Music was Otis Taylor's first love
- so why did he waste 20 years as a salesman?
Richard Williams
Thursday November 10, 2005 The
Guardian
Stranger to convention ...
Otis Taylor
The year is 1964, and the 16-year-old African-American boy is riding to school.
On a unicycle. While playing a five-string banjo. This, from the pages of the
Denver Post, is the first published photograph of Otis Taylor; more than 40
years later, he remains a stranger to convention and something of a phenomenon.
Taylor, who arrives for his first British tour next week, got into the music
business after leaving school, and then, in a state of disenchantment, got out
of it. The next 20 years were spent as an antiques dealer, until he was persuaded
to start playing in public again. Now he is receiving acclaim for music that
seems to reach back into the many strands of American vernacular music and simultaneously
thrust it towards the future.
He calls his music "trance blues", which could be a sidelong reference
to the influence of the late John Lee Hooker, whose harmonically static, open-ended
boogies seemed unusually close to the African roots of the blues while remaining
permanently at the cutting edge of modernity. Equally fundamental to Taylor's
music, however, is his immersion in the banjo-driven Appalachian ballads that
are usually thought of as the white man's counterpart of the blues.
"The banjo was originally an African instrument," Taylor points out
during a telephone conversation from his home in Boulder, Colorado, as he prepares
to leave for the UK. "And it sounds natural to me."
On Below the Fold, Taylor's latest CD, much of the music has the whirling drive
of virtuoso bluegrass, infused with the distinctive tonality and darker undercurrents
of the blues. Drones play a big part in many pieces, provided by a violin or,
in a recent development, a cello section. Mandolin, steel guitar and an occasional
trumpet are heard, along with a second vocal part from one of his daughters.
Sometimes the instruments crowd the frame; at other moments they fall away,
leaving only Taylor's urgent, confiding voice, and perhaps a harmonica. Very
sparingly, a fragment of musique trouvée - a brass-band march or a Native
American chant - will be used to lend an illustrative dimension.
Taylor's lyrics tend towards the minimal and elliptical, but his subject matter
recalls the days when songwriters drew their material from real life, and each
song is introduced in the CD insert with a brief synopsis that recalls the procedure
of Harry Smith, compiler of the celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music.
A song called Changing Rules, from the 2002 album Respect the Dead, is introduced
thus: "A small-town sheriff loses his job because he cannot adjust to the
changes in the modern world." In two brisk sentences, the story of 505
Train, from 2004's Double V, is outlined: "A girl sees her mother being
struck by her father. She knows they will leave and never come back home."
Certain songs explore the realm of autobiography, notably one in which the
singer's father works on a Pullman train, and another in which his mother is
arrested for selling heroin. Others deal with characters from black history,
such as Major Marshall Taylor, an African-American bicycle racing champion in
the early years of the past century. Mostly, however, Taylor's songs are about
small lives eked out in the margins, described via cryptic verbal brushstrokes
that are repeated until they create a pattern as hypnotic as that of the music.
Like many famous blues musicians, he was born in Chicago. Unlike most of them,
however, he left at the age of four, when his family moved to Denver. It was
on his daily journey to and from his black high school that he passed a folklore
centre, where a banjo hung in the window.
"My parents were big jazz buffs," he says. "They listened to
Brubeck and Coltrane. I hung out at the folklore centre and discovered music
from people I'd never heard of - Roscoe Holcomb, Fred MacDowell, Son House,
Dock Boggs. I bought a ukelele first, and I started playing the banjo when I
was 14. It was from a guy in the store that I got the idea of riding a unicycle,
too."
In his teens Taylor had a blues band, but by the end of the 1960s he was playing
solo gigs on banjo and guitar. In 1969 the Blue Horizon record label, famous
for launching the careers of such British blues musicians as Peter Green and
Christine Perfect, signed him up and brought him to England. But Taylor and
the label's producers fell out over their choice of arranger for his debut recording,
and after appearing at London's Roundhouse on a bill topped by Fairport Convention
he returned home.
From the mid-70s to the mid-90s he ran a successful antiques business in Boulder,
where he ran a bicycle racing team as a sideline. It was a friendship with Kenny
Passarelli, a bass player with Joe Walsh, Steve Stills and others, that brought
him back to music; together with a lead guitarist, Eddie Turner, they played
a gig in a local coffee house owned by the man who sponsored his cycling team
and promptly became the Otis Taylor Blues Band.
Their first albums, Blue Eyed Monster and When Negroes Walked the Earth, were
released on an independent label; in 2001 a deal with the NorthernBlues imprint
produced White African, Respect the Dead, Double V, and now Below the Fold.
Critics responded to a music that seemed to have found new ways to say old things,
and a handful of awards were followed by successful visits to France and Germany.
"I used to be told that what I did wasn't cool," he says. "They
said, 'You don't use chord changes and your songs are depressing. People want
chord changes and happy songs.' But that's the way it is. Those Appalachian
songs can be pretty depressing, too. Even Dolly Parton gets depressing sometimes"
The Otis Taylor Blues Band play Jack Beard's, London SW17, on Saturday, then
tour.
Stranger to convention ...
Otis Taylor