Unquestionably one of the premier bluesmen of our time, Taj Mahal has nevertheless refused to restrict himself to the elemental genre he had already mastered by the time he released his first two albums in 1968, the eponymous debut and The Natch’l Blues. In fact, the arc of his career has proven quite the contrary to any such tunnel vision, for the man born Henry St. Claire Fredericks Jr. has morphed into a musicologist par excellence, his multi-instrumental skills furthering a conscious effort to illustrate the common threads of global musical culture encompassing styles including New Orleans, Caribbean, Hawaiian and, perhaps most naturally, reggae as captured in this performance clip of a song used in the soundtrack for the 1972 Jimmy Cliff film, The Harder They Come.
