Remembering saxophonist Cecil Payne on the anniversary of his death at age 84 in 2007.
Payne was rarely a band leader, but that hardly meant he was a follower. He was well-known and well-regarded as a sideman for several musicians, perhaps most famously for Brooklyn childhood friend Randy Weston (but also Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and others).
When he was younger, Payne’s parents, according to Wikipedia, had hoped he would pursue a career in medicine, particularly dentistry. Payne pointed out that his name, Dr. Payne, wouldn’t be the best way to build a practice.
Payne brought plenty of joy with his saxophone, and built a surplus of karma when he needed it most. As he aged into his 70s, Payne’s sight faded because of glaucoma, according to jazzfoundation.org, and he grew increasingly reclusive.
Able only to reach the corner 7-11, he subsisted for more than a year on “two cans of Slim-Fast and a package of M&Ms a day,” according to the website.
A representative of the Jazz Foundation of America talked Payne into allowing Meals on Wheels to deliver: “I forgot greens were green,” Payne said, according to the website.
Payne returned to performing before he died of cancer less than a month before his 85th birthday.
”Cecil Payne was one of the truly great human beings on this Earth,” wrote Wendy Oxenhorn of the Jazz Foundation of America. “His positive attitude and his endlessly optimistic nature, no matter how bad things were, always got you a, ‘It is what it is’ and ‘Everything is everything’ and never a complaint or a negative word was uttered from his mouth. The Earth is a little emptier from his passing.”
Birthday greetings to Dr. John, born Malcolm Rebennack, who celebrates No. 71 today.
Rebennack was a guitar player known by his given name until two events in the 1960s altered his course: a gun accident injured a finger and detoured him to the piano, and he changed his name to the identity that would soon make him famous. His namesake was John Montaigne, a 19th-century doctor, whose treatments apparently were more in line with voodoo than the American Medical Association. The first Dr. John was once arrested, according to Tom Aswell’s Louisiana Rocks: The True Genesis of Rockand Roll, for prostitution, with a woman named Pauline Rebennack. The modern-day Dr. John, according to Aswell, thought the surname too much of a coincidence to overlook.
Most casual music lovers know Dr. John for 1973′s Right Place Wrong Time, but he never lost touch with his roots as Malcolm Rebennack, or as a session player (on Rickie Lee Jones’ debut 1979 album, for example, Rebennack — not Dr. John, who was by then famous — is one of six listed keyboards players).
“Doc has been my name all my life, and John is my middle name. I’m proud of all my names — Malcolm John Michael Creaux Rebennack,” Dr. John said in an interview on npr.org. “I’m proud of them names.”
Dr. John once said, in a Rolling Stone interview with Andy Greene, he always liked Johnny Cash because Cash “remembered my real name. Not many people do.”
In the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he’s enshrined as Dr. John, although his bio pays homage to his given name. His 2011 induction was the right place at the right time.
“See, I don’t know nothing about singing,” he told npr. “I never wanted to be a frontman. Frontmen had big egos and was always crazy and aggravating. I just never thought that was a good idea.”
Ideas, Dr. John had, most of them provided by his native New Orleans, and many of them outlandish. But he attracted attention not just for the show, but for the substance of the music, too.
“. . . many are the coats,” wrote Ashley Kahn, in an essay that originally appeared in the program from the 2011 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induiction program, “he’s worn: riff-master, R&B guitarist and boogie-woogie piano professor. Psychedelic voodoo rock shaman and stately New Orleans musical ambassador. Bandleader of top-tier talent and A-list sessionman/producer. Player of downhome blues and singer of uptown jazz standards. ‘Ain’t no difference,’ Dr. John said of himself a few years back. ‘It’s all one sucka in there however you want to break it down . . . ‘ ”
Dr. John was music’s Dr. J long before Julius Erving became basketball’s. He’s still going, of course. Asked by Greene about retirement, Dr. John said: “I think it’s only proper that I play until the last note of a set, then fall over and die. The band won’t have to play an encore and they’ll still get paid for a gig.”
Birthday greetings to folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, who celebrates No. 73 today.
Lightfoot’s birthday falls exactly one week after the 36th anniversary of the event memorialized in one of his most famous songs: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The ship, which for 17 years carried iron ore across the Great Lakes, sank during a storm on Nov. 10, 1975 in the Canadian waters of Lake Superior; all 29 members of its crew perished.
The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Lightfoot read about the disaster in Newsweek magazine, according to multiple accounts, and put the events to words and music. “Of the hundreds of songs he’s written,” wrote Bill DeYoung in 2010 on connectsavannah.com, “Lightfoot is most proud of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which uses the structure of an old Scottish folk tune to tell the true story of a bulk freighter that sank on Lake Superior . . .”
Lightfoot is even more proud of it now than ever. Because in 2010, aided by new evidence, he updated history. The original words to the song included lyrics that, thanks to the inquiry, implied some fault on the part of the crew:
At 7 p.m. a main hatchway caved in, He said, “Fellas, it’s been good to know ya.’ ”
A 2010 History Channel documentary (Dive Detectives) cleared the crew of fault, and Lightfoot changed the lines, in live appearances according to torontosun.com, to:
“At 7 p.m., it grew dark, it was then he said, ‘Fellas it’s been good to know ya.’ ”
“. . . I’ve been in touch with these people for years,” Lightfoot said, acording to the Sun. “The mother and the daughter of two of the deck guys who would have been in charge of that have always cringed every time they’ve heard the line. And they will be very pleased. And they know about it and they’re very happy about it.”
According to the website Lightfoot.ca, the official inquiry had blamed “human error, saying the rear hatches had not been properly closed.” Thanks to the documentary, the wreck is now blamed on more natural causes – its “most likely cause . . . was a rogue wave, a giant wall of water that could have toppled the ship,” according to the website.
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound And a wave broke over the railing And every man knew, as the captain did too, T’was the witch of November come stealin’.
Much of what happened that night is a mystery. The ship sent no radio calls of distress. No bodies were ever found. The legend lives on, as Lightfoot wrote about Superior, for many only from Lightfoot’s haunting account.
They might have split up or they might have capsized; May have broke deep and took water. And all that remains is the faces and the names Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.
In 1995, the ship’s bell was found, and it is displayed at a Michigan museum, according to the website ssefo.com. Each year on Nov. 10, according to the website, the bell is rung 30 times — once for every man who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald, and once for everyone ever lost in wrecks on the Great Lakes.
Does any one know where the love of God goes When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
Music is more than lyrics and notes. There is always a story to hear, play and sing. And I will try and bring you those stories from genres and artists far and wide.
DAVID M.
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