From the BluesWax Ezine, Sept. 3rd, 2009...

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Decoding Otis Taylor

By Stacy Jeffress

"Some people are Blues interpreters. I'm more like a composer."

Otis Taylor is not one to spoon-feed music to his listeners. You have to work at it; your appreciation for his roots-based, jazz-infused, African call-and-response brand of trance Blues is going to come only after some investment of sweat-based equity on your part. He is not about to hand you some twelve-bar, foot-tapping Blues and call it good. And you are largely on your own in deciphering what the minimalist lyrics of his songs mean, but you can be certain that he has a message to deliver.

It follows, then, that Taylor is surely not going to make it easy on an interviewer who admits to being new to, and perhaps a bit wary of, his music, although he did display much good humor, often at his own expense, during our conversation. This is a man who takes great pride in his artistry and cultural contributions but can laugh when his wife Carol teases him for writing what she calls his "huge amount of unfinished songs." Taylor acknowledges that he can be cryptic and that his music is "an acquired taste" defying categorization in the Blues world.

Taylor discussed his latest release, Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs, as well as his music's appearance on the soundtrack of the recently-released feature film Public Enemies.
 

Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: It's a privilege to talk to you. I have to tell you I'm new to your music. I've been listening to the CDs and wanting to learn about your music. Your music is different than what I'm used to. I'm looking forward to getting a chance to ask you about it.

Otis Taylor: Different than what you're used to. What are you used to?

OT: That's a different album.

OT: Trance music is like voodoo music, the congas. That's trance music. Something with no chord changes. Howlin' Wolf did a lot of trance music, R.L. Burnside.

OT: I saw [pianist] Jason Moran once in Germany, but I didn't pick up on him. Then I saw him in West Virginia playing at a concert - I said, "Whoa, I could do something with that," and I did. I just felt it, you know? Like when you talk about the Ludlow Massacre, you've heard that song ["Your Children Sleep Good Tonight"]?

OT: I had Rayna [Gellert] from [Rounder Records folk group] Uncle Earl play with me. I had a vision for it. I just see people I know. "Hey, I could do something with that, you know?" That's a very unique sound; you don't hear that cello-fiddle combination too much.

OT: I met him at a music showcase a long time ago, and I asked him to sit in, and I just kept him in the back of my head, so he's slowly played on more albums and more albums. He said he really wanted to play with Jason, and I said, "Okay, I'll work on it."

OT: Tarus and Nasheet Waits [drums] are in Jason's band called The Bandwagon, so I brought out his whole band. Sometimes we had two bass players in one song.

OT: I met him about four years ago in Brighton; he played on Definition of a Circle, too. I had opened for him at Santa Monica at the end of the night. I did a lot of touring with Gary.

OT: Yes, she does. That's what I was told.

OT: My father did. I used to do a lot of traveling to Santa Fe in the antique business. So she sat under the piano, and she made up that one little line, then I made up the chorus. At that time I wasn't even playing music anymore, I was retired from music, but I kept that song in my head because it was such a good song ["My daddy's gone to Santa Fe/My momma's taking care of me/He's working for the Pullman Company."]

OT: I think so, yeah. I'm not that musically inclined, but she's way better than I am.

OT: Oh yeah. Artists are supposed to push the envelope, you know. I'm a Blues artist, not a Blues musician. Does that make sense?

OT: Some people are Blues interpreters; they interpret the Blues and play like other people. Some people are like composers. I'm more like a composer. Doesn't that make sense?

OT: I think buying antiques and sort of looking for what's going to be ahead of the curve is an art form. I was always buying crazy stuff. It's not the same, but it still is an art form.

OT: Art deco, black photos, bicycles, televisions, art nouveau, paintings, whatever.

OT: Somebody told me about him. I used to go to Utah, and I used to go to Tennessee to buy guitars.

OT: I basically stopped except for playing my piano, my banjo sometimes. I only played in public once for nineteen years.

OT: I did a benefit for somebody. I had a friend who had a bicycle team; he was the sponsor. He was bankrupt, so I helped him out at his new coffeehouse. He had clothing stores and lost them all, so he opened up a coffeehouse, and we played for him.

OT: 1995.

OT: She's a great show, she's very visual. They said we'd be on the big stage, but we were on the side of the big stage. I brought more people because I thought we were going to be on the big stage. She jumps three feet in the air. She does really outrageous things. She needs about five feet by five feet of space, or at least ten by ten feet. She can really break loose.

OT: That's just because people are that smart. They just want to sell records, and I don't care. I make the kind of music that's not really commercial. I just don't care. I'm sure other people can write like that; they just may not be comfortable because they won't sell records. It isn't that they can't do it; they just choose not to do it.

OT: It's a little touchy there; they told me they don't have a category for me. It's really tough. My albums don't get it. I've just lately been nominated for banjo, not for my albums.

OT: That was a long time ago.

OT: That time and now, I think I got two nominations for Truth is Not Fiction [2004] which won Downbeat Blues Album of the Year, Downbeat critics, you know Downbeat magazine? Then I won Downbeat Blues Album of The Year the next year for Double V. Then I was off for a few years. Then I won for Definition of a Circle [2007], and then I won for the banjo album, Recapturing the Banjo [2008]. So in the last 10 years, I've won four Downbeat Blues Album of The Year Awards, but I can't get my albums nominated for the Blues [Music Awards] because they don't feel comfortable with what I'm doing. They tend to categorize me.

OT: Only for banjo, see. I was nominated last year for banjo and the year before that for banjo, but not for my albums.

OT: The critics.

OT: Unfortunately, not commercial. I'm not a crybaby, I'm just saying there's a disconnect. Jay [Sieleman of the Blues Foundation] told me he has no category for me, he's very honest about it. What can you do? It doesn't stop me. I just don't have a category. I'm a man without a country.

OT: Yeah, Michael Mann's a big fan, he gets it.

OT: Yes. There was a movie called The Shooter with Mark Wahlberg, sharpshooter Danny Glover. There was a movie called The Badge with Billy Bob Thornton. I scored a documentary called Purvis of Overtown [about contemporary Miami urban painter Purvis Young, 2006]. They put my music on American Idol, Crossing Jordan.

OT: Hollywood's been very very good to me.

OT: I don't know. What's important is what they can possibly discover. You want to keep everything a surprise, don't you? Maybe for them to hear sounds they've never heard before if they're not familiar with me. It's hard to say what's important. What's important is that I do this interview. That's almost like a legal comment, "Your Honor, what is important? He's dead, is it important that he had a heart attack or is it important that this woman stabbed him fifteen times? He's dead, Your Honor, he's still dead." What's important is what's important to the person who listens to it.

OT: I do that because I never could understand people singing songs. My wife says I write in a very cryptic way.

OT: She says I write this huge amount of unfinished songs. I don't agree with that part, but that's what she thinks. I write conceptually. I just try to get the point across. The words don't matter as much as the point.

OT: It's like a decoder ring.

OT: They'll find my records, and they won't have [the synopsis], and they'll have to get Egyptian cryptology people to figure out what I'm saying.

OT: "And I kindly said move aside, move aside/Sunday morning will return." I thought that was an easy one, actually.

OT: It takes awhile. I wrote that song in 1972. I thought that was one of my easier songs. I mean like "Mama's Got a Friend" and we tell people she's our sister, that's a little cryptic. You have to know what's going on.

OT: Yup.

OT: No. I wouldn't have written it while she was still alive. I'm not that spaced. I just gotta wait for everybody to die so then I can write songs. I write those so my kids won't have any skeletons in their closet where they can be blackmailed.

OT: Yeah, it's better for them.

OT: Yes.

OT: It's a true story.

OT: That was Joe Walsh's daughter. There's a fountain - they gave money to the park to name a fountain in North Boulder, a plaque with her name on it. I knew Stephanie; I was friends with his ex-wife. It's a love song, love for his guitar, love for his daughter. It's about separation, too. You get divorced, your life changes, the sort of things maybe you missed, the relationship with this child. He goes and sits by the grassy bank maybe he will remember. I guess it is a little cryptic.

OT: I like cryptic. But you get the point that somebody's really mourning something, right?

OT: When you think about it more, it must not be a guitar 'cause it's too mournful for a guitar. I'm not trying to get deep here 'cause my wife says I'm not very deep.

OT: I don't put on a sad show, I just write sad albums. There's a difference. People who see me live - I'm not there to depress anybody.

OT: But people don't understand. Ask somebody who sees my concerts, do you think those two songs were sad that I did [at the BMAs]? I don't do sad onstage.

OT: Well you'll see the hambone thing at Monterey. I don't know. You have to find someone who's seen my show with the bands. It's not like that. I'm not trying to make anybody depressed. What can I say? You'll have to go on YouTube and see more of my sets. Get a better perspective. I don't want anybody depressed. I remember getting depressed going to see Midnight Cowboy.

OT: I was depressed for a week.

OT: I was him. When I'm backstage at big fancy shows and the rider, all the food, and fancy Swiss chocolates I get. I put that in my bag, I take it home, that's my food. If I could figure out how to put shrimp in my pocket, I would. I can't get over being a poor kid. I was right with him. I would have done that for sure. Put that raw shrimp in his pocket. That was me. When we go backstage, the band knows I have to go through the back room and decide what I'm gonna take, and they can have what's left. I might go back and put two pounds of chocolate after we've toured Europe. Europeans love to give me chocolate. Drives the kids crazy, it's like trick or treating.

OT: Then that's what you should write about it. There's always something to write about. There's always a story inside of a story.

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