If I’d have been drinking milk, I’d have snorted it through my nose when a Telarc PR rep said she hoped that Recapturing the Banjo would do the trick for Otis Taylor. Taylor is the critically acclaimed trance blues artist who has yet to find his audience, but the only thing scarier than one banjo for much of America is a banjo summit. You can tell people it’s a blues album, but visions of pizza parlors and hillbillies still dance through their heads. I think she was hoping that having the other banjos played by Corey Harris, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Keb’ Mo’, Guy Davis and New Orleans’ Don Vappie would make a difference, and in sense it does. Nothing can affect people’s preconceptions about certain instruments, but in their collective hands, the instrument is played in unexpected ways that make Recapturing the Banjo anything but a Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

 

Taylor has used the blues to explore African American culture, and this album is no different. As the title suggests, Taylor and company reclaim the instrument as one whose African roots predate its Appalachian applications by hundreds of years. In some cases, they draw the line rather directly; on “Bow-Legged Charlie,” Taylor’s melodic pattern is clearly derived from African sources. The familiar clawhammer technique is employed, but these students of the instrument aren’t limited to any one technique, which means that we only occasionally hear the flurry of crisp, trebly notes we’ve come to expect from the banjo.

 

As with any drone-related artist, Taylor’s music is all about tension and release. Repetition builds it so that when something else happens—another part emerges, the drone briefly breaks—interest in the track deepens. In this case, the same logic applies to the song list. Familiar tunes “Hey Joe,” “Walk Right In” and “Little Liza Jane” break up the proceedings, and each contributor gets at least one moment in the spotlight. Vappie sings and plays the sole banjo on “Les Ognons,” a Creole children’s song from Haiti.

 

Otis Taylor’s art has always felt private and austere, and there’s a hint of that in Recapturing the Banjo. Where possible, he sums up the songs in one spare sentence (“A man drinks too much absinthe and goes crazy”). The communal nature of the project, though, mitigates that tendency, making it his warmest album, one that suggests that there’s no need to fear the banjo.