Otis Taylor: New Album
By Team JamBase Nov 18, 2011 • 8:56 am PST

ICONOCLASTIC TRANCE BLUESMAN OTIS TAYLOR
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“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.
On 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.
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