Dr. John: How Come My Dogs Don’t Bark (When You Come Around)

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

Nicholas Payton: Fleur de Lis

Birthday greetings to trumpeter Nicholas Payton, who celebrates No. 38 today.

Payton is one of the many musicians from New Orleans; you can follow Payton’s musical lineage back as if it were a family tree. His father Walter, who died last fall, was an accomplished bassist and educator; Nicholas was taught by Ellis Marsalis; Nicholas toured with pianist Marcus Roberts, who played with Wynton Marsalis, who is currently the best-known in the long line of New Orleans trumpet players to which Payton belongs.

(It’s only a coincidence that the coach of New Orleans’ Super Bowl-winning Saints is Sean Payton. Or is it?)

“In New Orleans music, trumpet is king,” Payton told Ashley Kahn on npr.org. “(There’s) something about the sound of the trumpet — its expressiveness, its sort of regal quality.”

The trumpet is not Payton’s only means of expression. He also plays piano, and he blogs on his website about topics ranging from race to music and in between. His blogs on race are provocative — we don’t concur with all of his conclusions — but they frequently stimulate revealing exchanges in the comments sections. If you get involved, you’ll be challenged.

Said Payton in Tony Green’s liner notes to the 1998 album Payton’s Place: “A lot of people have a very limited view of me, of what they see me doing. I don’t want to go against my reputation, as far as what I have established, but I don’t want to be categorized as a traditionalist. I’m still very conscious of my roots, but at the same time, I want to use my foundation as a starting point that will allow me to expand and express myself.”

Listen to the cut below from Payton’s 2008 album Touch of Blue to hear him do just that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdUY4EKuMFU

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

Bill Evans: Waltz for Debby

Bill Evans' 1975 double album Peace Piece and Other Pieces; 2 sides a re-release of 1958's Everybody Digs Bill Evans and 2 previously unreleased sides

Remembering pianist Bill Evans on the day after his death in 1980.

Although much is made of Evans’ relationship with and impact on Miles Davis, and vice versa, they made only two studio albums  together — 1958 Miles and Kind of Blue.  Which is a bit like saying Harper Lee only wrote To Kill A Mockingbird. If you read, you’ve  probably read it. And if you listen to jazz, or music at all, you’ve probably listened to and/or own a copy of  Kind of Blue.

The irony is that Bill Evans — not to be confused with composer/arranger Gil Evans, who also influenced Davis — had already left Davis’ group before Kind of Blue was recorded. But according to Ashley Kahn’s jazztimes.com article on their relationship (link below), Davis made a special request of Evans. Thus the 1959 album that featured Davis and John Coltrane had Evans on piano (and Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums and ”Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax). “I planned that album around the piano playing of Bill Evans,” Davis said in 1989, according to Kahn’s piece.

(According to npr.org, Davis said to Evans, “See what you can do with this;” the result was Evans’ solos on Blue in Green.)

On Rolling Stone’s 2003 list of 500 greatest albums, Kind of Blue was rated 12th; the only surprise is it didn’t rank higher. Said pianist Chick Correa, from Kahn’s book Kind of Blue: The Making of a Miles Davis Masterpiece: “It’s one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it’s another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did.”

Evans and Davis each pursued careers as band leaders; their music diverged. “The further he got from the Miles experience in point of time, the less aggressive his playing became,” said producer Orrin Keepnews, in Conrad Silvert’s liner notes to the album Spring Leaves.

Evans died, after years of drug abuse and hepatitis, at just 51 years old. A friend called it, in Peter Pettinger’s book: Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, “the longest suicide in history.”

A link to Kahn’s fascinating account of race and the Evans-Davis relationship below, and to a live version of Evans’ Waltz for Debby. 

Bill Evans and Miles Davis

sources: wikipedia.org, bittersuiteband.com, jazztimes.com