Album review: Otis Taylor's 'Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs'
June 22, 2009 | 7:22
pm
Those words aptly define the 61-year-old Boulder, Colo.-based bluesman's musical approach. Gentle upon first listen, blending the austerity of Delta blues with the expansiveness of free jazz, Taylor's ancient-sounding, avant-garde "trance blues" has a dangerous pull.
Love is the subject on Taylor's 11th album, "Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs." Its songs cast the universal emotion as gentle on the surface, with a riptide, and some bubble with quickening desire. Others, like "Dagger by My Side," about a man who kills his mistress, capture far-gone pain, plain and eloquent.
Taylor's fragmented, moaned and groaned lyrics are like prayers inscribed on paper boats carried forward by a river current. His collaborators -- including the guitarist Gary Moore, the pianist Jason Moran, the cornetist Ron Miles and Taylor's daughter Cassie, who plays bass and sometimes murmurs a lead vocal -- modestly state their parts to create a hypnotic whole.
It's a strange and subtle sound, not for those who turn to the blues for nostalgia or a party soundtrack. Fans of Cat Power, the late Chris Whitley or the freak-folk scene will appreciate it. But the eeriness of these songs doesn't diminish their emotional immediacy.
"I'm not mysterious, girl," Taylor sings in one, about an 8-year-old black boy kept from courting his white schoolmate. "Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs" is as simple as that -- and as entangled in the cruelties of history and the heart.
-- Ann Powers
Otis Taylor
"Pentatonic Wars and Love Songs"
Telarc
Three and a half stars