Malcolm John Rebennack jnr was born in New Orleans' Third Ward in 1941. Known simply as "Mac" to his friends, he also goes by the rather more spectacular title of "Dr John, the Nite Tripper", a name suitably reeking of voodoo-tinged old New Orleans essence. Widely regarded as one of the finest Crescent City pianists in the rolling style of Prof Longhair, Dr John is now something a roving cultural attache for his home town and one of the finest exponents of its important and varied repertoire.
To say that jazz began in New Orleans is a slight simplification but certainly that city has provided a crucial arena for many different musics to mix and explode. Many of these individual strands still exist, separately and together, and Dr John on any night will take the listener through most of them: marching band, blues, chants, boogie-woogie, the sounds of the great New Orleans r 'n' b groups and the later funky grooves of The Meters. What the good Doctor does is to mix all of the above with much voodoo malarkey, plenty of Creole drawl and, on occasion, some quite extraordinary outfits on loan from The Mardi Gras Indians. If you need to know anything about New Orleans music, Dr John really is the man. And there's even an Irish angle.
"Yeah, the jazz funerals in New Orleans stem from the Irish section which was called the Irish Channel. I've always heard that. It was from Irish wakes, My Uncle Joe told me years ago, how the original words for Didn't He Ramble came from there. It was at an Irish wake in the Irish Channel. Paddy McGinty was laid out in his best Irish flannel. In walked Buddy Bolden with his horn. And Paddy's old lady said, take him out the way he want. Now Buddy Bolden is a black cat who is supposed to have invented jazz!
"And a lot of the melodies that we use like Cabbage Head and Careless Love are all Irish melodies. So I could see real easy the way they would take those melodies and jazz them up a little bit. I learned a lot of them songs from my grandfather, who was Irish, and he knew them from when he worked with the LC Minstrels way back in the game. There has always been a hook-up from way back that I heard about all my life."
Much is made of New Orleans and its reputation as a melting pot. The jazz histories tend to begin there, describing it as a wild and free environment where great music thrived in Congo Square and in the velvety bordellos of Storyville where Jelly Roll Morton played piano and claimed to have invented jazz all by himself. But while New Orleans is undoubtedly a city of many legendary names like Buddy Bolden, Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong, the visitor is often disappointed with the "jazz for tourists" approach and is tempted to wonder was it really as good as the mythology might suggest. For the young Malcolm Rebennack, however, the music of New Orleans was a very real and vibrant thing.
"To me it was great because I was a kid. But a kid's got a distorted look at everything in some kind of way that's cock-eyed anyways. And I think it's a good thing. You know my memories of being a little kid in my little neighbourhood are cool, because first I do remember those jam sessions right at the corner. And then The Mardi Gras Indians was always fascinating me and that's a whole thing of itself. Each thing in New Orleans has deep roots. And we've just got a new Wild Magnolias record out, and it tells about the history of the Indians. Their native American and their African roots which makes them not accepted by anybody but they celebrate that. My father liked them and I liked them. That was something you did and the music was always something special from I was a little kid."
With such variety in the music that swirled around in the atmosphere, Rebennack was lucky in that his interests were given focus by his family circumstances. His parents, his aunts and uncles all played music and his father also ran a record store. When not at his studies at Jesuit High, the young Rebennack raided the shelves to hear the coolest sounds of the time.
"I just listened to what he sold. Basically it was "race records" - rhythm and blues, what later was called rock 'n' roll. There were country and western records too. He basically sold to students at Dillard University which was the oldest black college and he just sold what they bought: early be-bop too, some traditional jazz records, and gospel. So that's basically what I grew up listening to. And boogie-woogie.
"My aunt taught me to play piano when I was a little bitty kid and the first thing I played on it was The Texas Boogie. There was also a piano player who played at a bar at the corner - it wasn't even a club - and now I know something about music. I know that he played everything in F Sharp because it was all black keys on the piano. But that's where my interest lay.
"People got around the piano in the 1940s. That's what they did. That's how they had parties. And then sometimes bands would come and sit in with the piano if it was a good piano player."
As a talented teenager Rebennack eagerly learned guitar from "Papoose" Nelson who played with Dave Bartholomew and Fats Domino. Gathering confidence, he later began hanging around musicians like Professor Longhair and Huey "Piano" Smith and eventually dropped out of school to become a professional musician himself. He began working sessions at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studios, again in the company of top-drawer New Orleans musicians such as Longhair, Paul Gayten, James Booker and Sugarboy Crawford. This colourful period saw Rebennack through the 1950s, as his reputation as a musician and songwriter became firmly established in the city.
"When I came up starting to do sessions it was like a clique of guys in New Orleans. We didn't know about business, we didn't know how to hustle and make money, we just played music because we loved it. It took me to get to California to learn that somebody is supposed to get paid to contract a record. We knew nothing about that. And The New Orleans Musicians' Union didn't know nothing about it, and everybody just came in and did something. Guys like Red Tyler and Earl Palmer. Earl would always say: "Hey guys lets play this a little more funkybutt!" And all of a sudden the record would get funky and then there would be disagreement and then Red Tyler would always sit down at the piano and say well this is what we got to do and everybody did it and we made the record better.
"But there was a respect among the cats, and nobody was the leader or anything. It was just passed around. But nobody had any idea how to do things the way the rest of the world did stuff."
In the 1960s, Rebennack headed for LA and continued his career as a session man, working in studio with all sorts of luminaries, including Phil Spector, Sam Cooke, Sonny and Cher, and Bobby Darin. In 1968 he went out on his own and Dr John, The Nite Tripper emerged mysteriously through clouds of smoke with an album called Gris-Gris, which was rumoured to have been cut secretly on Sonny and Cher's studio time. Babylon appeared the following year and in 1973 he scored a couple of hits with Right Place, Wrong Time and Such a Night, which was performed as part of The Last Waltz, Scorcese's movie of The Band's farewell concert. Back in New Orleans, things weren't what they used to be. The city had in many ways missed the boat in the 1960s and was no longer the power it had been. Other southern cities were now the places with the big musical reputations.
"The recording scene was so good when I was working in New Orleans but it was the union which screwed everything up because they didn't know nothing. When the word `over-dub' came up they closed the studio. And that opened up a great thing for Stax Records in Memphis and other things in Dallas and Atlanta. All these other cities got all the studio work that was going to be coming to New Orleans. `And all these guys would tell us people - like Al Jackson from Booker T and The MGs, his hero was a guy from New Orleans called Charlie Williams. We didn't know nothing about it but he had learned it from Charlie Williams, simplified it and it had become a national thing. That's how music spreads and changes.
"But in New Orleans a whole chunk of the thing had been kinda wiped out. They didn't get hurried until Allen Toussaint put up a studio and The Meters got popular, and whatever acts they backed up, but there was a gap of time when all this stuff was happening in other cities."
Dr John's book, Under a Hoodoo Moon, tells many other stories, musical and otherwise. There was a long period of drug addiction which nearly finished him off, but he survived and he's still here, still dancing and still shaking that slightly spooky carved stick at his audience. The 1990s saw him receive two Grammies: one for a jazzy duet with Rickie Lee Jones and the other for the wonderful Going Back to New Orleans. His latest album, Anutha Zone, sees him playing with Spiritualized and Paul Weller among others - a long way from Buddy Bolden perhaps - but to Dr John, The Nite Tripper, it's all just one big flavoursome gumbo.
"In New Orleans I don't think there's no separation in music. When I was a young teenager and started doing record dates, there were guys telling me to respect all the music. When you're playing on a record and it's a country and western, gospel or whatever you just play that true to that music. And that's basically what we did. "I notice today that more guys tend to do a certain thing. They don't do everything and some guys don't respect some music. A lot of them do, but some look down on certain music and that bothers me because I grew up thinking that music is as good as the people that plays it. I don't care if it's hip-hop or country and western - whatever it is, it's got a thing, and if you play good it's gonna be good. But you can't go on with no attitude. That thing that separates things came out of business, not out of musicians. And music's got to be first. I think music has a healing power; it cuts people loose from their day-today thing. Life's a struggle and music gets you loose from it. The music is my life and if I don't keep that first I'd have some miserable times."