[Dixielandjazz] Dr. John, Still Swinging

[Stephen G Barbone]

Those of us who like Dr. John and live in the NYC area still have a  
chance to see him this coming week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,  
with New Orleans guests including the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Last  
week, he honored Louis Armstrong with a tribute performance.


See the last 4 paragraphs for a description of that tribute which  
included a bolero rhythm "It's Tight Like That" featuring Arturo  
Sandoval and Cuban rapper Telmary Diaz. Wish I'd been there for that.


Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband


Still Tripping Far and Wide

NY TIMES -By -Jon Pareles

A skull sat alongside votive candles on the grand piano when Dr. John  
performed on Thursday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, midway  
through a three-week residency titled “Insides Out.” Physical and  
spiritual, earthly and supernatural, a memento mori and a promise of  
transcendence — all were aspects of Dr. John’s music for the night.

The keyboardist Mac Rebennack, 71, invented his Dr. John character in   
the 1960s, when he was already well into a career as a songwriter and  
studio musician, a master of elaborate New Orleans piano and sly R&B.  
Dr. John embodies the history, funk and mysticism of New Orleans past  
and present — a multifarious role that Mr. Rebennack has been  
exploring in three programs at the academy.

Next week’s concerts, “Funky But It’s Nu Awlins,” will be his most  
familiar guise: playing funk and R&B with guests from New Orleans  
including Irma Thomas, Ivan Neville and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.  
But the first two parts of the series were rarer excursions: a tribute  
to Louis Armstrong last week and this week’s three shows (through  
Saturday), which reconvene the band that the guitarist and producer  
Dan Auerbach, of the Black Keys, assembled for Dr. John’s new album,  
“Locked Down” (Nonesuch).

Mr. Auerbach is a shrewd listener. He heard a connection between the  
first Dr. John albums and 1970s Ethiopian funk, with its modal tunes,  
syncopated six-beat rhythms and bottom-heavy horn sections and its air  
of dancing as disaster looms. The songs from “Locked Down,” written by  
Dr. John with the entire band, fuse North Africa, New Orleans and Dr.  
John’s hard-nosed take on the present: “Blind eyes of justice/Deaf  
ears of power/Dumb moves of money/Left us in a desperate hour,” he  
rasped in “Revolution,” which meshed Ethiopian-flavored horns and a  
Motown beat.

The collaboration may have nudged Dr. John toward different territory,  
but it was nothing he couldn’t master. Another bleak new song, “Ice  
Age,” had a stark twin-guitar line and a rhythm kicked around by snare- 
drum off-beats; when Dr. John wasn’t cackling its lyrics, his Farfisa  
organ pecked at and taunted the groove with dissonant little clusters,  
thoroughly funky.

Thursday’s concert interspersed all the songs from “Locked Down” with  
material from the era when Mr. Rebennack was calling himself Dr. John   
the Night Tripper and conjuring a psychedelicized New Orleans. He  
revisited songs like “Mama Roux” and “Black John the Conqueror,” a  
barrelhouse-piano meditation with gospelly choruses delivered by the  
three McCrary Sisters. And the band’s stark new version of “I Walk on  
Guilded Splinters” vividly revealed its boast and threat: “Pride  
begins to fade/And you all feel my malice.”

It was more a concert of groove and atmosphere than melody, except for  
the set-closer: a two-fisted solo version of “Such a Night” that made  
the piano a brass band, a carousel, a cotillion orchestra and a  
burlesque strutter. Transmogrifying pop was Dr. John’s agenda in the  
previous shows, March 29 to 31. For his Louis Armstrong tribute, he  
chose songs from Armstrong’s huge repertory — among them “What a  
Wonderful World,” “You Rascal, You” and “When You’re Smiling” — and  
brought them to his own turf of splashy piano and second-line R&B and  
funk rhythms, joined by a dozen guests.

The Armstrong legacy was represented by trumpeters from New Orleans   
(James Andrews, Wendell Brunious, Kermit Ruffins) and beyond (Roy  
Hargrove, Arturo Sandoval), flaunting varieties of genial  
assertiveness; Mr. Andrews and Mr. Ruffins, in particular, took up the  
Armstrong style of flinty high notes and garrulous melodic variations.

Dr. John’s own voice — casual and scratchy, with wily timing — was  
joined at times by the flamboyantly slurring, swooping vocals of  
Rickie Lee Jones and a singer from Virginia, Rene Marie. The Blind  
Boys of Alabama brought hearty gospel harmonies. The wild card was  
Telmary Diaz, a Cuban-born rapper who was both sultry and speedy  
(alongside the equally fleet Mr. Sandoval, also from Cuba) in a bolero  
version of “Tight Like This.”

With the Armstrong tribute, Dr. John flaunted the ways he has  
absorbed  and personalized (and New Orleans-ized) broad swaths of  
American tradition. And with “Locked Down,” he showed he’s still ready  
to grab more ideas.

“Locked Down” runs through Saturday and “Funky But It’s Nu Awlins”  
April 12 through 14 at the Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn Academy  
of Music, 30 Lafayette Avenue, at Ashland Place, Fort Greene; (718)  
636-4100, bam.org.