Joshua Redman's 2000 album Beyond

Birthday greetings to saxophonist Joshua Redman, who celebrates No. 43 today.

Joshua follows father Dewey Redman in most jazz CD collections, but it wasn’t Dewey’s path which put him there. Nor was it so much his father’s influence, but his mother’s.

Renee Shedroff was a dancer and librarian in California; she and Joshua’s father never married, according to enotes.com. Shedroff raised Joshua — they would see Dewey when a concert tour brought him near, and Joshua would hear him among the sounds of a house filled with music — and she introduced him to the arts.

“His mother . . . was the driving force that nurtured his creativity,” wrote Matt Pierson on the liner notes to Redman’s debut 1993 album.

“Materially, I did not grow up privileged,” Joshua told the crimson.com in a 2011 interview. “My mother and I were on welfare at times when I was growing up. I wanted a sense of stability, and playing jazz wasn’t my first choice economically speaking.”

Medicine might have been. Or law. Just not music. Because of his scholarship, Redman didn’t lack for opportunities. He graduated first from his class in high school and went to Harvard, from where he graduated summa cum laude (he may not be the best saxophone player ever — he’s certainly up there — but he’s pretty surely the smartest).

Redman was accepted into law school at Yale, and according to pbs.org, intended to work in civil rights or social work. Like a lot of college graduates, he took time off before matriculating at Yale Law. Redman intended it to be only a year’s sabbatical; we’re now at 21, and counting. We’re guessing Yale’s not saving a spot for him any more.

“I didn’t grow up with my father around, but I know that he struggled to put food on the table for himself and for his family,” Redman told the crimson.com. “I knew that there were many challenges to becoming a creative musician with integrity.”

Perhaps so, and perhaps the challenges are more than we can appreciate. But we also can guess this much: Redman became a “creative musician with integrity,” because he started as one, more than two decades ago when he decided the world could do with just one less lawyer.

“The reason I am playing music is because there is a part of me that feels that I can’t do anything else or there is a part of me that feels I have to play music,” Redman said in an interview with Fred Jung at jazzweekly.com. “It gives me an inspiration and a fulfillment and a joy that nothing else does. That is why I chose to play it. So it wasn’t a career decision. It wasn’t a rational decision in that sense. It was a decision of the heart and soul.”

Sources: enotes.com, crimson.com, jazzwekly.com, pbs.org, baltimoresun.com

James Carter's 1996 album Conversin' With the Elders

Belated birthday greetings to saxophonist James Carter, who celebrated No. 43 on Tuesday, one year closer to being an elder he once was conversin’ with.

Carter is not to be confused with the 39th U.S. President of the same name (who once hosted a group of jazz musicians at the White House and sang Salt Peanuts with Dizzy Gillespie), but he began playing in the last year of his namesake’s presidency, according to his website jamescarterlive.com. Though Carter the saxophonist was recording little more than a decade later, his career has consistently paid tribute to two things: his jazz predecessors and his hometown of Detroit.

“His playing is neither youthful homage nor cynical commercialism,” wrote Don Palmer on the liner notes to 1994′s Jurassic Classics. “There are hints of Gene Ammons, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Rollins, David Murray, Don Byas, Chu Berry, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, not to mention anonymous players whose solos were scuffed and barbed with the harrowing and cathartic burrs, growls, guffaws and melissmas of deep blues.”

It’s the latter it seems Carter most wants to celebrate. His own list of influences and inspirations is atypical; rather than pile plaudits on artists who are already surrounded by them, Carter has made it a point to cite artists less renowned, whose music, if not obscure, isn’t as well-preserved.

“But the world needs to get hip to its antecedents,” Carter told Howard Mandel on the liner notes to 1995′s The Real Quietstorm, and Carter helped his CD-buyers do just that, artist by artist, song by song, offering by offering off the album.

• “Like You Never Told Me That You Care, which  John Gilmore played on Sun Ra’s Sound Sun Pleasure in the late 50′s. People focus on Ra’s extravagance, but he came up through Fletcher Henderson, same as everybody else.”
• “Don Byas, in terms of antecedents, was playing the Cherokee changes at two and three times tempo prior to Charlie Parker’s Koto . . . Now it’s 20 years since Byas’ death, and I think his obscurity is sad.
• “The Stevedore’s Serenade is a clarinet piece for Barney Bigard from an Ellington compilation.”
• “I took Born To Be Blue from Gene Ammons; he put a thing on it in the organ combo context.”
• “And Jackie McLean recorded Ballad For A Doll on Jackie’s Bag . . .”

Real Quietstorm was one of Carter’s earliest releases, preceded by Jurassic Classics (a collection of standards)  and soon followed by Conversin’ With The Elders (cover above). On the latter, Carter saluted and played with five of his favorite artists — trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, saxophonist/clarinetist Buddy Tate, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Lester Bowie, the World Saxophone Quartet’s Hamiet Bluiett and Detroit saxophonist Larry Smith — and referenced his favorite recordings of all. In little more than half a decade, three of the elders had died.

Carter didn’t stop there, though. The 2003 release Gardenias for Lady Day was in memory of Billie Holiday, the 2000 release Chasin’ the Gypsy was dedicated, while not specifically to Django Reinhardt, according to Carter, but to the Paris  music of the 1930s associated with Reinhardt and bandmate Stephane Grappelli.  ”Although Carter insisted that the record wasn’t an outright tribute,” wrote Nate Chinen for jazztimes.com, “its title, repertoire and instrumentation pointed resolutely in the direction of Django Reinhardt, gypsy guitarist and spiritual leader of the fabled Hot Club of France. Atlantic, which didn’t share Carter’s reservations, emblazoned copies of the album with a sticker playing up the Reinhardt angle.”

 On Carter’s 2004 live album Live At Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, he performed with saxophonists David Murray, another of Carter’s favorites from the WSQ, and Johnny Griffin, who was 73 when the album was recorded in 2001 and died at 80 in 2008.

“I’m not inspired by individual players,” Carter told Palmer on the liner notes to Jurassic Classics. “A lot of players get hung up on someone like Trane. They look at the superficial elements, the finished product, and get the tune down. I feel I need to get to the spirituality of the piece and how he got to the finished product.”

A link below to a cut from the 2008 album Present Tense. According to jazz.com the cut Pour Que Ma Vie Demeure (For That My Life Remains, if our translation is close), is a Reinhardt piece Reinhardt never recorded and “pays unabashed homage to the nonpareil Sidney Bechet.”

Sources: jamescarterlive.com, allaboutjazz.com, jazztimes.com, jazz.com

Young Fats Waller: Rediscovered Early Solos (a compilation)

Remembering Fats Waller, born Thomas Wright Waller, on the anniversary of his death 68 years ago.

Though Waller played thousands of engagements in his too-short career, presumably none was more memorable than one in Illinois in the late 1920s. Waller was the guest of honor at the birthday party for the gangster who had almost everything, according to the independent.co.uk, invited by Al Capone’s men at the point of a gun.

According to the independent’s account, Waller “found himself bullied into a black limousine, heard the driver ordered to East Cicero. Sweat pouring down his body, Fats foresaw a premature end to his career, but on arrival at a fancy saloon, he was merely pushed toward a piano and told to play. He played. Loudest in applause was a beefy man with an unmistakable scar: Al Capone was having a birthday, and he, Fats, was a present . . .”

The party lasted three days, according to the website, which is a lot of encores. And tips. It was a tough crowd, perhaps, but a good time was had by all; we can be sure Waller wasn’t misbehavin’ with that audience.

From the Independent: “By the time the black limousine headed back . . . Fats had acquired several thousand dollars in cash and a decided taste for vintage champagne.”

Fitting since, Waller’s tastes and appetites for life, like baseball’s Babe Ruth of the same era, were reportedly as large as he was. He died in 1943 just months before he was to turn 40; history says his lifestyle contributed to his early passing, which in turn, enhanced his “larger-than-life” reputation.

“Lighting up, lest all our hearts should break,
 His fiftieth cigarette of the day . . .”

 wrote Michael Longley in his poem Elegy For Fats Waller.

“He plays for hours on end and though there be
Oases one part water, two parts gin,
He tumbles past to reign, wise and thirsty . . .”

Like Ruth, Waller yearned to be taken more seriously; the Yankees never made Ruth manager, and it’s largely — no pun intended — after Waller’s death that appreciation for his musical talents outweighed (ibid) his comedic ones. Richard S. Ginell on allmusic.com: “Waller did have so-called serious musical pretensions, longing to follow in George Gershwin’s footsteps and compose concert music (but) it probably was not in the cards anyway due to the racial barriers of the first half of the 20th century. Besides, given the fact that Waller influenced a long line of pianists of and after his time . . . his impact has been truly profound.”

From Orrin Keepnews’ liner notes on the compilation album Young Fats Waller: Rediscovered Early Solos: ”Surely it must be no longer ago than yesterday that he crowded his bulk onto a piano bench and began to cut the inflated lyrics of some insipid pop song down to size with the robust irony of his voice, or to extract every possible ounce of strength and of jazz out of whatever music was at hand.”

sources: wikipedia.org, bittersuiteband.com, independent.co.uk, allmusic.com

Steve Forbert's album Mission of the Crossroad Palms, released in 1995, which would make him at least 40 on this cover, though it's hard to tell

Birthday greetings to Steve Forbert, who celebrates No. 57 today.

Once upon a time, Forbert was anointed “the next Bob Dylan,” if for no other reasons than they both wrote music, played harmonica and came from states that started with Mi. (Minnesota and Mississippi).

Of course, this made them no more similar than William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis because they both wrote books. Forbert’s songs were simpler, peppier and younger; Forbert often wrote about his world, with “a young man’s ear;” Dylan wrote about the world around him with an old man’s eye.

“Being called the next Bob Dylan wasn’t exactly a good thing . . .,” wrote Steve Leggett on allmusic.com, “first because who on earth would want that hung around his neck, and second because his approach and style were nothing much like Dylan in the first place. It was a recipe for perceived failure . . .”

A career letdown for sure. Forbert’s Romeo Tune, on his second album Jackrabbit Slim in 1979, peaked at No. 11, but he never got that high again; of course he wasn’t the next Dylan because there’s no such thing, anymore than there’s a next Ali or Sinatra or da Vinci.

 ”It was just a cliché back then, and it’s nothing I take seriously,” Forbert said in a 2009 interview with NPR (npr.org). “I’m off the hook — I don’t have to be smarter than everybody else and know all the answers like Bob Dylan.”

Many of Forbert’s early songs were coming of age, and having come of age, material wasn’t as prevalent. He’s continued to write and perform, and his work has matured, even if you can’t tell it by looking at him. It’s hard to believe the artist staring back at you from 2009′s The Place And The Time, his most recent album, was then 55.

Or maybe age is in the eye of the beholder. Young and hopeful, Forbert went down to Laurel for love  with “just a touch of madness in my eye” (“I’m glad to be so young talkin’ with my tongue, Glad to be so careless in my way”). He still looks young and hopeful, although even Forbert’s optimism didn’t spare Laurel (“It’s a dirty stinkin’ town yeah”).

(On a personal aside, we once wandered into Laurel, Miss. during the heyday of Forbert’s popularity on an overnight ride to New Orleans. I asked our server at the all-night diner if she knew that Forbert had written a song about her town. When she said no, I figured it best to spare her the details lest she spill the coffee. And though my memories are bleak, I don’t remember Forbert’s description being wrong).

A link to Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast below:

 I got my fingers a-tapping on the hard,
stone steps.
I’m waiting for lightning and the rains to fall.
Young lovers are loafin’ with their sidewalk smiles
And all their rainbow dreams.

sources: allmusic.com, wikipedia.org, npr.org

McCoy Tyner's 1967 album The Real McCoy

Birthday greetings to pianist McCoy Tyner, who celebrates No. 73 today.

Tyner is still best known for his association with John Coltrane, though that was — chronologically — a short part of his career and a long time ago. It’s been 46 years since the two split — Tyner left two years before Coltrane’s death in 1967 — and 51 since Tyner first became a member of Coltrane’s most famous quartet (with bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones).

“(Coltrane) wasn’t dictatorial at all,” Tyner said in an interview with jerryjazzmusician.com. “He didn’t tell you what to do, he left the playing up to you. If he had something specific he wanted out of the melody, he would tell you, and the rest was up to you. So, we had fun!

“It was because it was like that, that we had that sort of freedom, we would surprise ourselves, we would reach certain points together . . . Jazz is a very good moral teacher. You have to respect the other guy who is on stage with you in order to achieve what you are looking for. You have to respect the music and the person that is next to you, that way you can get the best out of the situation.”

You can suggest Tyner’s best came after Coltrane, even if it’s not his best-known, or even best-appreciated by audiences. I can remember seeing Tyner some 30 years ago as the second half of a concert bill with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers; a third or more of the spectators vacated the venue after Blakey was finished.

“McCoy Tyner, so thoroughly identified with the rolling muscularity of Coltrane’s rhythm section, experienced a dry spell after he parted company in 1965,” wrote Gary Giddins on the liner notes to La Leyenda de La Hora (The Legend of the Hour). “. . . Many people wondered how and if he’d be able to sustain a career on his own. Tyner wondered, too, and there was a moment when he contemplated leaving the music scene.”

Fortunately, the moment passed. Like an actor most renowned for a role early in his career, Tyner’s name goes with Coltrane’s, even if he has long since evolved in his art.

“I asked McCoy in what direction he wanted his music to go from this point on,” wrote Nat Hentoff in the liner notes to 1967′s The Real McCoy. ” ‘I don’t think in those terms,’ he said. ‘You see, to me living and music are all the same thing. And I keep finding out more about music as I learn about myself, my environment, about all kinds of different things in life. I play what I live . . . I just want to write and play my instrument as I feel.”

A link to the title track of Tyner’s 1976 album Fly With the Wind below:

Sources: jerryjazzmusician.com, npr.org, wikipedia.org

Tom Waits' 1999 album Mule Variations

Birthday greetings to Tom Waits, who celebrates No. 62 today.

If you’re wondering why Waits recently released his first new album in five years, the answer is on his website: Said Waits: “There’s only one reason why you write new songs: You get sick of the old songs.”

Waits might, even if his audience doesn’t. For that we can be thankful, because a new album means a new round of interviews, and a new round of witticisms. Waits’ website even has a listing of  his best through the years; some, but not all, of those that follow are from there:

• On being inducted into the Hall of Fame: “They say I have no hits and that I’m difficult to work with . . . like it’s a bad thing.” (New York Times)
• On corporate influence in rock and roll: “If Michael Jackson wants to work for Pepsi, why doesn’t he just get himself a suit and an office in their headquarters and be done with it?” (wikipedia)
• On helping his kids with their homework: “The other day I overheard my older kids talking to my younger boy and they were saying, “Don’t ever, don’t ever ask Dad to help you with your homework.’ They said I made up a war once.” (Tomwaits.com)
• On giving up drinking: “I didn’t know what to do with my hands.” (Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross, npr.org, wbur.org)
• On his parents: “My father was an exhaust manifold and my mother was a tree.” (David Letterman interview; Tomwaits.com)

If there was a They Said It for musicians, as there is for sports figures in Sports Illustrated, Waits would be omnipresent.

(That’s before we even delve into his lyrics: “Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, that’s just God when he’s drunk;” or “If I exorcise my devils. Well my angels may leave too.” or “I don’t have a drinking problem ‘cept when I can’t get a drink.”)

If Oscar Wilde’s wit is present in music today, it’s best evoked by Tom Waits, in the voice famously described by critic Daniel Durchholz as sounding “”like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.”

And yet Waits can use that voice to  emote vulnerability, too, or tenderness, as he does in I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You or Little Trip To Heaven (On The Wings Of Your Love).

The New York Times once called Waits the “poet of the outcasts.” Thankfully, there’s a whole lot of outcasts for him to reach.

“I guess I’ve always lived upside down,” Waits told Terry Gross in an interview this fall with NPR’s Fresh Air. “I want things I can’t have. My wife, actually, thinks that I have a syndrome, it’s called reality distortion field. You know, it’s kind of like drugs, only you can’t come back from it, you know. Reality distortion is almost a permanent condition. So I guess to a certain degree, I did that with myself.”

sources: wikipedia.org, Tomwaits.com, npr.org, wbur.org

Birthday greetings to pianist Dave Brubeck, who celebrates No. 91 today.

One of the advantages to growing older is the increased likelihood to have things named for you. Brubeck’s alma mater, the University of the Pacific (College of the Pacific when he matriculated before World War II), named The Brubeck Institute after Brubeck and his wife Iola; it includes the Brubeck Collection (of his music and correspondence) and the Brubeck Festival each spring, which normally features the Brubeck Jazz Quartet.

Irony is, one of the professors there tried to keep Brubeck from graduating not quite 70 years ago because Brubeck couldn’t read music, but only play it, according to Hedrick Smith’s story on pbs.org. 

“The piano teacher in my senior year figured it out in about five minutes.” Brubeck said, according to Smith. “And that piano teacher went right downstairs to the Dean and said, ‘That kid can’t read anything.’ And the Dean called me in and he said, ‘We can’t let you graduate with your class.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’ ”

According to Smith, it wasn’t OK with other teachers, who lobbied to allow Brubeck to graduate. “The ear training teacher went to (the Dean) and said, ‘You’re making a mistake. Brubeck’s one of my best students,’ ” Brubeck said, according to Smith’s account. “And the Dean called me back in and he said, ‘You know, I’ve heard some rather interesting reports on you. If you promise never to teach and embarrass the school, I’ll let you graduate with the class.’ And I said, ‘I promise, I’ll never teach.’ “

Brubeck was 21 years and a day old, still in college, on Pearl Harbor Day. He graduated in 1942, married Iola and joined the army, making it to Europe in the days after D-Day.

“. . . we went to Verdun,” Brubeck told Ken Burns in an interview on pbs.org, “(and) if you (turned) left you’d be in (Omar) Bradley’s Army, if you (turned) right you’d be in (George) Patton’s Army.”

Brubeck turned right and was in Patton’s army; Smith wrote, “Music literally saved Brubeck’s life.”

“. . . a Colonel heard me play (piano) and he said, ‘This guy shouldn’t go to the front. We want to keep him here and form a band.’ ”

Brubeck’s wartime band was called The Wolfpack, and Brubeck told Burns, “It might have been the first integrated unit in World War II, and maybe in the Army . . .”

After the war Brubeck returned home, went to graduate school, met Paul Desmond, made the cover of Time Magazine, took off with Take Five (written by Desmond), and kept most of his promise to the dean. He never embarrassed the college, and he taught only by example.

A link to PBS’ Dave Brubeck IQ test below:

Dave Brubeck trivia

sources: pacific.edu, wikipedia.org, pbs.org

Egberto Gismonti's 1996 album Zigzag on the ECM record label

Birthday greetings to guitarist/pianist/composer Egberto Gismonti, who celebrates No. 64 today. Or in the Portuguese of his native Brazil: ”Parabens.”

Though Gismonti’s parents were Sicilian- and Lebanese-born, and he himself studied in Europe (as well as Brazil), his music is rooted in the multiculturalism of the country of his birth.

“I have a large interest in Brazilian culture, and I have been preoccupied with its development for a long time,” Gismonti said in an interview with Bruce Gilman on brazil-brasil.com. “To the world, Brazil represents a real mixing of races. I’m not talking about living together but about breeding together — Brazilians, Indians, Europeans, Africans. Because of this merging we are closer to the broader picture of life and to a more aesthetic horizon.”

Given that, it’s ironic that one of his most famous and groundbreaking collaborations — with countryman and percussionist Nana Vasconcelos — was accidental. Gismonti planned to do the 1977 album Danca Das Cabecas — Dance of the Heads, if our translation is correct — but, according to shazam.com, Brazil’s military government placed a restrictive tariff ($7,000) on citizens leaving the country. The musicians Gismonti was to record with couldn’t afford to depart.

Already in Europe, where the album was to be recorded for the ECM record label, with the deadline nearing, Gismonti met Vasconcelos, who was living there. “Having to record the album in three days, he decided to have Vasconcelos into it, and asked by (Vasconcelos) to describe the album’s concept, (Gismonti) explained that both of them had a common history, and he proposed Vasconcelos use that album for telling it,” wrote Alvaro Neder on shazam.com. “It was the history of two boys wandering through a dense, humid forest, full of insects and animals, keeping a 180-feet distance from each other.”

The album won several awards, and according to Neder’s review for allmusic.com, “changed both artists’ lives.”

“I had known his music from Brazil before and I really admired him,” Vasconcelos told N. Scott Robinson in a 2000 interview at nscottrobinson.com. “But when we started to play together, it was a big change for his music. Because it was something he had never experienced before. He was used to playing with a quartet . . . When he started to play with me . . . the Afro-Brazilian element was in his music for the first time. Egberto was coming from a schooled concept; he went to the conservatory in Vienna to be a classical musician. I come from the street so I brought those elements to his music. We both realized, how that was so different, but at the same time it was together, because of the way we think.”

Danca Das Cabecas was the first of Gismonti’s many albums for ECM, despite a competing offer — “The main problem,” he told Gilman, “was making a decision between Atlantic’s very substantial contract versus ECM’s very artistic purpose.” Gismonti committed to ECM and the indigenous cultures of Brazil, according to Neder.

“In the heart of the Amazon forest, Alto Xingu, he tried to make contact with the Yawaiapitì tribe, playing his flute for two weeks until head chief Sapaim invited him to his home,” wrote Neder for shazam.com. “They shared no common language other than music and Gismonti spent about a month living and learning with them, upon the condition of spreading the forest people’s values.”

They could have no better advocate. Through the years, Gismonti seems equally comfortable recording with fellow Brazilians Vasconcelos, Nando Carneiro and Zeca Assumpcao, with ECM’s international stars Charlie Haden or Jan Garbarek, or even solo (the favorite here is Gismonti’s work with Garbarek and Haden on ECM’s 1981 release Folk Songs; a link to one of its songs below).

According to ecmrecords.com, Gismonti taught himself to play the guitar at 21; today his son Alexandre, 30, performs and plays with him. Congratulations, indeed.

sources: yahoo.com, bittersuiteband.com, wikipedia.org, shazam.com, brazil-brasil.com, nscott.robinson.com, ecmrecords.com, allmusic.com

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.

sources: bittersuiteband.com, wikipedia.org, jazzfoundation.org, allaboutjazz.com

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 Rock and 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.”

sources: npr.org, answers.com, nitetripper.com, rollingstone.com, rockhall.com