Taylor is leaving his mark on the blues

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Taylor is leaving his mark on the blues
February 2, 2011
By KEITH LORIA
The Stamford Times

Listening to the unique blues styling of Otis Taylor, you might think that the multi-instrumentalist was always thinking about a career in music. However, the 62-year-old had other dreams growing up.

"I wanted to be a circus clown," Taylor says. "I have been performing since I was in second grade and I would sing and act crazy. I rode a unicycle when I was little, would sumo wrestle with my friends and was always on the edge of strange things."

In his teens, he mastered the banjo and harmonica and later turned to guitar to start playing what he called "rebellious music."

"My father was a big jazz fan and he worked for the (railroad) Pullman Company," Taylor says. "I started listening to Mississippi John Hurt and country blues, which was like me rebelling against him."

Brown used his musical skills to front the Butterscotch Fire Department Blues Band and the Otis Taylor Blues Band, before joining T&O Short Line with legendary Deep Purple singer/guitarist Tommy Bolin.

Still, music wasn't his only passion. He opened up an antique business in Colorado and managed a professional bicycling team. All the time he kept writing and playing, and eventually the music took over for the most part.

Over the past three decades, Taylor has turned out 10 critically acclaimed blues albums, although his music is not always a perfect fit for the genre.

"The blues world doesn't call me a blues musician, I call myself one. The Grammys think I'm contemporary. The Blues Foundation tells me they don't have a category or me. It's as if I'm planning a revolution," he says. "If Miles Davis played Flamenco, what would you call it? Jazz. So, when I play I call it the blues. I am the artist, so I should be allowed to call it whatever I want. It's a political thing I fight through all the time."

His latest release, "On Clovis People, Vol. 3" offers a musical journey of the past, with songs he wrote drawing on ancient civilizations from over 10,000 years ago. Taylor says he's drawn to stories from another time, and he's compelled to retell them in a way that's relevant in the modern day.

"I went back to my musical past with these songs," Taylor says. "That's why I called it Volume 3. There really is no Volume 1 or 2. There's something about reaching back to an earlier time and revisiting the stories of the past from a new perspective that I find compelling."

On Friday, Feb. 4, Taylor will be heading to Stage One to offer Connecticut a chance to judge for themselves if he belongs in the blues world. Joining him on stage will be Irish blues-rock guitarist Gary Moore, pedal steel guitarist Chuck Campbell and cornetist Ron Miles and his daughter Cassie Taylor on bass.

"I have some great musicians coming with me and we're going to give you something you haven't heard before," Taylor says. "I come from the whole James Brown school that 'you need to entertain people if they spend money,' so if you feel like hearing something different and having a good time, come on down."

Taylor has seen a shift in his audiences of late. Helped by the placement on the soundtrack of the Johnny Depp/Christian Bale movie "Public Enemies," his song "10 Million slaves" has attracted more than two million hits on Youtube.

"Young kids come to me with covers of my song all the time and come see me in concert because of the movie," he says. "The more that they discover me, the better it is. You have to make music that accessible to kids."

To that end, Taylor spearheads a Blues in the Schools program called "Writing the Blues." Throughout the year, Taylor appears at elementary schools and universities around the country to offer advice, enlighten, and mentor students about the blues.

"It was my wife's idea. As I get older, I may try to do it more and get more involved in education," Taylor says. "I start by asking them to write down what makes them sad; fears, disappointments, losses, whatever. It is just amazing to see some of these nuggets, these incredible thoughts. They are often simple sentences but so real, so sad, so true, so pure."

Looking ahead, Taylor plans to continue playing music, but says he makes sure to keep his life well balanced.

"I'm living a good life," he says. "I have an antique business, a great family and I have been very fortunate. I hope people come see me and enjoy the show and tell their friends."