artist info

To date, Otis Taylor has received 16 Blues Music Award (BMA) nominations. Taylor is also nominated regularly as an instrumentalist for his banjo playing, and won a BMA for his original style in 2009, following the release of Recapturing the Banjo. His albums Double V, Definition of a Circle and Recapturing the Banjo all won DownBeat’s “Best Blues” CD award. He also took the magazine’s Critic’s Choice Award for “Best Blues” Album for 2003’s Truth Is Not Fiction. In 2000, he was awarded a fellowship from the Sundance Institute’s Composers’ Lab, and Taylor has been nominated two times for the prestigious Académie Charles Cros award in France, winning the Grand Prix du Disc for Blues in 2012. Five years ago, Contraband — his 12th album — took the DownBeat Critics’ Choice award again for “Blues Album of the Year.” His 2015 album, Hey Joe Opus/Red Meat, is on display in the new Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture.

Fantasizing About Being Black, Taylor's latest release, is a raw and haunting multi-instrumental blend that reveals the connection of history to modern day events. With Otis Taylor, it's best to expect the unexpected. An amalgamation of roots styles in their rawest form, his music discusses heavyweight issues like murder, homelessness, tyranny, and injustice, even while his personal style is lighthearted.

Following his 2015 psychedelic masterpiece Hey Joe Opus/Red Meat, the new album from visionary roots music songwriter and bandleader Otis Taylor, Fantasizing About Being Black, is a stark and poetic lesson on the historical trauma of the African American experience, from the voyages of slave ships to the Mississippi Delta. Taylor simultaneously travels back in time while moving forward as a musical artist.