Saw Taj Mahal last night and wrote this review: It's a bit wordy but hopefully a few of you will enjoy it enough to reach the end.
Pete
The Taj Mahal Trio & Idrissa Soumaoro @ The Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool 19/06/05
Liverpool’s Philharmonic hall is a temple of pristinely restored art deco in white & gold with meticulous acoustics and formidable classical music credentials. Taj Mahal dedicates a song to ‘all those women with a sweet load behind who know what they’re carrying’. The match of dirty blues and spotless paintwork should have been unlikely but with Taj’s colossal reputation built through world music crossovers his albums doubtlessly sit alongside the Mozart on many a middle-class bookshelf and I seemed alone among the audience in feeling unease with hearing ‘Going up to the country, paint my mailbox blue’ in such formal surroundings. At 23 I seem to be the youngest person here who hasn’t been brought by his parents. I also suspect I’m alone among the male audience in not owning a pair of khaki chinos. I’m certainly in the minority having not worn mine tonight.
Opening act Idrissa Soumaoro seemed less out of place, though perhaps only because I wasn’t equipped to spot the dirty jokes in his lyrics. A Malian desert blues guitarist he felt compelled to offer lengthy explanations of what songs were about in slightly stilted English before singing them in his native tongue. Not that it mattered that his lyrics were incomprehensible to a Liverpool audience as the hypnotic grooves he laid down certainly weren’t. His repetitive pentatonic guitar brought to mind a more polished R. L. Burnside. His percussionist, playing what looked like a small wooden dome with his bare hands, had a sense of time that could have elevated any second rate bar band to the sublime. A lead guitarist and flute player completed his act each firing complex flurries of notes into the mix where gaps in the vocal allowed it.
While the matching white linen uniforms seemed contrived the music certainly wasn’t and although the habit of playing similarly textured songs back to back didn’t quite work in the context of the concert hall it generated the impression of a band more used to playing gigs where keeping people dancing was of key importance.
Taj Mahal entered post-interval to rapturous applause. Playing electric guitar all night, while an acoustic banjo sits disappointingly untouched, he kicked off with three or four up tempo blues standards. Without being able to fault the delivery I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this was stuff I’d seen done in a million bars by a million blues bands and, while Taj looked like he was working hard & seemed to be enjoying himself, it must have been stuff a performer of his calibre could have sleepwalked. By the time Taj sat at the piano for ‘Blues with a Feeling’ and invited us to ‘move your behinds and holler’ I couldn’t really think of anything I was less inclined to do.
Picking up his guitar again and launching into ‘Fishin’ Blues’ it is almost like a switch has been thrown and he suddenly begins to sound like Taj Mahal. What follows is an excellent greatest hits set; though with a couple of the most obvious ones missing. A particularly vocal request to “play Katy” from the front row results in Taj joylessly playing the opening chords with a scowl with the clear message that that’s as much as you’re getting. When he walks on for his encore he greets the yells for ‘Statesboro Blues’ with ‘Lovin’ in my Baby’s Eyes’ the opening (and standout) track from his 1996 record Phantom Blues. It might be a song that he’s been playing for a decade but it’s a choice that sends a message that he won’t be tied to the half-dozen albums he made between his debut in 1967 and the mid-seventies that house his most well known and enduringly popular songs.
Taj provided a consummate performance, threw in plenty of recognisable songs and clearly played to his crowd, and yet I came away feeling faintly disappointed. I had prepared myself for chameleonic changing of styles, or for a set consisting entirely of material from a recent album or collaboration. What I wasn’t expecting was a set of strait-up electric blues with the emphasis on crowd pleasers. Meticulously performed and providing exactly what was expected yet somehow the lacking the spark that might have come from seeing Taj do material that was fresher for him.
He has a big gig at Glastonbury festival next weekend and I think the set we heard was quite neatly geared to a non-blues-fan audience there. The belted electric blues and dirty jokes will just feel better standing in the sweaty crowd amidst the puffs of hash smoke in the acoustic tent than in the neat Philharmonic amidst Liverpool’s respectable middle-aged middle-class.
Pete
The Taj Mahal Trio & Idrissa Soumaoro @ The Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool 19/06/05
Liverpool’s Philharmonic hall is a temple of pristinely restored art deco in white & gold with meticulous acoustics and formidable classical music credentials. Taj Mahal dedicates a song to ‘all those women with a sweet load behind who know what they’re carrying’. The match of dirty blues and spotless paintwork should have been unlikely but with Taj’s colossal reputation built through world music crossovers his albums doubtlessly sit alongside the Mozart on many a middle-class bookshelf and I seemed alone among the audience in feeling unease with hearing ‘Going up to the country, paint my mailbox blue’ in such formal surroundings. At 23 I seem to be the youngest person here who hasn’t been brought by his parents. I also suspect I’m alone among the male audience in not owning a pair of khaki chinos. I’m certainly in the minority having not worn mine tonight.
Opening act Idrissa Soumaoro seemed less out of place, though perhaps only because I wasn’t equipped to spot the dirty jokes in his lyrics. A Malian desert blues guitarist he felt compelled to offer lengthy explanations of what songs were about in slightly stilted English before singing them in his native tongue. Not that it mattered that his lyrics were incomprehensible to a Liverpool audience as the hypnotic grooves he laid down certainly weren’t. His repetitive pentatonic guitar brought to mind a more polished R. L. Burnside. His percussionist, playing what looked like a small wooden dome with his bare hands, had a sense of time that could have elevated any second rate bar band to the sublime. A lead guitarist and flute player completed his act each firing complex flurries of notes into the mix where gaps in the vocal allowed it.
While the matching white linen uniforms seemed contrived the music certainly wasn’t and although the habit of playing similarly textured songs back to back didn’t quite work in the context of the concert hall it generated the impression of a band more used to playing gigs where keeping people dancing was of key importance.
Taj Mahal entered post-interval to rapturous applause. Playing electric guitar all night, while an acoustic banjo sits disappointingly untouched, he kicked off with three or four up tempo blues standards. Without being able to fault the delivery I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this was stuff I’d seen done in a million bars by a million blues bands and, while Taj looked like he was working hard & seemed to be enjoying himself, it must have been stuff a performer of his calibre could have sleepwalked. By the time Taj sat at the piano for ‘Blues with a Feeling’ and invited us to ‘move your behinds and holler’ I couldn’t really think of anything I was less inclined to do.
Picking up his guitar again and launching into ‘Fishin’ Blues’ it is almost like a switch has been thrown and he suddenly begins to sound like Taj Mahal. What follows is an excellent greatest hits set; though with a couple of the most obvious ones missing. A particularly vocal request to “play Katy” from the front row results in Taj joylessly playing the opening chords with a scowl with the clear message that that’s as much as you’re getting. When he walks on for his encore he greets the yells for ‘Statesboro Blues’ with ‘Lovin’ in my Baby’s Eyes’ the opening (and standout) track from his 1996 record Phantom Blues. It might be a song that he’s been playing for a decade but it’s a choice that sends a message that he won’t be tied to the half-dozen albums he made between his debut in 1967 and the mid-seventies that house his most well known and enduringly popular songs.
Taj provided a consummate performance, threw in plenty of recognisable songs and clearly played to his crowd, and yet I came away feeling faintly disappointed. I had prepared myself for chameleonic changing of styles, or for a set consisting entirely of material from a recent album or collaboration. What I wasn’t expecting was a set of strait-up electric blues with the emphasis on crowd pleasers. Meticulously performed and providing exactly what was expected yet somehow the lacking the spark that might have come from seeing Taj do material that was fresher for him.
He has a big gig at Glastonbury festival next weekend and I think the set we heard was quite neatly geared to a non-blues-fan audience there. The belted electric blues and dirty jokes will just feel better standing in the sweaty crowd amidst the puffs of hash smoke in the acoustic tent than in the neat Philharmonic amidst Liverpool’s respectable middle-aged middle-class.
