US Edition As a boy, Dr John loved hanging round his father's appliance shop in Gentilly Road in New Orleans.
The shop sold electrical goods, radios and records. Visitors included famous disc jockeys of the early Fifties – New Orleans figures such as Okey Dokey Smith, Vernon Winslow and Doctor Daddy-O (the first black DJ in New Orleans, and "a really cool guy" recalls Dr John), who would buy records and talk music. Dr John's father, Malcolm Rebennack senior, sold Cuban music, Hillbilly and gospel records. But what he loved selling was jazz.
"My father loved music. He would play Big Joe Turner, Professor Longhair and Pete Johnson but most of all we would love to listen to Louis Armstrong records, and I've never lost that affection," says Dr John, in a phone call from Louisiana. "Even to a teenage boy, he was so inspiring. I loved Gutbucket Blues and his singing with Billie Holiday on My Sweet Hunk O'Trash."
Dr John, who has won six Grammy awards and been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has reached back to his New Orleans roots for a special project. Ske-Dat-De-Dat . . . Spirit of Satch has been a creative and commercial success – shooting to the top of the Billboard jazz charts in 2014.
With co-producer and trombonist Sarah Morrow, Dr John carefully selected the 13 songs on an album that features trumpet luminaries such as Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton. Arturo Sandoval, Wendell Brunious (on flügelhorn) and James Andrews. They all do Armstrong's legacy proud.
Dr John at the Songwriters Hall Of Fame awards in June, 2015 GETTY IMAGES
"So many of these songs really touched me. That's why it was hard to pick for my tribute album to Louis. I felt a deep connection with a lot of songs."
Malcolm Rebennack Junior, born on November 21 1940, has said that Armstrong appeared to him in a dream to urge him to make the album. He enjoys it when I tell him that the late Joe Muranyi, Armstrong's clarinetist in the All Stars band days, told my father, who was Armstrong's biographer, that the great trumpeter's ghost also used to visit his bedside and chat to him. "It was a weird experience for me," Dr John says. "My memory of the dream is that Louis wanted me to do the music my way. He didn't hang around for too long. In the dream he came and went. I was spaced out by it."
Dr John had actually met Armstrong several times in real life: "Two years before Joe Glaser died, I joined his Associated Booking Corporation in 1967. Glaser had managed Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington and Louis for about 40 years. I signed up with the late BB King and I met Louis several times at Joe's office in New York. I asked Louis about a photograph on Joe's office wall, of Ralph Schultz' Fresh Hardware Store, which was opposite my dad's shop. Louis was laughing about that other shop. It was a place of such activity, where you could get married and buy break tag stickers for your car. The owner was a funny character, we all knew that. I told Louis that we were both from the third ward of New Orleans and that when I was a child my father always pointed out the house in Jane Alley where Armstrong had been born. The mayor had areas demolished in the Sixties, including that one, so we lost a site of great historical importance. That was not cool. I loved meeting him, we talked and jawed a lot."
It's hard to underestimate the importance of heritage for the people of New Orleans. One of the great honours for someone in the New Orleans African-American community is to be offered the role of leading the Carnival Krewe. It was something Armstrong did in 1949 and Dr John vividly recalls watching it as a young boy. "I will always remember when he was the King of the Zulus for Mardi Gras in 1949. He may have moved to Queens in New York but he came back to do that. I thought, 'this is my hero, wow.' I thought the world of that. It was spiritually correct thing to do."
There are 27 musicians on Ske-Dat-De-Dat and 22 live in New Orleans. "There was a blossoming on the album," says Dr John. "Every track has some spiritual connection."
Louis Armstrong. PHOTO: AP
Dr John, now 74, has seen a lot of changes to his hometown, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. "It's weird what has happened to jazz and music in New Orleans," he says. "Places like Bourbon Street are not what they were. I remember Jim Garrison, the District Attorney who investigated Kennedy's assassination, and his clean-ups of Canal Street and Bourbon Street in the Sixties. Garrison's place is now padlocked. It's all crazy. But the music survives."
That spirit of survival is honoured in David Simon's television programme Tremé, in which Dr John is a recurring character. I wonder whether Louis Armstrong would have been in the show? Dr John replies, with a laugh, "Louis Armstrong was a character actor from his heart. He would loved to have been in Tremé. That was him."
Dr John, who is also known as Mac, or The Night Tripper, shows no signs of slowing down and says he is "really excited" about visits to the UK. He was here in November 2014 for the EFG London Jazz Festival and is back to play Ronnie Scott's in June 2015.
Does he still keep in touch with Van Morrison, his old recording and touring partner from the mid-Seventies? "Van is a hell of a piece of work. Van would always connive with the guys in my band to get me to work with him and he'd ask through my drummer Roscoe [Herman Ernest III, who died in 2009]. We did done another record in the studio together in 2014, actually. He is an original character of the highest order. I love jaw-jerking with him."
They met again, along with Lady Gaga, at the recent Songwriters Hall of Fame Awards.
Lady Gaga, Van Morrison and Dr John GETTY IMAGES
His most recent British show, with a big band, was special, but Dr John welcomes all the chances he gets to honour Armstrong. "You got to remember that this is the man who invented skat, his voice on Heebie Jeebies in 1926 changed music. He opened the door for Ella Fitzgerald with that voice. In fact, Louis Armstrong opened the door for all of us, he opened it wider than anyone could ever have imagined."
(Proper Records)