Watch: Dr. John's "Ice Age" feat. Dan Auerbach @ BAM (official video)

Listen: Dr. John Talks to WNYC's "Soundcheck" About New Album, "Locked Down," and Three-Week BAM Residency

 

Mac Rebennack, a.k.a Dr. John, whose new album, Locked Down, is due out next week, was the guest on today's episode of Soundcheck from New York public radio member station WNYC. Mac treats listeners to a live solo piano version of "Big Shot," a song off the new album that was named NPR Song of the Day last week, and talks with host John Schaefer about working with The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, who produced the album. Schaefer also plays a clip from the album track "Revolution," which you can hear in full here. You can listen to Dr. John on Soundcheck below.

Mac also talks with Schaefer about a three-week residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), titled Dr. John: Insides Out, which gets under way this week with a tribute to Louis Armstrong at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Thursday through Saturday nights. The following weekend is the centerpiece of the residency, a three-night run of concerts in which Auerbach will join Dr. John and a handpicked band to premiere new music from Locked Down, April 5–7. Dr. John: Insides Out concludes April 12–15 with Funky But It’s Nu Awlins, a funk-infused night of New Orleans music, featuring key players from the Crescent City. For tickets, head to bam.org now.

Listen to Soundcheck Here

NPR: Dr. John: A 'Big Shot,' Reinvigorated

 

  James Demaria Productions

Friday's Pick

Song: "Big Shot"
Artist: Dr. John
CD: Locked Down
Genre: Blues-Rock

March 23, 2012

Horns run quickly up and down a semi-chromatic scale, sounding faded and ghostly, as if they're blowing in a juke joint back in the 1920s. Then the volume rises, the pace slows a bit — like a not-too-fast, not-too-slow, shoulder-shimmying sashay down a New Orleans street late at night. A familiar voice begins to sing, loud and strong; it's the unmistakable growl of Dr. John. The song is "Big Shot," from the new Locked Down, in which Dan Auerbach, singer and guitarist for the blues-rock band The Black Keys, aims to give the good Doctor a modern spin. Auerbach and Dr. John count among the song's many co-writers.

Dr. John always sounds exactly like Dr. John: a singer with heart and swagger in his gravelly drawl and magic powers in his piano-thumping fingers. In the 1970s, when he burst into national fame, he was totally outrageous — dressing like a befeathered voodoo king and calling himself the "Nite Tripper." Today, he's a bit of an elder statesman, singing old classics and penning mournful paeans to Katrina-battered New Orleans.

Auerbach makes 71-year-old Mac Rebennack sound fresh and intimate by connecting him to his vital musical past. The horns pump up the song, just the way they'd enliven a funeral march in the Big Easy. The backing McCrary Sisters are gospel-flavored and swathed in reverb, while Dr. John himself sounds as if he's having a heap of fun with the self-promoting lyric. He slurs words with New Orleans insouciance, toys with the beat, injects just the right amount of ego and attitude, and proves that now, as always, he's the ruler of American roots music.

Stream: First track from Dr. John's "Locked Down"

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Click to listen to Dr. John's 'Revolution'

New Orleans legend Dr. John – a.k.a. Mac Rebennack – teamed up with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach to record his latest album, Locked Down. "Watching him come up with parts was just so awesome. Mac is fearless," says Auerbach, who produced the set. "Like that Farfisa solo on ‘Revolution' – that’s a first-take solo. He just goes for it, man. He told me he hadn’t played a Farfisa organ since 1969 when he was with Doug Sahm, and he killed it." Locked Down won't be in stores until April 3rd, but you can stream "Revolution" today.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/exclusive-stream-dr-john-teams-with-black-keys-dan-auerbach-for-revolution-20120229#ixzz1nn7KtNKn

NY Times: New Orleans Saint’s Brooklyn Revival

By BEN RATLIFF

A NEW record by Mac Rebennack, a k a Dr. John, the blues-and-roots potentate, is no big thing per se; it happens every few years. Neither is Dr. John returning to his late-’60s coordinates of super-informed funk, representing the rhythmic trip of West Africa to the Antilles to the American Gulf Coast; he did that recently on “Tribal,” released a year and a half ago. 

But “Tribal” probably didn’t go far beyond Dr. John’s own specialized listenership. What’s newsworthy about “Locked Down,” his new album, to be released by Nonesuch on April 3, is that he’s being nuzzled by someone young and much listened-to: Dan Auerbach, singer and guitarist of the Black Keys, the post-garage band that recently sold out a Madison Square Garden show in 15 minutes. Mr. Auerbach collaborated with Dr. John in a set at the Bonnaroo festival last June that I liked very much, with two drummers, backup singers and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. In it Dr. John sang old songs with twisted histories, and the show vibrated with bass, organ, low brass and quiet funk. 

Soon after that they recorded “Locked Down” — Mr. Auerbach produces and plays guitar — which is a bit more preening and academic. It’s all original songs, clearly grown out of studio jams. There’s a single drummer here, one of the two from the Bonnaroo show: Max Weissenfeldt, of the German rare-groove band Poets of Rhythm. The keyboardist and bassist, Leon Michels and Nick Movshon, are from the El Michels Affair, one of the bands associated with Dap-Tone records from Brooklyn and the world of retro-funk that brought you the sound of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” record. (They’ve also both played in the touring version of the Black Keys.) The guitarist Brian Olive, once of the Soledad Brothers, whose own solo album “Two of Everything” was produced last year by Mr. Auerbach, is part of the same fraternity of backward-looking obsessives. 

This record will find some fans among those who loved “Back to Black,” and it should. But have you ever wondered how hip is too hip? “Locked Down,” with its down-cold James Black drum rhythms, distorted Fender Rhodes keyboards and free-range, organically farmed reverb, is a useful test case. (By the way, go back and listen to Dr. John’s complicated, spaced-out record “The Sun, Moon & Herbs,” from 1971, when all recordings were analog: are we trying to out-hip that on its own terms?) If Dr. John weren’t grounding it with his casual essence, it might collapse under the weight of its own studied scuff. 

But some of it is beautiful, and I look forward to hearing it live. One can do that right around the release date of the record, when Dr. John comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for “Insides Out,” a residency spread across three weekends. March 29 to 31 he’ll perform in “A Louis Armstrong Tribute,” which is just what it sounds like but different, including performances from Arturo Sandoval, Rickie Lee Jones and the Blind Boys of Alabama. April 5 to 7 he’ll be performing “Locked Down” with Mr. Auerbach and band; and April 12 to 14 he presents “Funky but It’s Nu Awlins,” with guests from his hometown, including Donald Harrison, Davell Crawford, Ivan Neville, Irma Thomas and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

Dr. John to Lead Three-Weekend Residency at BAM; Dan Auerbach to Join in Debut of Music from New Album, "Locked Down"

Dr. John—Mac Rebennack— will lead a three-weekend residency titled Dr. John: Insides Out at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York, March 29 through April 14. The centerpiece of the residency is a three-night run of concerts in which Auerbach will join Dr. John and a handpicked band to premiere new music from the album at the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, April 5–7. Dr. John: Insides Out begins the previous weekend, March 29–31, with a tribute to Louis Armstrong, and concludes April 12–15 with Funky But It’s Nu Awlins, a funk-infused night of New Orleans music, featuring key players from the Crescent City. 

From March 28 to April 1, BAMcinématek presents a complementary series of films shot or set in the Crescent City. Spanning five decades, the series includes Belle of the Nineties (1934), The Flame of New Orleans (1941), and Down by Law (1986), plus many more.


Tickets for Dr. John: Insides Out go on sale next Monday, January 23, for Friends of BAM, and the following Monday, January 30, for the general public. To order then, go to bam.org.

For more on Locked Down, the forthcoming Nonesuch release from Dr. John, click here.