Otis Taylor has been called the Malcolm X of the blues, a visionary and the most relevant blues artist of our time. By hook or by crook, Otis has single-handedly raised the bar as he has never skirted around controversial themes and has always spoken his mind. Since his major label debut, When Negroes Walked The Earth, Taylor has been critically acclaimed while raising eyebrows at the same time. Whether it is race relations, bigotry or poverty, Otis Taylor speaks to the issues that few are bold enough to tackle.
Born in Chicago in 1948, Otis Taylor was introduced to jazz at a very young age and it wasn't until the Taylors' relocated to Denver that he was drawn to the blues, "Between my 50- year-old cousin, Matthew Yarber, and The Denver Folklore Center, I got turned onto the blues," said Taylor. In fact it was at the Folklore Center where he first saw Mississippi John Hurt - whose influence can be heard in Otis's music to this day.
After mastering banjo and harmonica, Taylor was ready to make some noise of his own, "Yeah, the Butterscotch Fire Department Blues Band was my first group. We were 16 and got together for one gig in 1965, the Mr. Colorado Body Building Pageant.. We played blues rock songs, all covers, nothing original or political. I didn't have a political message when I was 16. My message was about getting a girlfriend, like every other healthy teenage boy. But I did march in some civil rights marches in Denver in the 60s. There were girls there too!" Otis laughed.
After a record deal with England's Blue Horizon went south, Otis attempted to scrape out a living playing gigs, but by 1976 he turned his back on the music industry, "I quit because I wasn't happy, and when I'm doing things that make me unhappy I stop." Nearly twenty years would pass before he would return. "It was an accident getting back into it. I played a gig for my friend Buck who was sponsoring a bicycle team. After that, I just sort of liked it and kept on going."
Since his return, Otis has been a welcome guest in the states but is especially embraced by European audiences, "I just returned. We played in Paris, Avignon and Strasbourg in France; Bonn, Roth, Berlin, and Hamburg Germany, and in Schaffhausen Switzerland. We were there March 23 to April 3. It was an interesting trip. We got in a car accident, then 6 hours later got stuck on the highway for three hours because of a chemical spill. One night the fire alarm in the hotel went off three times. I did a lot of interviews in Europe - one was for the German Rolling Stone - and played on National French radio and shopped in East Berlin, so it wasn't all bad!" said Otis.
Taylor plays uncomplicated and straight-forward blues, which is reminiscent of the late John Lee Hooker, but adds a little country twang for a unique spin. His first recording, Blue-Eye Monster, sent a shockwave into the blues community as the earthy roots overtone was underscored by disturbing subject matter, "I admire people who go out to feed hungry people, or go out and sacrifice their lives, like firemen and the people who put their asses on the line for civil rights and got killed. I don't write from inspiration, the songs come to me subconsciously. Whatever comes, comes. The best songs, I use. Money inspires me," he laughs.
Not only does Otis pen songs of social injustice, but he takes his message to African American youth with his own program called Writing The Blues, "Rather than putting the emphasis on the historical and technical, I put the emphasis on the emotional. So I have them write something sad, and then they know that everyone knows what the blues is. I do cover the background about slavery and the migration of the southern blacks to Chicago. And I tell them that anyone can write a song," explains Otis.
In 2003 Otis Taylor put out his most ambitious recording to date, Truth Is Not Fiction. The Handy Nominated album was filled with haunting electronic textures which gave it a trip-hop ambience of a Tricky project, "I wasn't really listening to anybody else, just trying to do something different," said Taylor. This year Otis returns with Double V - his second record for Telarc - and the reviews have been extremely positive. Double V is a return to Taylor's signature style of country blues with passionate narratives and rudimental chord progressions, which The New Yorker calls intense and rewarding.
Otis Taylor may have taken a 20 year break, but his return was a wake up call to the blues community. His music transcends time, space, race, and age with a message which may be hard to swallow - everything is not OK, but there is hope.
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