Recommended if you like: Buddy Guy, North Mississippi Allstars, Little Feat
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. The 82-year-old is home in Berkeley, reflecting on six + decades of music making. "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.
You're there to receive the gift."
Taj is a towering musical figure -- a legend who transcended the blues not by leaving them behind, but by revealing their magnificent scope to the world. "The blues is bigger than most people think," he says. "You could hear Mozart play the blues. It might be more like a lament. It might be more melancholy. But I'm going to tell you: the blues is in there."
If anyone knows where to find the blues, it's Taj. A brilliant artist with a musicologist's mind, he has pursued and elevated the roots of beloved sounds with boundless devotion and skill. Then, as he traced origins to the American South, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, he created entirely new sounds, over and over again. As a result, he's not only a god to rock-and-roll icons such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, but also a hero to ambitious artists toiling in obscurity who are determined to combine sounds that have heretofore been ostracized from one another. No one is as simultaneously traditional and avant-garde.
Quantifying Taj's significance is impossible, but people try anyway. A 2022 Grammy win for 'Get On Board' for his collaboration with Ry Cooder, then a trip with his Sextet to Leon Russell's Church Studio in Tulsa, OK to record 'Swingin' Live at the Church Studio in Tulsa,' yet another Grammy win, brought his Grammy tally to five wins and 16 nominations, and underscored his undiminished relevance more than 50 years after his solo debut. Blues Hall of Fame membership, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association, 2025 Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award Honoree and other honors punctuate his resumé. He appreciates the accolades, but his motivation lies elsewhere. "It's not a hunger, not a lust or even a thirst," Taj says of what drives him. "It's just more knowledge of self -- to realize that almost everything is right here. We're so used to looking outside of ourselves for things, and it's right here."
Taj's exploration of music began as an exploration of self. He was born in 1942 in Harlem to musical parents -- his father was a jazz pianist with Caribbean roots; mother was a gospel-singing schoolteacher from South Carolina -- who cultivated an appreciation for both personal history and the arts in their son. "I was raised really conscious of my African roots," Taj says. "So I was trying to find out: where does what we do here connect to what we left there?" In the early 1950s, his family moved to Springfield, Massachusetts -- a microcosmic melting pot for immigrants from across the globe: the Caribbean, the American South, Europe, the Mediterranean, Syria, Lebanon. "Music was everywhere," he says. "Things were different in those days. There weren't a lot of places that African Americans had to go out to entertain themselves. So people did a lot of entertaining in their homes. Friday or Saturday night, you'd move the furniture, mop and wax the floor, and set things up so people could pop over and hear all the music." Musicians and friends from around the world passed through, ate home-cooked feasts, and led neighborhood jam sessions and dance parties in cozy living rooms.
From the beginning, Taj found the blues magnetic, even as most artists around him in the Northeast were exploring other sounds. "I could hear little strains of the blues coming through -- you could feel that energy in the music that was being played," he says. "I could also feel that energy of the blues inside myself." Piano lessons didn't stick -- "I'd already heard what I wanted to play" - so when a blues guitarist from North Carolina moved in next door, Taj found an early mentor and was off.
For college, Taj attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He graduated after studying agriculture and animal husbandry. "I knew I'd like to connect myself to something on this planet that's meaningful," he says. "That's why I was interested in agriculture and music. Those were the two things that I recognized even as a very young child that people are never going to do without."