Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' on stage with their band at the Santa Fe Opera, both in straw hats with guitars, beneath a lit TajMo sign and orange and blue stage lights.

After the Season: TajMo at the Santa Fe Opera

Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' on stage with their band at the Santa Fe Opera, both in straw hats with guitars, beneath a lit TajMo sign and orange and blue stage lights.
Taj Mahal and Keb' Mo' at the Santa Fe Opera, September 20, 2026.

A sold-out Sunday on the hill, three weeks after the opera season closed.

The Santa Fe Opera closed its 2026 season on August 29. Three weeks later, on Sunday, September 20, the Crosby Theatre filled again for something the summer calendar does not hold. Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ brought the Room on the Porch Tour up the hill at seven o’clock, to a house that had sold every seat. We were both there, and it was a good night.

A concert in that theater is not an opera in that theater. The Crosby is partly open to the weather, which is a considerable thing to ask of an opera house and one of the reasons people drive out to it, and it was built around a form that arrives with a pit, a chorus, and a plot. Hand it to two guitarists and a band in late September and it has to do a different job, with nothing in front of the music and no season around it.

Taj Mahal has been working since the middle 1960s, when he and Ry Cooder and Jesse Lee Kincaid put together the Rising Sons in Los Angeles. He was born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks. Keb’ Mo’ was born Kevin Roosevelt Moore in 1951 and took the name for the self-titled record he made in 1994. The billing calls them two generations of American music masters, which is arithmetic rather than promotion.

They first recorded together as TajMo in 2017, and that album took Best Contemporary Blues Album at the Grammy Awards the following winter. Room on the Porch followed on Concord Records in May of 2025, eight years later, and earned a nomination of its own. The songs are mostly written together, and the tour takes its name from the title track.

The evening was presented by Lensic 360, the extension of the Lensic Performing Arts Center that puts concerts into venues across New Mexico and runs free community programming at home. We have written before about that second half of the work, when the Santa Fe Summer Scene was filling the Plaza for nothing at all. Booking the Opera for the third Sunday in September is the same instinct at a larger scale: take the best house in the county on a night the season has ended, and give the town a reason to drive north.

We went early, to the historic Opera Club, which had been given over to the Vital Spaces Pre-Show Benefit. It sold as an add-on that carried no concert ticket with it, and that is the right way round: the benefit was the thing, not a hospitality tier bolted onto a seat. The billing ran to food from Ranch House, cocktails, live entertainment, gift bags with a limited edition Room on the Porch poster and a tote in them, and a meet and greet with both musicians. We met neither, which we mention only so that nobody reads that list as a boast. Vital Spaces said it meant to turn the Opera Club into “something that feels unmistakably Vital Spaces,” and it did.

Vital Spaces has been working in Santa Fe since 2019 on the least romantic and most pressing problem an artist in this town has, which is where to work. It rents low-cost studios on its Midtown campus and on Cerrillos Road, runs youth programs with the city’s teen centers, gives away art supplies through the Community Art Closet, its own name for the idea, and is renovating a theater adjoining Midtown. Raashan Ahmad is the Executive Director of Vital Spaces and Christopher is a founding board member, so read our warmth here as declared rather than disinterested. Ahmad is also a musician, which makes a roots-music bill a more natural partner than most benefits get.

Santa Fe has always been good at presenting art and has been getting steadily worse at housing the people who make it; an organization founded on affordable studio space is a fairly direct reading of where the pressure sits. So: a sold-out house on a Sunday in September, for two musicians whose whole subject is what gets handed from one hand to the next, in support of an organization whose whole subject is keeping that possible here. A well-made evening, whoever thought of it.

Lensic 360 publishes its concert schedule and its free community programming at lensic360.org; Vital Spaces lists its studios, programs, and events at vitalspaces.org.

Continue exploring

Related Posts