TAJ MAHAL & FANTASTIC NEGRITO - LIVESTREAM

511 E 36th Street,Charlotte NC 28205

27 March, 2021

Description

TAJ MAHAL & FANTASTIC NEGRITO - LIVESTREAM Live from the UC Theatre stage in Berkeley, CA! Blues / R&B *Purchasing tickets via this link will help raise funds to save Neighborhood Theatre* Utilizing a shared band, expect both separate and collaborative performances on stage! Fantastic Negrito just won the 2021 GRAMMY® for Best Contemporary Blues Album. $25 per screen (Tickets grant you 48-hour access to the stream in case you can’t join Taj live. All ticket sales end when the livestream performance begins.) TAJ MAHALComposer, multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, multi-GRAMMY® winner, multi-Blues Music Award winner, Blues Hall of Fame member and Americana Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement award recipient TAJ MAHAL streaming LIVE to the comforts of your own home from the UC Theatre stage in Berkeley, CA. This will be Taj’s first ever livestream performance! Taj Mahal doesn’t wait for permission. If a sound intrigues him, he sets out to make it. If origins mystify him, he moves to trace them. If rules get in his way, he unapologetically breaks them. To Taj, convention means nothing, but traditions are holy. He has pushed music and culture forward, all while looking lovingly back. “I just want to be able to make the music that I’m hearing come to me––and that’s what I did,” Taj says. The 76-year-old is home in Berkeley, reflecting on six decades of music making. “When I say, ‘I did,’ I’m not coming from the ego. The music comes from somewhere. You’re just the conduit it comes through. You’re there to receive the gift.” Taj is a towering musical figure––a legend who transcended the blues not by leaving them behind, but by revealing their magnificent scope to the world. “The blues is bigger than most people think,” he says. “You could hear Mozart play the blues. It might be more like a lament. It might be more melancholy. But I’m going to tell you: the blues is in there.” If anyone knows where to find the blues, it’s Taj. A brilliant artist with a musicologist’s mind, he has pursued and elevated the roots of beloved sounds with boundless devotion and skill. Then, as he traced origins to the American South, the Caribbean, Africa, and elsewhere, he created entirely new sounds, over and over again. As a result, he’s not only a god to rock-and-roll icons such as Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, but also a hero to ambitious artists toiling in obscurity who are determined to combine sounds that have heretofore been ostracized from one another. No one is as simultaneously traditional and avant-garde. FANTASTIC NEGRITO...is the incarnation of a musician who is reborn after going through a lot of awful shit. In fact, the name Fantastic Negrito represents his third rebirth, literally coming back from death this time. The narrative on this man is as important as the sound, because the narrative is the sound. Songs born from a long hard life channeled through black roots music. Slide guitar, drums, piano. Urgent, desperate, edgy. Fantastic Negrito is the story of a man who struggled to “make it”, who “got it”, who lost it all, and somehow managed to find his way back. These are singular songs by a true musician who writes and produces his own work. His songs are his fuel as he continues on the third comeback of his life, at a time when our world is in upheaval.