Tuesday, 30 November 2010
I don’t know whether anyone remembers seeing a movie years ago called Pretty Baby and if they do, there’s every possibility they wouldn’t admit to it, given the subject matter - a young girl played by Brooke Shields growing up in a New Orleans brothel.
I’m not a movie watcher, but back when video libraries were in their infancy there was a copy of the movie on the shelves of the place I rented a video recorder from, and I can remember looking at it and noting the New Orleans factor, though I don’t recall actually borrowing and watching it.
So I have no way of knowing whether the house in New Orleans featured a piano playing Professor but I have the definite impression that every house of ill-repute in Storyville had a piano player and they were all Professor Something.
One of the names that the English music press seemed to associate with John Peel was someone called Doctor John, who had a couple of albums on Atlantic which were a strange gumbo of swamp blues from the bayous around New Orleans. Around 1972 there was a new Doctor John album which attracted a fair number of column inches, and I was intrigued to read that the album wasn’t new material, but was a greatest hits of New Orleans package.
I didn’t know a lot about New Orleans music back then, but there were names I recognised when Dr John started talking about his influences. I had a vague notion Jerry Wexler, who’d prompted the recording, was someone influential and one of the tracks (Iko Iko) was suggested by Peter Wolf of the J Geils Band. I was a huge J Geils Band fan at the time.
So Gumbo was duly ordered, collected and taken home, and I discovered that there were plenty of familiar tracks there, though I’d previously been unaware of the New Orleans connection.