Banjo-strumming Otis Taylor plays different blues style
LOS ANGELES -- In blues circles, Otis Taylor is something of an outsider. The mixed-race musician, whose music plays a prominent role in Michael Mann's new movie, "Public Enemies," has an iconoclastic vision for his music. Put it this way: When was the last time you heard blues played on a banjo?
Taylor's just-released "Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs" - his 10th album - also incorporates jazz, folk, rock, and African rhythms. Music historians may struggle to compartmentalize the Denver-based musician's ouevre, but Taylor calls it "trance blues."
"People say, 'You can't categorize Otis,'" says the 60-year-old, sitting next to the pool of a Los Angeles hotel. "The Blues Foundation says it has no category for me. So, my album's never going to be nominated for blues albums. But it's OK, because I won the Michael Mann award."
The Denver-based musician clearly relishes the prize of exposure. "Ten Million Slaves," a neck-and-neck canter of banjo and electric guitar, is selling well on iTunes due to its placement in the trailers for "Public Enemies," a Johnny Depp biopic about Depression-era gangster John Dillinger.
But, most of all, Taylor is grateful for the experience of working with a director renowned for enhancing visuals with rock songs ever since he created TV's "Miami Vice."
"I never would have picked this one song that he picked for one scene," says Taylor. "I said, 'I guess I just got took to school, because I never would have seen that. I need to pay attention to this and listen and see if I can learn something.'"
Taylor is still a relative novice in the blues world. Just 15 years ago, he was an antiques dealer. His main hobby was coaching a highly-ranked amateur bicycling team. A music career wasn't on Taylor's mind. After all, a previous foray into professional musicianship as a young man failed to yield a viable record deal. By 1977 he knew it was time to quit.
The turning point in resuming a music career was a benefit gig for a local coffee house. Taylor unleashed his voice, a gruff yet soulful instrument whose vociferous phrasing oscillates from ebb to riptide. The rapturous response to the show proved to be the nudge he needed to cut an album.
"My wife said, 'There'll only be one record.' Now there's 10 records," he grins.
The bluesman's gentle sense of humor is initially surprising given that Taylor gives off a terse persona on his album covers. It's not just his formidable bear frame. Most of his face is shrubbed in beard as dense as boxwood. (A Gillette sponsorship is clearly out of the question.) But Taylor's most striking feature are unblinking pale blue eyes that could mesmerize a hypnotist. The title of Taylor's debut album: "Blue-Eyed Monster."
A good review in Playboy magazine for Taylor's third album, "White African," made others sit up and take notice. In truth, Taylor's songs are hard to ignore. Over the course of successive albums he's written songs about the lynching of his great grandfather, the gun-shot murder of his uncle, and his mother's drug bust for selling heroin. "Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs" includes a song in which the "other woman" in a marriage turns out to be the wife's lesbian lover. It's about his mother.
"I want these stories to come out so my kids can never be blackmailed," says Taylor, who is hardly a stereotypical bluesman. He doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, and has been married for over two decades. "I come from a very avant-garde family," he states matter-of-factly.
Taylor's parents were into bebop jazz; Taylor preferred rootsy fare. "My father didn't like folk, country, or blues because that had to do with suppressed blacks," says the songwriter. "He was intelligentsia. He didn't like country people, because they stayed in the South and he got out."
Nevertheless, Taylor gravitated toward the banjo. But when someone noticed Taylor's prowess and encouraged him to go South, Taylor started "freaking out." The South was hardly a hospitable environment for a black man in the 1960s, so Taylor started leaning more toward guitar and harmonica.
"Later, about 15 or 20 years ago, I discovered that banjo came from Africa, but I didn't know that when I was a kid," he says. "Which is really sad, because it probably would have changed my whole perspective."
Warming to his theme, Taylor lays out a detailed history lesson about how whites took over minstrel shows and, with their black face makeovers, employed banjos and watermelons as racially stereotypical props. Such Jim Crow-era performances may explain why African-Americans began to abandon the banjo. The instrument's original heritage was lost.
"Understand one thing about the banjo: Until the '60s, the banjo was still linked with ignorant white country people - Appalachian hillbillies," Taylor says emphatically. "It was like, 'The Beverly Hillbillies.'" (At this point, Taylor starts mimicking the plunking banjo of the show's theme song.)
Taylor's revelation about the black roots of the instrument inspired Taylor to unite blues luminaries such as Guy Davis, Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Keb' Mo' for the 2008 album, "Recapturing the Banjo."
"I was just wanted to show that black people don't play the banjo like white people," explains Taylor. "We really have a distinct style. I wanted it to be modern and old."
The record, which includes "Ten Million Slaves," was met with critical plaudits. But it also put pressure on Taylor to deliver a worthy follow-up.
"After the banjo album, I knew there was going to be a lull if I didn't watch out," says the songwriter. "I thought, 'If Otis Taylor does love songs, that'll get their attention, because I'm so dark.'"
Nevertheless, the songwriter challenged himself to write happy tunes. "Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs boasts a number of romantic songs, some of them featuring tear-stained guitar by British blues star Gary Moore.
But don't go adding the album to your Valentine's Day gift basket just yet. "Dagger By My Side" is about a man who murders his mistress, "I'm Not Mysterious" recounts Taylor's childhood experience of an ill-fated crush on a white girl at age 8, and "Lost My Guitar" is a metaphorical lament about the tragic 1974 car-accident that killed Emma K. Walsh, the young daughter of Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh, in Boulder, Colo. Taylor is friends with the girl's mother.
"Whenever I drive by 9th and Spruce, I always go slow because I knew that her daughter died there," he says. "It's always affected my life, that spot."
So much for the light-hearted album. "It's just my nature," rues Taylor. "I tried my hardest to keep it as light as possible but, every once in a while, I had to dig in that dark (area)."
Easygoing in person, Taylor is hardly an optimist. "You're either fighting to go up, or you're fighting to keep from going down," he says of his career. But, he adds, "When you're unique, and there's only one of you, you're in a better position when things go bad because they can't go replace that. But they can go get 10 more of these Chicago (blues) guys. So, I'm hoping in the long run, I'll be stronger."