (from The Guardian)

Taj Mahal has been recording for 40 years now, and he's clearly in the mood to celebrate. His remarkable career has involving reviving, reworking and often repopularising roots music of almost any kind - from the blues to reggae or Hawaiian and African styles - and Maestro provides a reminder of his range and his many musical friends. Blues, in different shades, dominate the album, from the slinky Slow Drag, in which he shows off his banjo work in a reunion with the Phantom Blues Band, through t......

Taj Mahal - Maestro (from All About Jazz)

Track Listing: Scratch My Back; Never Let You Go; Dust Me Down; Further on Down the Road; Black Man, Brown Man; Zanzibar; TV Mama; I Can Make You Happy; Slow Drag; Hello Josephine; Strong Man Holler; Diddy Wah Diddy. Personnel: Taj Mahal: vocals, guitar, harmonica, banjo; Ben Harper: vocals; Angelique Kidkjo: vocals: Jack Johnson: vocals; Ziggy Marley: vocals; C.C. White: background vocals; Deva Mahal: background vocals; Tracy Hazzard: backing vocals; Pebbles Phillips: background vocals; Leo N......

Taj Mahal - Maestro (from Entertainment Weekly)

Now in his fifthdecade as a one-man musical melting pot, TajMahal continues to resist the constraintsof genre. And so the reggaerhythms of "Never Let You Go" (a duetwith daughter Deva) are provided byukulele, trombone, and Latin workhorsesLos Lobos, while the lilting Africanballad "Zanzibar" features the Maliankora player Toumani Diabate and vocalsby Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo.What's constant on Maestro is Taj's 66-year-oldvoice ? itself something of a tourist, notjust in the way it tries......

Taj Mahal - The Best of Taj Mahal (from Robert Christgau)

Though the box is too much as usual, rest assured that none of his albums have gotten worse. But since not everyone's a natural sucker for John Hurt's love child moved down to New Orleans and taken up with a St. Kitts woman, here's where to find out how much you care. Five of 17 songs are also on the paradigm-shifting 1992 comp Taj's Blues, which also begins (and why not?) with "Statesboro Blues" and "Leaving Trunk." But starting with 1969's The Natch'l Blues, say, would mean missing, to name ju......

Taj Mahal - Maestro (from Robert Christgau)

Maybe I have a weakness for African-Americans from Hawaii, or maybe this one knows how to bend the blues, croon the diaspora and also sing Hawaiian. Then again, on his strongest non-collaborative album since the '70s, it's possible he's just extra excited. At 66, he leads multiple bands, including Los Lobos and Ivan Neville's crew through previously unmined naturals, from "Scratch My Back" to "Diddy Wah Diddy," and keeper originals such as "Strong Man Holler," in praise of a woman who was sweet ......

Taj Mahal - The Real Thing (from Tiny Mix Tapes)

The brilliance of Taj Mahal lies in the fact that he realized the blues was not a frozen style preserved in a formaldehyde of Delta dust and urban grit, but rather a template to apply any number of variations to. When I saw him in 2000 he filled a tiny 15 foot stage with seven musicians, three of them on ukulele. This adventurous spirit is what makes him one of the most exciting artists working within the "folk" lexicon. For his 1971 live alb......

Taj Mahal - Maestro (from All About Jazz)

Track Listing: Scratch My Back; Never Let You Go; Dust Me Down; Further on Down the Road; Black Man,Brown Man; Zanzibar; TV Mama; I Can Make You Happy; Slow Drag; Hello Josephine; StrongMan Holler; Diddy Wah Diddy. Personnel: Taj Mahal: vocals, ukulele (2), guitar (3, 6, 8, 10, 11), harmonica (3, 4, 7, 8, 12), banjo (4,5, 9); Deva Mahal: background vocals (2); Ben Harper: vocals (3); Jack Johnson: vocals (4);Ziggy Marley: vocals (5); Rudy Costa: alto saxophone (5); Angelique Kidjo: vocals (6);......

Taj Mahal - The Essential Taj Mahal (from Hour)

Grammy-winning blues scholar Taj Mahal plays guitar, piano, banjo, dobro, African thumb piano, conch shell, harmonica and National steel guitar - and he does so while whistling and singing acoustic blues, electric blues, country blues, city blues, Piedmont blues, Delta blues, jazz blues, rhythm'n'blues and barrelhouse piano blues. If you need a primer on the blues, look no further than this 36-track sampler of the Taj's storied career, one that helped break reggae in America (check out his great......

Taj Mahal - Blue Light Boogie (from All About Jazz)

Blue Light Boogie combines songs Taj Mahal recorded for various multi-artist tribute albums along with some cuts lifted from the bluesman's '90s releases on Private Music. The latter are hardly the best selections Taj recorded for his label, they do demonstrate the eclectic talents and considerable soul of one of America's best blues talents. Blue Light leans a little too heavily on pop-oriented tracks from Mahal's 1991 CD "Like Never Before." Fortunately, a great country-blues version of the St......

Taj Mahal - Maestro (from Jazz Reviews)

Listening to Taj Mahal for the first time in more than 40 years was a look back into a time when society as a whole was in a continuous state of change and turmoil. During the turbulent 1960s, there were civil unrest, Woodstock, Vietnam, LSD, hippies, racial divide, anti war demonstrations, the British music invasion, Motown, free love, the Mi Lai massacre and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, as well as John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Francis Kennedy. In many ways, music played a......

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