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‘The past is immaterial’: Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, reunited after 56 years

At 75 and 80 years old, the much-loved musicians have finally re-formed to pay tribute to their folk-blues heroes. They explain how old records taught them how to play – and how to live

R y Cooder was just 14 when he first saw Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee playing live. “Just their walk to the stage was unbelievably dramatic,” he remembers. The harmonica and guitar-playing folk-blues duo were appearing at a small club in West Hollywood called the Ash Grove. “They came through the audience,” Cooder says, “and Brownie was walking with difficulty, with a built-up shoe, having had polio. And Sonny was hanging on to him, because he was blind. When you are that age everything you encounter – at least for me, in music – is a tremendous revelation. Particularly if you come from Santa Monica – a wasteland of nothingness!”

Three years later Cooder would be on the same stage, playing guitar in a blues band, the Rising Sons, that included Taj Mahal, a young singer and multi-instrumentalist who shared his tastes. They recorded an album that was rejected by the record company, but eventually appeared in 1992, by which time Cooder and Mahal were big stars. Ry had become a session musician for Neil Young, Captain Beefheart and more, then a versatile guitar hero under his own name, exploring a wide range of American and global styles (he would later travel to Havana to play a crucial role in the success of the Buena Vista Social Club), while Mahal had his own successful solo career. Both became cult heroes for re-working the blues, both worked with the Rolling Stones, both have recorded exquisite albums with Malian stars, and have earned eight Grammys between them.

Now, with Cooder aged 75 and Mahal nearly 80, they have recorded their first album together in 56 years – a tribute to Cooder’s early heroes that has the same title, a similar cover, but not quite the same track list, as an album that Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee released in 1952 on which they were joined by Coyal McMahan on maracas and billed as the Folkmasters. His early heroes were an unusual duo. Celebrities on the New York folk scene in the 1940s, when they worked with Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, they went on to appear in Broadway productions and films, and for decades were regulars at blues festivals in the US and UK. They were deservedly successful but never fashionable, being considered too commercial by those blues fans who preferred the “authentic” styles of Skip James or Bukka White, who had been rediscovered and encouraged back on to the stage. “You couldn’t say that Sonny and Brownie were ever popular in the black communities,” says Cooder, “but they figured out: ‘What do white people like? Whatever they like, we’re going to do it.’”

Cooder and Mahal’s album demonstrates Sonny and Brownie’s range. There are folk standards originally learned from Lead Belly and Guthrie – The Midnight Special, Pick a Bale of Cotton, and I Shall Not Be Moved – and then there are blues, ranging from the upbeat Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee (written by McGhee’s brother Stick McGhee) to a slide-guitar-backed Pawn Shop Blues . Cooder sang and played guitar, mandolin and banjo, Mahal sang and played harmonica, guitar and piano, while Cooder’s son Joachim (in whose house the recordings were made) added percussion and bass. Aside from a few overdubs, each song was done in “just one take, with live vocals”, says Cooder.

The album is a celebration: of Sonny and Brownie, of Cooder’s long-awaited reunion with Mahal, and of the era back in the 1950s and early 1960s when young, mostly white Americans were excitedly discovering the blues. During my phone chat with Cooder in California he stresses how this music changed his life. “I couldn’t concentrate because I kept thinking about songs,” he says. “I got in trouble with teachers and all that crap.” Mahal was captivated by this music, too: “I was never about what everybody else liked – I was lucky enough as a young black man to realise the value of these people, these elders.”

Cooder’s fascination with folk and blues began when he was “five or six years old, just a little kid, not even in the first grade”. His mother had been in the Communist party and one of her friends was a violinist who had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era. “He had these records by Lead Belly – the original 78s. I’d go over – they were neighbours – and listen on their record player. And, as you say, the door opened! It was so fascinating and alluring. And the same man gave me a little guitar and said ‘you can learn to do this’ … and that’s how I got started”.

His parents were less understanding. His mother had met Woody Guthrie and complained “he was very dirty, he hadn’t even bathed”, to which the young Cooder replied: “Sure – because he hobo-ed on trains. What do you expect?” His family were “stone broke” and his father, who liked classical music, “used to say ‘these players you like are just poor field hands. They don’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of’. But I never considered that these people were poor – quite the opposite.”

He learned about music at the record store where he bought Sonny and Brownie’s Get On Board. It was “way downtown in Los Angeles, where you could buy these Folkways LPs. Whatever I saw, I would get, if it was New Orleans jazz, blues, hillbilly music – so long as it had that look, with black and white photographs, and text on the cover, I was fascinated by that. It was like a whole education, right there in front of you for $5.98. And I’d say: I’m going to memorise everything on this record, I’m going to learn the tunes and lyrics and try to play along on the guitar”.

Then he would watch his heroes playing at the Ash Grove, “where I would always sit at the counter, maybe eight feet from the stage … for someone like me trying to learn guitar, you want to really pay attention”. When Brownie McGhee was playing, he would ask: “How did that bass run go, how did you do that? And he’d say, ‘well, look here, kid’ and he’d play it. When you get to see these people in person, that’s when you learn something.”

Across the country, in Springfield, Massachusetts, Henry Saint Claire Fredericks, who would become internationally known as Taj Mahal, had first become fascinated by the country blues after hearing the playing of “my nextdoor neighbour who came from Mississippi and was one of my first guitar teachers”. Mahal’s Jamaican father had been a musician, but it wasn’t until he went to Amherst, where he earned a degree in agriculture and animal husbandry, that he became involved in the “coffee house, folk music” scene, and got to hear more country blues. He was aware of Sonny and Brownie’s Get On Board, “but it didn’t come to me the way it came to Ry – it was special for him”, and the first version of The Midnight Special he heard was by Lonnie Donegan. As for Lead Belly, he never heard him until he worked on a dairy farm “and a guy called Pete who was testing the milk said he collected his records”.

Mahal played in different bands, and worked with a guitarist, Jesse Lee Kincaid, who knew Cooder. In 1965, the pair travelled to Los Angeles “specifically to meet Ry Cooder – and with the hope of forming a group with him”. They got on well, Cooder says. “He and I seemed to like exactly the same things, and have the same kind of interest in the old music”. They formed the Rising Sons, a guitar, bass and drums band reworking songs like Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues or Jimmy Reed’s Baby What You Want Me To Do. Mahal remembers: “We were booked by the Martin guitar company to play at a teenage fair, demonstrating electric guitars. Ry played bottleneck and I played harmonica and second guitar. We saw it as great music.” They played at the Ash Grove, acquired a local following, and were signed by Colombia Records. So why was the album not released? “You have to convince these [record label] people, and it’s like convincing a stone obelisk to speak!” says Mahal. Cooder remembers: “The Byrds came out with Mr Tambourine Man, and all of a sudden, everyone was showing up in their Spandex pants and little sunglasses like Jim McGuinn wore.” Singer-songwriters were in fashion, and “me and Taj liked the old songs. But I don’t look back. The past is immaterial”.

Prior to their new album, they had only played together once since the Rising Sons – at a 2014 show in Nashville when Mahal won an Americana Music Award – and they are clearly enjoying their reunion. Asked if Cooder had changed, Mahal says: “Everything about him when I first came to California in 1965 was just amplified by time and accomplishment. There just aren’t people like that. It’s like talking about the Dalai Lama.” Cooder is more down to earth. “Me and Taj are old-timers now. We’re just old cats who want to have a good time together.”

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Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder Concert Setlists & Tour Dates

Taj mahal & ry cooder at great american music hall, san francisco, ca, usa.

• Packing Up Getting Ready To Go
• My Baby Done Changed the Lock on the Door
• Hooray Hooray
• The Midnight Special
• Pawnshop Blues
• Deep Sea Diver
• Old Folks Boogie
• Take This Hammer
• Roscoe's Mule Down in Roscoe's Barn
• Haul That Wood-Pile Down
• Big Legs, Tight Skirt
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Reverend Gary Davis K.C. Douglas Jesse Fuller John Lee Hooker Lightnin' Hopkins, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry & Big Joe Williams Uncle Dave Macon Taj Mahal Blind Willie McTell Slim Green Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee

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Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee . With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo—joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass—they recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee. 

Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: THE SONGS OF SONNY TERRY & BROWNIE MCGHEE , out April 22, 2022, on Nonesuch Records. A video for the track “Hooray Hooray” may be seen below, as well as an interview with Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal about the record.

With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo—joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass—the duo recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee, who they both first heard as teenagers in California.

Explaining where Terry and McGhee took him musically, Cooder says, “Down the road, away from Santa Monica. Where everything was good. ‘I have got to get out of here,’ was all I could think. What do you do, fourteen, eighteen years old? I was trapped. But that first record, Get on Board , the 10” on Folkways, was so wonderful, I could understand the guitar playing.”

Taj Mahal adds, “I started hearing them when I was about nineteen, and I wanted to go to these coffee houses, ‘cause I heard that these old guys were playing. I knew that there was a river out there somewhere that I could get into, and once I got in it, I’d be all right. They brought the whole package for me.”

Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder originally joined forces in 1965, forming The Rising Sons when Cooder was just seventeen. The band was signed to Columbia Records but an album was not released and the group disbanded a year later. The 1960s recording sessions, widely bootlegged, were finally issued officially in 1992. Cooder then played on Taj Mahal’s 1968 self-titled solo debut album. GET ON BOARD is Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder’s first recording together since then.

Harmonica player Sonny Terry and guitarist Brownie McGhee, both originally from the southeastern United States, had active solo careers as well as collaborating with some of the most celebrated musicians of their time. But they were best known for their forty-five-year partnership, which began in 1939 and included mesmerizing live performances around the world and numerous acclaimed recordings.

Their Piedmont blues style became popular during the folk music revival of the 1940s and ’50s, centered in New York City’s flourishing club scene for jazz, boogie-woogie, blues and folk music. Terry and McGhee traveled in the same circles as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, and Josh White, among others in a rich mix of writers, actors and musicians. As a new generation emerging in the 1960’s drew inspiration from folk and blues, Terry and McGhee toured the world as the foremost exponents of the acoustic music of the Piedmont. They were named National Heritage Fellows in 1982 in recognition of their distinctive musical contributions and accomplishments.

“You got the south on steroids, when you got the music of the south, the culture of the south, the beauty of the south, through Brownie and Sonny,” Taj Mahal says. He describes McGhee as a “solid rhythm player. To really play behind the harp like that. He would set stuff up. He wasn’t making many notes. Sonny had all the notes, running around. But Brownie, he laid it down.” Cooder adds: “This thing of squeezing the thumb and first finger and a little bit of the second finger, which I still do. I’d forgotten where it came from. That’s what Brownie did. I saw him do that and said, ‘I think I can do that.’”

Taj Mahal calls Terry “a wizard harmonica player.” Cooder says, “Sonny had incredible rhythm for one thing. Making sounds with his voice and the harmonica so you couldn’t tell quite which was which. He was good at that.”

“We’ve been doing this a while,” Cooder says. “Perhaps we’ve earned the right to bring it back. Taj Mahal concludes. “We’re now the guys that we aspired toward when we were starting out. Here we are now … old timers. What a great opportunity, to really come full circle.”

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Nearly sixty years after they first played together, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, longtime friends and collaborators, reunite with an album of music from two Piedmont blues masters who have inspired them all their lives: GET ON BOARD: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee . With Taj Mahal on vocals, harmonica, guitar, and piano and Cooder on vocals, guitar, mandolin, and banjo—joined by Joachim Cooder on drums and bass—they recorded eleven songs drawn from recordings and live performances by Terry and McGhee. “The music feels intimate and lived in, the sound of two old friends jamming away in a small room," says Rolling Stone . "But because they also want to romp things up, what could have been a tasteful salute becomes a record that’s bristlingly, viscerally alive." Grammy Winner for Best Traditional Blues Album.

Congratulations to all the winners at tonight's Grammy Awards, including Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway, whose debut album, Crooked Tree , won Best Bluegrass Album; Wilco, Best Historical Album (compilation producers Cheryl Pawelski & Jeff Tweedy and mastering engineer Bob Ludwig) and Best Album Notes (Bob Mehr) for the 20th anniversary super deluxe edition of  Yankee Hotel Foxtrot ; Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder, Best Traditional Blues Album for GET ON BOARD: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee , with Joachim Cooder; and Caroline Shaw & Attacca Quartet, Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance for Evergreen .

Congratulations to all of the Nonesuch nominees for the 65th Grammy Awards: Molly Tuttle for Best New Artist and Best Bluegrass Album for Crooked Tree with Golden Highway; The Black Keys for Best Rock Album for Dropout Boogie and Best Rock Performance for "Wild Child"; Dan Auerbach for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical; Cécile McLorin Salvant for Best Jazz Vocal Album for Ghost Song  and Best Arrangement, Instrumental and Vocals for "Optimistic Voices / No Love Dying"; Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, and Brian Blade's LongGone for Best Instrumental Album; Brad Mehldau's Jacob's Ladder for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album; Punch Brothers' Hell on Church Street for Best Folk Album; Caroline Shaw & Attacca Quartet's Evergreen for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance; Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder's GET ON BOARD for Best Traditional Blues Album; Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (20th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition) for Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes for Bob Mehr; and  Astor Piazzolla: The American Clavé Recordings . for Best Album Notes for Fernando González. 

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GET ON BOARD

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How Ry Cooder Stopped Being Other People

By Nick Paumgarten

Ry Cooder—the guitar wizard, songwriter, film-score composer, itinerant scholar and interpreter of soulful sounds from around the world and his own back yard—always disliked being the main dude onstage. “Being the front guy is a hard job,” he said the other day. “I’m still not sure about it. I’d rather be sharing the stage with other people.” And yet here he was in a midtown hotel lobby, the morning after a gig at Town Hall—a week into his first front-guy tour in six years. “Never thought I’d do this again,” he said. “Touring? Out of the question. Just not feasible. We had to start from scratch. I had nothing in place. No machine , like the big acts have, the country guys especially. Me and Joachim already got rid of all the stuff, sold all the cases.”

Joachim is his son, drummer, and right hand, who, along with the rest of the band and the crew, had retreated to Weehawken, New Jersey, for the night. Cooder and his wife, Susan Titelman, had opted for the Algonquin, in hopes of a decent night’s rest.

“I haven’t been sleeping,” he said. He’d had to leave a few balms back home in Santa Monica: his Lorazepam pills, which his doctor had un-prescribed, and a “multitudinous” stomach-soothing brew of seaweed, meat, and vegetables. “The broth didn’t make it on tour,” he said. “We didn’t have room for a broth tech.”

Cooder, who is seventy-one, had his hair in a ponytail, under a black watch cap, and was wearing a black drum-shop sweatshirt, black pants, and rubber sandals over white socks. He spoke with a kind of growling drawl—a grawl, maybe.

One corollary of Cooder’s reticence in performance has been his tendency, in the past dozen-plus years, to make ventriloquistic concept albums in the guise of fictional, historical, or extraterrestrial characters, starting, in 2005, with “ Chavez Ravine ,” a record of songs about the Mexican-American community that was displaced by Dodger Stadium. “It’s like being an actor. Or a novelist,” he said. “Wouldn’t you rather hear the stories of other people as opposed to your own? That seems so claustrophobic to me.”

Recently, though, Joachim, who is thirty-nine, suggested that his father do a straight-up Ry Cooder album like the ones he became known for in the seventies: “Go back to your American roots sound again.”

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Another friend told him, “Stop being other people.”

Once Cooder and his son had recorded the album, “ The Prodigal Son ” (the title track is a reconsideration of a recording from the nineteen-thirties by a quartet called the Heavenly Gospel Singers), the label started booking tour dates.

“I panicked,” Cooder said. The most pressing problem was that he had no one to sing the burly gospel parts that are so essential to his sound. Terry Evans, one of his longtime singers, had died in January; another, Arnold McCuller, was on the road with James Taylor. (Both of them had sung on the album.) “These guys, with that sound of the old gospel quartet—it’s an art form as obscure as scrimshaw, or duck carving. It’s hard to find young people who understand this style and can sing it.” McCuller twigged him to the Hamiltones, a trio in North Carolina. “They come from the real quartet families,” Cooder said. “That is the key to the whole damn thing. You gotta have lineage.” The Hamiltones found space in their schedule, and Cooder had the rudiments of a machine.

The new album, like most of the old ones, has some political overtones, but, before setting out on tour, Joachim advised his father to go light on the patter. “He said, ‘Don’t bear down on the audience like you might’ve done. Keep it simple, don’t talk too long.’ ” For the most part, Cooder had obliged, the night before, although Woody Guthrie’s “Vigilante Man,” a longtime Cooder bottleneck keen, had grown a sharp new verse about Trayvon Martin. One could imagine, or maybe need not, another verse about ICE . The vocal exertions of “Jesus on the Mainline” left Cooder dizzy and depleted. “That one takes all I got,” he said. “Should’ve had an oxygen tank offstage. Take a little hit. Actually, I tried that once, years ago. It doesn’t really work.”

He went on, “Joachim tells me, ‘You don’t have to work so hard.’ He’s concerned. But last night I got with it.”

Cooder’s wife appeared. Time to rejoin “the cats” in Weehawken and catch the bus to Virginia. The tour rolls on. The lobby of the Algonquin began to teem, unaccountably, with elderly Vietnamese in silken ceremonial dress. “Look at that hat!” Cooder said, referring to a woman’s khan dong —a halo of layered blue silk. Curious, Ry and Susie followed her outside, where a throng of Vietnamese-Americans was mustering, to march up the Avenue of the Americas, in the Immigrants Parade. “Holy Moses,” Cooder said. “There’s this Vietnamese folk music called cai luong . It’s the wickedest, funkiest shit in the world. It’s impossible to learn.” ♦

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Taj Mahal (born May 17, 1942) is the stage and recording name of American Grammy Award-winning blues musician Henry Saint Clair Fredericks, hailing from Harlem, New York, U.S.

Strongly influenced by his gospel singing mother and jazz musician and composing father – who Ella Fitzgerald had referred to as “The Genius” – Fredericks was exposed to a genre-spanning collection of music from a young age. Despite being a talented and devoted farmer the bluesman decided to pursue his music career and moved to Santa Monica, California, U.S. and formed the band Rising Sons alongside Ry Cooder and Jessie Lee Kincaid. The band signed with Columbia Records however proved to be commercially unviable so Fredericks went solo. In 1968 Taj Mahal released his eponymous debut album, introducing the musician’s stripped back traditional brand of blues.

It wasn’t long before the album became a classic and paved the way for “Natch’l Blues” also in 1968 and “Giant Step/De Ole Folks at Home” in 1969. With these successes Fredericks was afforded the luxuries of working with some of the most prominent rock and blues artists, including the Rolling Stones. The ’70s represented Mahal experimenting with Caribbean themes and rhythms with “Happy Just to Be Like I Am” in 1971 and the brass-induced double live album “The Real Thing” in 1972.

After moving to Warner Bros. in 1976 and releasing the albums “Music Fuh Ya’” (1976), the soundtrack album “Brothers” (1977), and “Evolution” (1977), Fredericks moved to Hawaii to explore the island's musical tradition. After a ten-year hiatus from recording, the iconic bluesman returned with the album “Taj” in 1987, and a string of acclaimed children’s albums alongside Shake Sugaree followed. After earning a Grammy nomination in 1991 for scoring the play “Mule Bone”, Fredericks returned to his extensive recording and touring schedule on the Private Music label.

Throughout the ‘90s the blues musician covered more musical ground drifting into rock, pop, and R&B with the albums “Like Never Before” in 1991, “Dancing the Blues” in 1993, “Phantom Blues” in 1996, and the Grammy Award-winning “Señor Blues” in 1997. Fredericks subsequently collaborated with classical indian musicians to craft “Mumtaz Mahal” in 1995, and released the Hawaiian themed album “Kulunjan” in 1999. With an all-star list of guest including Ziggy Marley, Jack Johnson and Ben Harper, “Maestro” was issued in 2008, followed by the Christmas album, "Talkin' Christmas" with the Blind Boys of Alabama in 2014.

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Best concert I've seen lately. Great engagement with the audience and awesome energy from the band. Taj played at least 4 instruments and was in great voice. Although confined to a chair for the performance, he connected with the crowd as he shuffled and danced on and off the stage, we loved it! Keb played flawless guitar and was in fine voice as well but acknowledged his affection for Taj during his introduction of the legend. He said "without this man I'd still be playing the Pied Piper in Compton". One of the highlights for me was hearing "She caught the Katy" sung by the master. Electric. Solid set, solid band. If you go, watch for Taj daughters in backup singer roles. Obvious they inherited their father's stage presence as they danced and mugged in the background, not distracting, just part of the show. Special call out to the opener Jontavious Willis. The 21 year old college student from Georgia, praised as the next thing in blues by Taj himself, played an impressive 45 minute set, all alone, sitting in a chair with his guitar. Had the audience in the palm of his hand from the first song. Highlight was him creating a killer blues original from a shout out in the audience. Do yourself a favor, go see TajMo.

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When I was a young boy, my father was really into old blues music. One day when I was still a young child he introduce me to a blues musician called Taj Mahal. I didnt know it then, but as I got older into my teenage years Taj Mahal become one of my favorite musicians and greatly influenced how I approached life.

So it only made sense that I could honor my father and Taj by seeing him live in concert right? My buddy helped me find his tour dates and we split the tickets to go see him. Well the day finally arrived and we got to the House of Blues where he was performing. It wasn't too crowded and the stage was nicely light. He took the stage and began playing songs off his 1991 album Mule Bones.

Seeing him live I discovered he played a wide array of instruments including guitar, banjo, piano and harmonica, and increased my respect for him more. The man is so talented on a guitar, he makes playing it look so effortless and has such a wonderful voice as well. It was definitely a treat to see him live and really understand how talented this man is.

Although blues musician Taj Mahal, real name Henry Saint Clair Fredericks is fast approaching his 75th birthday you cannot deny the energetic manner is which he performs his live show. There is a huge sense of importance when he performs older tracks and he knows how much resonance they hold with the audience gathered here tonight.

Therefore there is a huge sincerity in the way in which Taj delivers the classics such as 'Lovin' in My Baby's Eyes' and 'Queen Bee'. There is also a fantastic sense of fun involved throughout as so much of his music has a fantastically upbeat tempo which you can really tap your feet along to. The audience claps the musicians along intently as they perform aptly bluesy instrumentals during a cover of 'Blues With a Feeling' by Rabon Tarrant. The man himself has such a warm, exciting personality and has a really natural interaction with his fans that only comes with so many years on the circuit. There is no doubt that should his health allow it, he will continue to tour for years to come.

I saw the Taj Mahal Trio at the SF Jazz center this evening. I'd listened to his music for years but this is the first time I have seen him live. Most enjoyable. He played a number of songs he is known for. He played a number of instruments. All quite entertaining and the audience seemed to quite enjoy the performance.

Excellent show, the atmosphere was great!very happy with the seats and the full show! His daughters are extremely talented and fun to watch as well!

Thank you for coming to seattle!

Taj and Keb were Great! The venue was a great little place to see them. The opening act Guy Davis was also good. I am glad I went to this show!

Posters (25)

Past concerts

YouTube Theater

Byron Bay Bluesfest

National Arts Centre - Southam Hall

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Taj Mahal tour dates and tickets 2024-2025 near you

Want to see Taj Mahal in concert? Find information on all of Taj Mahal’s upcoming concerts, tour dates and ticket information for 2024-2025.

Taj Mahal is not due to play near your location currently - but they are scheduled to play 4 concerts across 1 country in 2024-2025. View all concerts.

Next 3 concerts:

• Seattle, WA, US
• Saratoga, CA, US
• Highland, CA, US

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• Asia (3207)
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Touring history

Most played:

• Seattle (55)
• SF Bay Area (53)
• Los Angeles (LA) (45)
• New York (NYC) (40)
• Washington (25)

Appears most with:

• Keb' Mo' (72)
• Taj Mahal Trio (56)
• Bonnie Raitt (35)
• Los Lobos (28)
• The Blind Boys of Alabama (19)

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