Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder have a history going back nearly 60 years, which officially makes Get On Board a long-awaited reunion – and something to cherish. With the profound contributions and pedigrees of Mahal and Cooder, we expect brilliance, and the album more than meets those expectations.
In the mid-1960s, when Ry Cooder was just a teenager and Taj Mahal too was still getting started in the business, the two fronted a band in Los Angeles called the Rising Sons. It was a match that, with 20-20 hindsight, would appear to have been made in heaven. Both musicians shared a penchant for drilling into musical veins throughout the world and would go on to successful solo careers. The Rising Sons band, however, was a failure, releasing only one single before breaking up in 1966. (The band would be rediscovered, however, with the 1992 release of archival tracks on Rising Sons Featuring Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, and would even be the launching pad for a book, The Unbroken Circle, by Fred Metting, which focuses on their parallel careers.)
Mahal and Cooder then went their separate ways, with Mahal gaining notoriety with a self-titled album and then The Natch’l Blues in 1968 and many releases thereafter. Mahal, who was born as Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr. in New York, had a foray into Hollywood in 1972, doing the soundtrack to the movie Sounder, and started exploring backwaters of American roots and world music, paving the way for Cooder and other musical adventurers that would come to include the likes of Corey Harris, Guy Davis, Eric Bibb and Luther Dickinson. More recently, he collaborated with Keb’ Mo’ to record TajMo in 2017, which has become one of my own favorites. Mahal, who turns 80 this month, has been nominated for ten Grammy Awards and won three.
Cooder, meanwhile, was a successful studio musician in the 1970s for the likes of the Rolling Stones (Sticky Fingers and Let It Bleed) and Little Feat (he played the lead guitar on the original version of “Willin’”); and released a series of excellent solo projects (check out Boomer’s Story, Into the Purple Valley or Paradise and Lunch).
Around 1980 Cooder was also discovered by Hollywood, doing the sound tracks for numerous movies. In the 1990s he was a member of “supergroup” Little Village (with John Hiatt, Jim Keltner and Nick Lowe) and began making his own forays into international music, first collaborating with Indian guitarist V.M. Bhatt on A Meeting by the River and then with Malian Ali Farka Toure on Talking Timbuktu. In the late 1990s, he traveled to Cuba, where he found a group of great musicians who had little exposure outside their homeland and recorded together with them as Buena Vista Social Club. Then in the 2000s, Cooder’s work started taking on a populist political bent. Chavez Ravine in 2005 told the story of the thriving barrio that was condemned to build Dodger Stadium. 2011’s Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down opened with Cooder’s musical diatribe about the financial crisis – “No Banker Left Behind” – and 2012’s Election Special made his allegiances clear. The Prodigal Son in 2018 followed in a similar vein. Six Cooder projects have won Grammy Awards.
Unlike Mahal’s slick collaboration with Keb’ Mo’ recently, Get On Board, has a lo-fi, primitive feel throughout, with casual percussion from Cooder’s son Joachim. From the crusty opening number, “My Baby Done Change the Lock on the Door,” the album has a loose vibe appropriate for a collection of Sonny and Brownie (somewhat rowdier than Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi’s fine homage to the same legends in 2017, Sonny and Brownie’s Last Train). All the songs on Get On Board are excellent; other highlights include Mahal and Cooder’s take on the familiar Creedence Clearwater Revival hit “Midnight Special,” the simple “Pick a Bail of Cotton,” “Hooray Hooray” and “Pawn Shop Blues.”
About the author: Bill Wilcox is a roots music enthusiast recently relocated from the Washington, DC area to Philadelphia, PA and back again.