Blues Singer Otis Taylor Releases “Contraband” on Feb. 13th, 2012

BOULDER, Colo. — Otis Taylor isn’t defined by
any single category. A musical alchemist and a true innovator, Taylor
has never been afraid to experiment beyond the blues tradition. He’s a
master craftsman who has created his own signature “trance blues” style
by melding haunting guitar and banjo work, syncopated rhythms and a
combination of gruff vocals, shouts and yells with raw passion.

“When
I sing, I just do what I do, ” Taylor says. “Whatever comes out —
that’s the way I leave it. And if I make a mistake, I leave it in. I
like to keep the emotion.” Otis Taylor’s Contraband is evidence of that.
Set for release February 13, 2012, on Telarc, a division of Concord
Music Group, Taylor’s new album finds the artist on familiar thematic
terrain: love, social injustices, personal demons and war.

The
album takes its title from an article that appeared in the May/June 2011
issue of Preservation Magazine about runaway slaves who during the
American Civil War escaped to the Union lines at Fort Monroe, Va.. Known
as “contraband, ” they lived in camps where conditions were often worse
than life on the plantation.

Otis Taylor’s Contraband isn’t
just speaking to the African American experience, but to the entire
human experience. “I’m not really a protest singer or even a very
political person, ” says Taylor. “I just try to tell an interesting
story and let people interpret it as they wish.”

On Otis
Taylor’s Contraband, the iconoclastic bluesman is reunited with several
longtime collaborators including the supple-toned Ron Miles on cornet;
pedal steel guitarist Chuck Campbell from American Sacred Steel gospel
group the Campbell Brothers; djembe player Fara Tolno, a master drummer
born in Guinea, West Africa; fiddler Anne Harris from Chicago, Ill.; and
the Sheryl Renee Choir. Bass is handled by Taylor’s daughter Cassie and
Todd Edmunds. Rounding out the band are Jon Paul Johnson on guitar,
Brian Juan on organ, and Larry Thompson, former house drummer for
Colorado’s world-renowned Caribou Ranch recording studio.

The
recording took an ominous turn in April 2010 when Taylor became victim
of a serious illness and had to undergo major surgery. “I found out that
I had a cyst connected to my liver and my spine, ” he says. “I’ve
always had a bad back, but the cyst was as big as a softball and it was
pushing on the nerves in my spine. It was a pretty serious thing. So I
went into the studio three days before the operation and recorded seven
acoustic songs . . . just in case. If you listen to parts of the album
carefully, you can tell I was in excruciating pain.”

Otis
Taylor’s Contraband offers 14 compelling originals. “The Devil’s Gonna
Lie, ” a rousing showcase for the entire band, opens the album with
Taylor’s trademark howls and a demonic laugh. As he writes in the liner
notes, “When there is peace, the devil wants war. When there is love,
the devil wants hate.” On “Yell Your Name, ” one of the project’s
original seven acoustic tunes, Taylor sings about a man wants his lover
to come back.

The insistent rhythm of another acoustic love
song, “Look to the Side” spotlights the distinctive sound of Taylor’s
specially made electric banjo. Of the foot-tapping “Romans Had Their
Way, ” he says, “I wrote this song in the ’60s when I was a kid,
listening to groups like the Kinks. This is the only old song on the
album — all the rest are new.”

A stark meditation on race,
“Blind Piano Teacher” tells the story of a young black piano teacher who
lives with an older white man, while a man begs a woman for compassion
on “Banjo Boogie Blues.”

With its swirling guitars and hypnotic
lyrics, “Contraband Blues, ” a song about Civil War slaves who were held
by the Union Army as contraband (or captured property), is the powerful
centerpiece to the album. “During the Civil War, slaves were free, but
not as people, ” Taylor says. “We don’t usually think of people as
contraband, but this is about treating humans as animals.”

The
bleak and haunting “Open These Bars” — the longest song on the album —
refers to the Jim Crow years in the South, when a black man could be
lynched for just looking at a white woman. On “Yellow Car, Yellow Dog, ”
a poor man wishes he had money and could win the love of a woman.
Taylor calls this “one of my more poetic songs.”

“Never Been To
Africa” is the simmering tale of a black soldier who’s fought all over
the world in World War I, but has never seen Africa. There’s desperation
in Taylor’s voice when he sings “Cold sweat running down my leg, I can
feel the gas coming across my face, I know I don’t believe in war, but
I’ll fight anyway.”

On the final track, “I Can See You’re Lying,
” Taylor captures the energy and emotion of romance and relationships
perfectly. “It’s another one of my dark, twisted love songs, ” he says.

By
taking blues music as an art form to a higher level altogether, Otis
Taylor’s Contraband is both subtle and challenging. Another
thought-provoking entry in his canon, Taylor’s eighth Telarc album is
the follow up to Clovis People, Vol. 3, released in May 2010.

“It’s
all a balancing act, ” Taylor says. “A new album has to be different,
but you can’t be too different. It has to be the same, but not exactly
the same. It’s like a riddle.”

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