City Park Jazz: Otis Taylor | June 26

With Otis Taylor, it’s best to expect the unexpected. While his music, an amalgamation of roots styles in their rawest form, discusses heavyweight issues like murder, homelessness, tyranny, and injustice, his personal style is lighthearted. “I’m good at dark, but I’m not a particularly unhappy person,” he says. “I’d just like to make enough money to buy a Porsche.”  Whether it’s his unique instrumentation (he fancies banjo and cello), or it’s the sudden sound of a female vocal, or a seemingly upbeat optimistic song takes a turn for the forlorn, what remains consistent is poignant storytelling based in truth and history.

 

Hey Joe Opus/Red Meat, the new album from this visionary roots music songwriter and bandleader, is a psychedelic masterpiece. Blending his uniquely poetic songwriting and the compelling musical approach that he calls “trance blues” — cuts to the core of the human spirit with its mix of vocal and instrumental performances, letting its hypnotic sound as well as Taylor’s lyrics tell its story. He explains that this album is “about decisions and their consequences. It’s about how decisions and the actions that result can change our lives, the lives of our families and the lives of people we don’t even know. Sometimes you win in life; sometimes you lose. You want the outcome of your decisions to be good, but sometimes its bad. And that’s when you don’t eat the meat. The meat eats you.”