Dr. John's Gumbo

"You can even smell it, a smell like it has been in a bookcase for a very long time", said the Belgian girl to me when I was heading back to the South and was examining my catch from the record fare. It does smell it's age. Recorded & produced in 1972, this record is more than 36 years old. It doesn`t only smell a bit like mold, it even looks a bit moldy from the outside.

I paid about 10 euro's for this record, and while examining the record in the train I`m wondering if it was worth it. The cover is beautiful - The doctor is standing in front of a large wall, portraying an industrial-farm landscape. The back cover shows him lying on several bar-stools in front of "Yudda's Yummy Hamburgers Hot Dogs" - A little hamburger place. When opening the the record the inner sleeve is even more impressive. It has a slightly greenish quality, displaying the doctor from head to toes - dressed in a nice suite and a top hat. With the bad lighting it is however hard to see if the record has a lot of scratches yes or no.

I start reading the insert. It starts with an intro from the Doctor himself what moved him to record this album. Dr. John is born as Mac Rebennack in New Orleans. From the early 1950's he started working as a studio musician in New Orleans playing the guitar and piano. He worked in the studio where Shirley & Lee, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Professor Longhair and Heuy Smith recorded their records. Later in the sixties he started to record his own material - Gumbo is his third record.

The record is filled with New Orleans classics from the 50s and 60s which have been re-recorded by the Doctor and his band. And how. "Iko Iko" starts the record off extremely catchy. I don`t get the lyrics (They seem to be based on Creole), but the music speaks for itself - It's a great mix between "Dixieland, Rock & Roll and Funk", as the Doctor describes it. The only thing I know is that it is catchier, dirtier and swings more than anything coming from the British Isles in the past decade (European music most of the time is very straight-lined).

The song that blew me of my feet however was "Big Chief"; The organ that runs through this song is just amazing. It's unlike anything I`ve heard before and again as catchy as hell. The song is funky. It's hard to stay still during this song. It also sounds like the musicians had a lot of fun playing these song - and the record is in perfect condition - so it all sounds as clear as an ice cold winter morning.

"Mess Around" displays the Doctor's excellent piano skills, he himself describing his solo at the start of the song as "radiating the adiating". The piano is on fire, that's for sure. In his liner notes he tells that this song was written by Ahmet Ertegum for none other than Ray Charles. It would have fitted Ray perfectly. Up tempo, one big celebration.

The second side starts of with "Junko Partner". Described in the notes as "the anthem of the dopers, the whores, the pimps, the cons. It was a song they sang in Angola, the state prison farm and the rhythm was even known as the "jailbird beat". Dudes used to come back with all different verses. The hard-core dopers couldn`t wait to hit the street after their release so they could score again.

"Six months ain`t no sentence
One year ain`t no time
They got boys in Angola
Doing nine to ninety-nine"

Meaning they had no intention of reforming even before the beginning their sentence. It's a song all New Orleans bands had to play: kind if a Calypso-oriented rhythm with Cajun dialect."

The Doctors excellent piano playing accompanies the record right to its end. It's one of the most enjoyable records in my collection (definitely entered my top 10 of favorites - out of more than 300 classics now) - and I can recommend it to anyone who loves music. It was my best 10 euro's spend in a long long time. It's living proof that great music goes beyond the notion of time.