“WALK THROUGH THE FIRE FLY THROUGH THE SMOKE…” DR JOHN | 1941-2019
AARON Neville is attempting to describe the vacuum left by the passing of Dr John. In the end, he resorts to the language of the elements. “We’ve lost one of New Orleans’ natural resources,” says Neville, a fellow Crescent City legend. “He’s irreplaceable. He could outplay just about anybody on the piano. He took it to another level, much further than New Orleans. I don’t care where you were from, he was going to hit your soul. It was natural, effortless, like he wasn’t even trying. He drew pictures with his music. You could see it, not just hear it, and you could taste the gumbo! I can’t explain it. Mac was the man – and he’s irreplaceable.”
Rarely has any musician been so inextricably entwined with the sound, the spirit, the indefinable ju-ju of a single city as Mac Rebennack, the ultimate piano man who for 50 years traded as Dr John. When Rebennack played, he was a one-man Mardi Gras: melody and percussion; celebration and danger; the past and present; life and death, all rolled into one. “We won’t see another like him,” says his close friend, the Kent-born, Louisiana-based pianist Jon Cleary. “He was one of the most important piano figures in New Orleans in the past 200 years.”
The records that sealed Rebennack’s reputation were created between 1968 and 1975. First, via the extraordinary series
