Taal Mama: What's in a name?

The words in question are Taal Mama. Anyone want to guess what it means? It is important enough to be the name of a surprisingly popular song written and recorded by my band Gojogo. We titled the song ourselves, though the words are virtually nonsense. Realizing as much as I wrote this very blog, I decided to google "Taal Mama" to see if the words do have meaning, perhaps on a foreign level. Though I found nothing helpful in deciphering the song title, I was stunned to find website after website referencing Taal Mama by Gojogo. It's on Pandora, Yahoo, Itunes, AOL, Amazon, and on and on.

Granted I'm a little behind on internet marketing, but I am now a firm believer that it works! "Works" is not so much the correct description. "Spreads" is more accurate.

The little song Taal Mama spread all the way to Great Britain, where Window Payne Productions decided to feature it in their beautiful new documentary Calabash. It is, in fact, the music for the trailer!



Simplistic is form and melody, Taal Mama lends itself well to imagery. Window Payne productions is not the first to set pictures to this unpretentious little tune.
It was first seen in Thomas Campbell's gorgeous surf documentary Sprout. Gojogo performed the score live to Hedgehog in the Fog, a beloved Russian film by Yuri Norstein. Taal Mama was even used by a couple of local artists for their independent films, including my own cousin Ryan Zaharako.

It's funny to think that this little song that began as a two bar groove scratched on a piece of manuscript in my bedroom one night has reached so far beyond my compact cycle of write-perform-record. My bandmates in Gojogo made it accessible and beautiful, of course, but what made it popular? To me, this is one of those mysteries tangled in human perception and the internet.