Otis Taylor’s Definition Of A Circle

By Jenny Shank, 3-20-07

“Definition of a Circle”
by Otis Taylor
Telarc Records

With his new album, Definition of a Circle, internationally-recognized Boulder musician Otis Taylor continues to stretch the definition of the blues to make a comfortable and flexible home for himself within the genre.  Taylor’s rough-hewn voice is pure blues, but his accompaniment is restless.  There are gospel influences in the bursts of organ and choir on the first track, “Little Betty,” and electric guitar licks throughout the album that edge the sound toward rock.  There’s jazz trumpeting, R&B grooves, and even some freewheeling instrumental interludes that jam band fans should enjoy.

Taylor often employs the traditional lyric repetition of the blues, but his careful phrasing releases this technique from monotony, as in the track “Looking Over Your Fence.” The liner notes coyly describe the plot of the song in this way: “A neighbor threatens to take a man’s wife and land,” but the lyrics seem to point elsewhere: “Now I’m looking cross the fence/ When the oil starts pumping/ And my pockets dry/ I’ll be looking cross the fence.” The song ends with Taylor’s chilling refrain, “Maybe we’ll go to war,” iterated with a slightly different nuance each time he sings it.

In “They Wore Blue,” Taylor’s bass-playing daughter Cassie repeats the mournful refrain, “Oh Katrina,” while her father muses about the disaster in aggrieved sentence fragments: “What would you do?” “Would you feed them?” “Oh the water.” Just when the song seems to be shaping up as a downbeat elegy for the flood victims, it shifts at the four-minute mark, and segues into an extended organ and guitar jam that leaves the downtrodden beginning of the song behind in favor of energy and hope.

On the lovely “Few Feet Away,” which the notes describe as “A lullaby from a father to his bi-racial child,” Taylor sings, “If the sky fell down/ and the moon went out/ I’d just be a few feet away from you,” over a delicate banjo and mandolin melody accented with Ron Miles’ cornet playing.

Even when Taylor’s title and liner notes suggest a song is going to be politically heavy handed, his impeccable skill as a musician and storyteller render it into subtle art.
This is the case with “Mexican Cowboy,” which the notes describe in this way: “A confiscated green card forces a cowboy to go back home to Mexico.” But the song isn’t a polemic at all.  Taylor brings to life a character mourning the love he must leave behind, singing in the first person, “Well I’ve been drunk for just about a week,” his voice so ragged that you believe him.

In his restrained evocation of current national and international woes, Taylor brilliantly makes the case that there has never been a more appropriate time for the blues than the present day.  Taylor’s blues music is vital, engaged, and always surprising. He has been especially prolific of late, releasing seven albums over the past eight years, but as Definition of a Circle demonstrates, this outpouring hasn’t diluted his potency.