Otis Taylor is waiting. The Boulder-based bluesman is waiting for tour plans to fall together in Europe, the continent where he does most of his playing.
“I’m trying to figure out if I’m going to Europe in March,” Taylor said recently. “But I’m still waiting, still negotiating. Right now I have two possible tours, maybe three. Or maybe four, but it depends on what happens. Maybe five. I have different agents in different countries, so it’s weird.”
A lot is in the air for Taylor, who will celebrate his recently released “Contraband” with four shows at Dazzle this weekend. Of course Taylor plays in his native Colorado, the home of his second annual Otis Taylor Trance Blues Festival this November. But a quick glance at his tour schedule speaks volumes about the touring life of this modern bluesman.
Brescia, Italy. Ljubjana, Slovenia. Munich, Germany. Domecko, Poland.
“It’s a different culture over there,” Taylor said. “They go conquer a country, take all their gold and resources, and look at the people and say, ‘Oh, aren’t they interesting.’ It’s part of their culture to explore other cultures. You’ll see kids at blues festivals and performing arts centers. It’s a different mentality.
“They love me here (in the States) too, some of them. You know how it is.”
The idea of conquering and claiming ownership of something has been a theme for Taylor’s last year of creating art. It started in 2011 when he was reading a magazine article about the Civil War and he learned that slaves who escaped and made it to Union lines were considered (and referred to as) contraband. Sure enough, the third and final definition of the word in Merriam-Webster backed up the disturbing revelation.
As a man who is closely connected with and identified by his African-American heritage, Taylor was immediately absorbed with the tale.
“When the slaves escaped, they had to stay in the concentration camps — they were considered contraband,” Taylor said. “Just like them taking silver and gold and wine, they called it contraband, but here they were calling the people contraband.”
And so the same artist who released the titles “When Negroes Walked the Earth,” “White African” and “Recapturing the Banjo” — the last of which reclaimed an instrument for the African-American heritage that first played it — set out to write a song. And “Contraband Blues” followed, along with 13 other tracks on his new album, released earlier this week on his longtime label, Telarc — an unintentional tie to Black History Month.
“If I was Jewish, I might write about the Holocaust,” Taylor said. “I don’t write songs for commercial purposes. Because I can’t. Every time I try, they say, ‘Are you joking?’ I just stopped trying. I can’t seem to do it. And this gives me the leeway to write about whatever I think is interesting. I’ll be on NPR this year if things go right. I wasn’t going for the Black History Month tie, but independent record labels like February or March or April, because then you can prepare for your tour.”
As you can see, Taylor talks straight. No frills or preservatives. And his stories are often as provocative as his “trance blues” music, which does all it can to avoid a single genre-pin or pigeonhole. New songs “The Devil’s Gonna Lie” and “Never Been to Africa” are as subversive as they are straightforward, and while his filed-under-trippy blues are challenging, his songs are also quite listenable.
But Taylor doesn’t consider himself an intense thinker. Just a storyteller.
“They’re dreams or thoughts,” Taylor said of his songs. “I’m not really that deep. I’m just a storyteller. I was deeper when I was 16 hanging out in coffeehouses in the early ’60s. I was more into being a philosophical intellectual. But now I’m shallow — what can I say?”
Taylor, 63, says he’s not deep, though some fans and critics would contest that. What is uncontestable: Taylor’s prolific talent. In the last 10 years, Taylor has released nine records — shattering the typical, every-three-years release schedule often held by artists. But that’s how he works. As he waits to hear about this spring’s European tours, he’s writing, planning, plotting.
“If the football player makes millions of dollars, nobody cares,” said Taylor. “But if a musician makes that money, people say, ‘That’s not art.’ As an artist, I’m trying to live the American dream, too.”
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394, rbaca@denverpost.com or
OTIS TAYLOR. The Boulder bluesman will play four shows at Denver jazz club Dazzle this weekend; 7 and 9 p.m. Saturday, and 6 and 8 p.m. Sunday. 930 Lincoln St. Tickets, $20, are available at .
