Click here to download an MP3 of "Mexican Cowboy" from Otis Taylor's Recapturing the Banjo.
Psychedelic blues has belonged to guitarists since the 1960s. Otis Taylor doesn’t care. For seven albums, starting with his haunting 2000 solo debut When Negros Walked the Earth, Taylor has encroached on the trippy territory defined by six-stringers like Syd Barrett and Jimi Hendrix with an unexpected instrument: the banjo.
Normally the stuff of bluegrass records and old-timey string bands, banjo lines under Taylor’s command can become swirling sonic cyclones. By snapping a little digital delay on a circular melody, he’ll create a soundtrack for a story of madness like “I Lost My Horse,” from 2001’s White African, or to evoke ghosts of the past in the ode to Rosa Parks, “Rosa, Rosa,” from 2003’s Truth Is Not Fiction.
Paralleling Taylor’s passion for making “trance blues,” as he calls it, with his banjo is his exploration of race and African American identity, a theme that runs through his bold, blunt, evocative lyrics.
On Taylor’s brand new Recapturing the Banjo, he takes both of those interests to a new, more deeply twined level. Although Taylor’s banjo often shared the psychoacoustic stage with electric guitars on his earlier releases, this time the instrument is front and center. And the album has a very specific mission.
“I want people to know that the banjo came from Africa—that it’s an African instrument,” Taylor explains by phone from his Colorado home. “Recapturing the Banjo is an educational album, not just good music. A lot of people think the banjo was developed for bluegrass or Appalachian folk music, but banjo-like instruments discovered on archeological digs in North Africa have been dated back at least 700 years. I want to recapture the banjo’s identity as a black instrument. It didn’t get here until the slaves did.”
To make his point, and his album, Taylor assembled a group of top-flight banjo picking collaborators: Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Guy Davis, Grammy-winner Keb’ Mo’, and Don Vappie—some of the most progressive African American artists in contemporary blues.
“I wanted to show that we are modern black men with modern ideas,” says Taylor. “Although we recorded old timey stuff, psychedelic stuff, New Orleans music, jug band music, and our own songs, we put a distinctive spin on all of it.”
Hart’s tune “A Prophet’s Mission,” about the Native American chieftain Tecumseh’s attempts to rally various tribes against the European invaders, weaves a bed of percussion and twin basses around his raw singing and loop-like banjo. And a tune later, Taylor’s own “Absinthe” sounds fueled by the narcotic liquor—real absinthe, not the new-fangled store-bought kind. It opens with a burble of drunken cornet and sets his, Mo’ ’s, and Vappie’s overlapping banjo licks against Hart’s expressive lap steel guitar. Vappie may be the finest banjoist currently playing in the New Orleans and Creole jazz tradition (He’s worked with Doc Cheatham and Terence Blanchard, and is a regular guest of Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra), but on this recording he’s found his counterparts in Taylor and Mo’.
Davis and Harris provide some of Recapturing the Banjo’s most traditional performances, Davis a banjo- and mandolin-propelled cover of traditional folk song “Little Liza Jane” and Harris a take on “Walk Right In,” which honors the great Gus Cannon and his 1920s Mississippi string group the Jug Stompers. Rather than frailing or playing claw hammer style on the tune, Harris plucks single notes until a frilly, strummed instrumental break. His style of single-note picking on banjo is closely associated with the instrument’s early recorded African American practitioners as well as white players, like the famed Virginia mountain musician Dock Boggs, who learned from black stylists.
As for Taylor, who typically plays guitar in the banjo-like open G tuning, his own style is a conglomerate. “It’s a combination of picking and brushing the strings,” he explains. “Sometimes I’ll pluck strings or use down strokes with my fingernail to play single notes. It’s whatever I need to get the job done.” He also prefers banjos with tone rings, describing their sound as more African.
“In bluegrass and old-timey music, often the banjos don’t have a ring around the resonator so they tend to sound brighter and more aggressive, for fast lead playing,” Taylor says. “The tone ring gives me more sustain and adds more bass, especially with heavier strings, so it’s more rhythmic.”
Taylor says he’s nurtured the idea of making Recapturing the Banjo since 1999. “I was doing a workshop at a festival in Port Townsend, Washington, with the bluesman Jack Johnson and the idea really caught my imagination,” he says. It took several years to get his ideal cast. Now Taylor describes the results as “historic.”
Indeed, the line-up of Taylor, Hart, Mo’, Harris, and Davis amounts to a banjo-driven blues supergroup, and they’ll play several dates together this summer, including the Chicago Blues Festival (see www.otistaylor.com for more).
Taylor’s timing couldn’t be better. The banjo is undergoing something of a renaissance, showing up in warmly received young roots music outfits like the Carolina Chocolate Drops and the Old Crow Medicine Show, who sport two banjos in their line-up.
Pickers are also well represented in this year’s Grammy nominations. Comedian and strummer Steve Martin as well as virtuoso Bela Fleck both appear with the influential banjoist Tony Trischka on his Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular, which is nominated in the Best Bluegrass Album category. Cathy Fink’s Banjo Talkin’ has a nod for Best Traditional Folk Album. And J.D. Crowe and the New South, whose leader is one of the most influential banjo players in contemporary bluegrass, also have a Best Bluegrass nomination for their Lefty’s Old Guitar, which recently won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s 2007 Album of the Year title.
“I do see a little bit of a resurgence of interest in the banjo,” Taylor concurs. “Every time a young band gets on stage with one and their fans see it, it’s a good thing, because it makes the banjo contemporary. Which it is. My album has some old music, but it’s very modern. The truth is, with a banjo—whether it’s a black-music thing, an old-timey thing, or a psychedelic thing—in the right hands it can sound timeless.”
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For more information on Alvin Youngblood Hart, check out Gibson's incredible interview with the Memphis musician.