Blues guitarist Taj Mahal pairs up with Malian kora master Toumani Diabate for an African twist on the blues, in this interview by James Rotondi:

On his first tour of Africa, jazz great Duke Ellington was asked his opinion of African music. The bandleader replied, "I've been making African music for 35 years." The same sentiment is evoked by veteran blues troubadour Taj Mahal today, and it's underscored by the release of Kulanjan, his recent collaboration with West Mali's acclaimed kora ambassador Toumani Diabate and a six-piece Malian ensemble.

"Look, I'm not taking a leap from Chicago blues to Mande music," stresses an animated Taj, chewing vigorously on a Maduro cigar. "I've always been searching for the American music that still has its connection with the African tradition, a tradition that's been unbroken for 71 generations. This album is a real connection with my ancestors. We've been gone from their midst for 500 years, and we've created our own music that has stood the test of time. Now we're relinking with one another. These are relatives coming home."

Since his first trip to Mali in 1979, Taj, born Henry St. Claire Fredericks in Harlem and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, has been convinced that his ancestors were members of Mali's Kouyate tribe, the first family of Mande griots, or storytelling musicians and singers. During the sessions for Kulanjan--at a 1920s clapboard house in Athens, Georgia, in April 1999--Taj's African collaborators dubbed him "Dadi Kouyate." Taj agrees with musicologists who cite West Africa as a spiritual and musical fountainhead of the blues.

"The Mande people are the ones responsible for the way guitars and banjos were played in the United States," he explains, "and they're also the creators of that specific rhythmic style, the lompa-tonka-lompa-tonka groove you hear when someone picks up a blues guitar and starts picking on it. They also have that sad sound, the melancholy, that you hear as much in the blues as in the older African music."

Interview continues here.