I’m sat abaft a fast-moving vessel, the good ship funk, surrounded by my merry men, a team of Absolute Monsters and we’re heading at great speed into an uncertain future. Well, I say uncertain, but that depends on whether our flight to Baltimore is any further delayed. Paz, a six-foot-two Indian, has been shepherding us through this Odyssey since we set…

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As I sit here, bleary-eyed, at Professor-Longhair-International-Airport lounge, eating grits for breakfast, it seems only appropriate that the good Professor’s silvery tones should be gracing our collective ear bits via the not-quite-loud-enough sound system playing in the background. I’ve often found it to be the case that sound systems are never loud enough when playing the music you like, and that they’re always too loud when it’s music you can’t stand.

I’d locked the front door behind me a couple of hours earlier and was stood in the dark at five-thirty, to the right of the clump of banana trees, under the street lamp, waiting in the early calming quiet of a new morning for the taxi that was to take me to the airport. The Uber driver nodded and, barely awake, I managed a half-hearted smile/grimace and even muttered an affable greeting as I stumbled aboard, bags safely stowed. No sooner had we turned the corner onto St. Claude Avenue than the radio came on and the volume went up and, pinned to my seat, I was subjected to a form of high-decibel lug-hole-drilling rap torture that didn’t stop until we arrived at the drop-off terminal, under the sign that said ‘United’.

Grits and Professor Longhair are good, both of them. When combined, they make for an efficient tool with which to go about the task of re-paving a sleep-deprived constitution; sturdy stuff with which to steady oneself in preparation for the long day of travel ahead. Today’s my birthday and I’m spending it in airports.

The Gods long ago determined that it was my fate to spend every birthday at airports; going through security, standing in long queues, contending with delays, hooking heavy suitcases, toting the weighteous bag of many things, etc. That’s fine, I’m not complaining, I’m used to it, I practically live in airports anyway, and the airport staff almost feel like family. In fact, I must confess to feeling a little disconsolate when arriving on the big day, that they’ve forgotten once again to hang up the bunting with all the balloons and ribbons at concourse C. Surely they must know by now!

There have been so many airport birthdays at this point in my life that they fade, like much else, in the memory. They’re all a bit of a general departure lounge blur. Some stand out I suppose. I remember the fiftieth, the bi-centennial, the big one. Many people I know have special commemorative celebrations when they turn 50. They have surprise parties and go to fancy restaurants, have candle-lit dinners in exotic island getaways. I celebrated that particular anniversary taking two uncomfortable long-haul flights followed by being detained for several hours in an interrogation room at Toronto Airport. The immigration officer seemed unimpressed that I was in danger of missing my connection to play at a Jazz Festival with Dr John and demanded that I produce evidence of a work permit. The good Doctor’s new tour manager, an idiot, from Cleveland, had failed spectacularly. His only qualification for the job was that he was a childhood friend of the Trombonist (suffice to say, I narrowly made it and the gig was good).

Today’s birthday, so far at least, has been going much better, apart from the bit where I had to get up at 5.00 am for the red-eye to New York. But ‘She who must obeyed at all times’ has booked me a first-class seat, bless her, which has more than made up for that gross indignity. I’m currently feeling very special in row three. In fact, I’m enjoying so much extra leg-room that I bitterly regret not having an extra leg so as to take full advantage.

Also, as a first class passenger I’m getting extra attention from the Steward. He just asked me if I wanted a Pank ache? I wasn’t sure if this was a veiled threat; had I done something wrong? Had I unwittingly transgressed an unwritten rule. Is he about give me a swift kick in the Pank? Not being a regular traveler in first class, I’m not completely au fait with how these things are done. I don’t want any kind of ache, especially not on my birthday. I don’t want a headache, a tooth-ache, an ear ache or an ache of the Pank. What is a Pank, anyway? The lady in the seat next to me eagerly requested two Pank aches, but was given a plate of breakfast food instead, weird.

I closed my eyes, fell asleep immediately and was woken by the Steward to ask if I wanted to remain undisturbed. I thanked him and, unable to go back to the land of nod, have decided instead to stay awake until we arrive in the land of Newark and peck at a laptop keyboard.

More to follow….

…

…Well, several hours later and the adventure continues. After long consideration I decided against continuing by Camel, Aquaplane or Hovercraft and opted instead for an Avis car rental. So far so good. I fear the natives of Mahwah and ‘Parsipanny Rd Lk. Parsipanny’ might not look too kindly on foreign travelers in this strange land so I have decided to just plough on ahead until we make camp at nightfall in a place called the ‘Full Moon Resort’, Woodstock. There’s a cunning plan afoot to reconnoitre there with Charlie Musselwhite, Bobby Rush, Eric Gales, Luther Dickinson and Ruthie Foster for for a secret three-day operation that’s been dubbed: Music Masters Collective Band Camp.

In preparation, and with a few minutes to spare this morning between waking, rubbing my eyes and the kettle boiling, I sat at the piano and knocked out a quick red-eye boogie on the old spinet piano, for you all, dear Substackians.

Stay tuned, this is day one of a six-week tour. Plenty more to follow. Click below to listen to “Red-Eye Boogie”.

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It’s not without a degree of curiosity, and even some slight alarm, that I learn today that I’m ‘emerging’.

Just to set the record straight, the last thing you want to do in New Orleans right now - if you have an air-conditioning unit that works - is to ‘emerge’. It’s too bloody hot outside. I will only emerge from the cool comfort of the red room in my…

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I’ve played music to crowds at the Hollywood Bowl, Sydney Opera House and Bertha’s Bon Ton Lounge on Basin Street - all sophisticated, high-class joints. But there’s nothing that gets the spine all atingle and the funk juices bubbling quite like the prospect of getting down at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Fortunately, someone had the good sense to r…

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This morning my sleep was disturbed by the ding-dong bells of a Lutheran church in Minneapolis outside my hotel window. Yesterday, I was summoned at 5.30 am from my light slumber by the bells of a village church near a lake in Northern Italy. Those were a bit more bingy boingy than dingy dongy - that’s to be expected; they’re about seven hundred years o…

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Marilyn Barbarin - “Reborn”

I can’t remember exactly the first time I came across Marilyn Barbarin, but it was on a gig I was doing when I was the piano player in Walter Washington’s band. It would have been in the 80s, and Marilyn happened to be in the audience and was invited by Walter to sit in.

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Zigaboo Modeliste - “Standing in Your Stuff”

I’m not exactly sure; it was quite a while ago, and there have been many sessions under the bridge in the interim, but listening to this, I’ve realised that it’s me doing the keyboard work on this track. I’d forgotten, but I remember going over to Zig’s house, uptown, one afternoon and playing on a few tunes.

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The Meters - “Cardova”

I’ve no idea why this tune is titled ‘Cardova’. George Porter, the Meters bass player, told me that in those days, the late 60s, the band had no say in giving their tunes titles; that was left to Marshall Seahorn, Allen Toussaint’s business partner. Some of them were named after racehorses, I seem to remember, and this might have been one of them.

This stage of the Meters sound represents the change that was taking place in the evolution of New Orleans music in the post 50s heyday of Fats Domino and Little Richard. Since the invention of teenagers, young people the world over have eagerly embraced the novelty of the new. If it’s different from what their parents listen to, they will claim it, though when it’s borne out of a folk music it will never stray far in its essence.

Music is the soundtrack of our adolescence, and the people who make records and sell music for a profit are always looking for a hit; hits put money in pockets. The popular music of New Orleans has continually evolved with the times. The first New Orleans jazz record was ‘Livery Stable Blues’ by the Original Dixieland band in 1917. Play it to a teenager now and they’d probably fall about laughing but to a young adult over a hundred years ago, Tailgate blues was the coolest, rockingest sound you’d ever heard coming out of an Edison phonograph speaker. That sound was driven by a drum kit.

Stylistic changes in the music were often technology driven. The first drum kit appears when New Orleans drummer Dee Dee Chandler invents a rudimentary foot pedal for the big bass drum around 1895. Rig up some stands for a snare drum and some cymbals and now you have one person in charge of the rhythm -sitting down. Problem was that the poor old double bass players and guitarists were now getting drowned out. When the electric guitar was invented, guitarists could turn up but now the upright bass players fingers were getting blisters in the effort to keep up and be heard. The electric bass came out in ‘52 and ‘Luscious’ Lloyd Lambert was the first guy to use one on a recording session in New Orleans.

Bands were getting louder, bigger and heavier and by this time the piano, which had originally been the loudest instrument in the band, was now the quietest and was becoming inaudible. Art Neville’s early records had featured him hammering the piano keys (check out his crazy playing on ‘Light’s out by Jerry Burne) and his style had been influenced by his piano playing elders, Professor Longhair, Huey Smith and Eddie Bo, but things were about to change.

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A poster on my wall, fading a little now as a cherished possession from the 80s, is for a show at a long-vanished club on Claiborne Avenue. It loudly proclaims, with obligatory spelling mistake:

‘James Rivers: One of New Orleans Greatest Bagpipe Artist’.

James was, to my knowledge, the only man in New Orleans, indeed the entire world, who …

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Regrettably, there no longer seems to be a direct flight between Saskatoon and Frittenden International Airport. The landing strip there is conveniently close to the Bell and Jorrocks pub, and it’s always nice to steady the constitution with some fresh Pork Scratchings immediately on arrival. I would take the ferry, but I fear I wouldn’t arrive in time …

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‘Thank you… muchly’, said the pretty, petite and smiling young waitress, as my mental innards recoiled in revulsion.

Muchly.. ?

…Thank you muchly.

I think she was speaking Canadian. Do people here speak Canadian? Of course they do, and that’s as it should be. We are, after all, in Canadia. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m having breakfast, mu…

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And, as chance would have it, I find myself back in my other living room, Concourse C at New Orleans Louis Armstrong Airport. There’s a wall of nasty weather on its way from Mexico, but there’s still a chance I’ll make it out to Houston before it hits - assuming, of course, the storm doesn’t make it to Houston before me. I’m confident that I’ll make my connection and that tonight I’ll be sitting down for an evening meal in Canadia.

I’m setting off on a two-week tour, opening up shows for my old friend Bonnie Raitt and her band. I’ll be warming up the room in theatres every night with forty minutes of solo piano plonkage, hoping that the crowds will be at least a little familiar with the sound of Crescent City ivory rattling. If they aren’t at the beginning of the show, they will be by the end. The solo variety of my dog and pony show allows me a fair degree of flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pantness and I can never really anticipate what my fingers will choose to do when I sit down at the keyboard. Sometimes they go at it of their own volition and I sit and watch and listen.

Who knows, I might be given a good idea earlier in the afternoon at the soundcheck - a process that can sometimes take as long as the gig itself, or longer. It’s a chance to hear what the room sounds like and try out the piano du jour. I’ll often let my digits do the walking and just watch and wait to see if they’ll lead me to somewhere inspirational. When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, there’s a cerebral repository of melodies and lyrics, riffs and turnarounds, intros and outros, a library, a to-do list, a mental inventory of song ideas; just scraps lying around in the cerebral filing cabinet that will come to me unbidden, if they feel like it.

The last solo show I played was on my home turf at Chickie Wah Wah’s den of ill repute in New Orleans on Wednesday and the tune that popped into my mind after some initial rambling and noodling was Junco Partner. ‘Junco’ was James Booker’s signature tune. Dr John used to play it too and its form and its lyrics are based on an older blues that had low-down associations. Mac said that it was a favourite with the old junkies, a basic blues anyone could mess around with up in Angola penitentiary, an old plantation turned prison in North Louisiana, a tune that they’d play for the hookers, dealers and pimps.

Below the paywall is a recording of soundcheck, some recollections of a trip to Angola and memories of Honeyboy doing the Hambone…

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Some might argue that five thousand miles is too far to go to play just three songs. Having just got back, you know, I think they’re probably right. But I’d do it again…cos that’s what we do.

Rauma is a long way North of New Orleans. It’s a couple of hundred kliks west of the Putin’s Russian border and only a few hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle and the edge of Lapland. 11 o’ clock in the night, and you have to draw the curtains tight because, outside,

in the street,

in front of the hotel,

at midnight,

it’s daytime;

it’s still light.

And it’ll still be light at one in the morning - and three in the morning… and five in the morning, - and seven in the morning...

I’ve just made it back in one piece from the land of the unsetting and unsettling sun, and I’m about to have another futile go at getting some sleep. I tried hard both nights I was there, but despite the fact I’d just been on the move for 18 hours on two planes with a three-hour drive from Helsinki, over an ocean and across seven time zones, my eyes wouldn’t stay closed, and my head was spinning.

Actually, that’s not strictly true; I think I did drop off into a species of blurry stupour around midnight local time, and, who knows, perhaps I would have been carried off to deep sleep if a taxi hadn’t disgorged a bandful of New Orleans musicians at 1 am, directly beneath my open window…

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I like John Travolta’s underpants. They’re a bit tight but that just gives me another incentive to lose a few pounds, to decline the Biscotti on long-haul flights and desist in the habit of eating late-night TV toast snacks. I’ve never met John Travolta, but I like his underpants.

My tastes in most things are frugal. There was never much spare m…

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I don’t know how many times I heard Booker play this on that old upright piano - only a few feet from where I was standing, busy doing something else. It was the musical accompaniment to an ordinary afternoon; me balancing on a step-ladder wielding a gooey paintbrush in one hand and a half-finished Dixie Beer in the other or chatting to the bar tender as he cleaned glasses, tossed empty bottles from the night before and prepared to open up for the early alcaholics. I heard that tune so often that I think I absorbed it through osmosis and through the pores of my skin. Its sequence of notes took residence in that dark room, up a far flight of stairs in my cerebral accommodation; settling into the fabric and folds of my brain where the music lives, a crowded space. James Booker was, for a while, just one piece of the daily furniture at the bar where I’d landed on the night of my arrival in America - 18 years old and with a hundred and twenty dollars in my pocket. And where the Fat Man, taking pity, had offered me a job….

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An advantage of flying to New Orleans via Atlanta from San Diego Airport is that in the food area, beyond security at San Diego Airport, you’ll find a not-bad Yamaha grand piano. A disadvantage, however, is that a travelling and bored pianist will probably start playing it, and - having noodled awhile - will completely lose track of time.

Airports are generally quite specific about time-related matters. The clock features prominently in the world of arrivals and departures, and flight schedules aren’t generally designed to accommodate idiot pianists who don’t own a watch. You see, there’s the rub, that’s where they have me at a disadvantage, because my profile quite accurately fits the afore-mentioned.

Paid subscribers can read more and listen to Jon’s 10 minute piano session at San Diego Airport below. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one today!

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