Dr John: Life, death, voodoo and the blues

Dr John has released a new album featuring one track written from beyond the grave... The blues legend from New Orleans casts his spell on James McNair

On the ninth floor of the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, the dapper man before me proffers his hand-carved walking stick. Jackdaw feathers and a "mojo" bag fashioned from some unfortunate kangaroo's scrotum hang from its handle. Tellingly but incongruously, there's also a pouched mobile-phone.

The stick belongs to Malcolm "Dr John" Rebennack who, though widely regarded as one of the world's finest blues pianists, started out as a session guitarist big on T-Bone Walker. It was in 1961, after a brawl at a cheap motel in Florida, that he was forced to switch instruments.

"Ronnie Baron was singing with my band," he recalls. "He was underage, and his mother told me 'Don't let anything happen to him or I'll cut your nuts off.' So I walk into the dressing room, and the promoter's pistol whippin' the kid. I start beatin' his hand off the wall, but my fingers are over the gun barrel, and it goes off. When they sewed my finger back on, it was dead from the middle-up. I'd play a note on the guitar and it would just go 'thunk'."

Born in New Orleans in 1940, Rebennack has long personified his home city's diverse musical heritage. Equally comfortable with Dixieland jazz, funk, R&B or the rich syncopation of Afro-Cuban music, he also has a CV that reads like a Who's Who of pop history. In the Fifties, he played with legendary bandleader Dave Bartholomew. In the Sixties and Seventies, his session credits included Phil Spector, Van Morrison, Aretha Franklin and The Band.

But the breakthrough as a writer in his own right came with 1968's spooky, Creole and psychedelia-influenced Gris-Gris, the recording of which saw Rebennack deck-out LA's Gold Star studios like a voodoo shrine. Umpteen albums later, 1998's Anutha Zone – which featured collaborations with the likes of Primal Scream, Spiritualized and Portishead – confirmed that he'd lost none of his edge or relevance.

Petty crime, heroin addiction and juke-joint hustling were an adjunct to Rebennack's early musical career. Perhaps understandably, he's become increasingly reluctant to talk about his "goofball" years. Asked about his time in prison for burglary, he shifts the goal posts, talking instead about a sax-playing friend of his currently serving 300 years at Angola State Penitentiary for "sticking somebody up with a Coke bottle".

"Charlie didn't kill or rape nobody," he tells me. "All he wants is to see his daughter one time. The least ones I respect is somebody that messes with a child, but if you're just some regular con-man or run-of-the-mill junky that burglarised someone ..." At this his sentence tails off, leaving me to draw my own conclusions.

Between puffs on his cigarillo, he tells me about his parents. His deceased father ("Whenever I asked 'bout his heritage all he'd say was 'New Orleans'") owned a record store selling "gospel, bebop, real filthy party records, and hillbilly stuff like Hank Williams".

His mother, now living in California, was born in Mobile, Alabama. She spent much of her career working as a fashion model, but apparently had the opportunity to act, too. "She was asked to appear in the Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller," smiles Rebennack. "They wanted her to jump across the river usin' alligators as steppin' stones. Nothin' doing."

Though Rebennack's father is long gone, the pianist's new album, Creole Moon, makes it clear he's not forgotten. Having scored a writing credit from beyond the grave, how could he be? The song in question is "Georgianna", a gorgeous, old-time waltz in which Michael Doucet's fiddle pays homage to a Cajun ex-lover of Dr John's "who looked like Sophia Loren, but caused me a lot of harassment". The vocal melody, he says, was provided by his father during a visitation.

"There's times I've been sat on his grave and heard him hummin' stuff without seeing him," he tells me, "but on this occasion he was sitting close as you are now. He looked like when he was young, and he was singing that exact melody. I recorded it on my tape recorder and wrote the words later."

Such anecdotes make more sense in the light of Rebennack's long adhered-to belief system. His alias "Dr John Greaux, The Night Tripper" was shared by a voodoo practitioner who lived in New Orleans in the early 1800s. And like fellow New Orleans musicians Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, Rebennack grew up surrounded by voodoo, learning about the allegedly supernatural forces central to the ancient African religion, and incorporating its distinctive musical forms into his own playing.

Even Creole Moon's cover-art is rooted in the said religion. Its back cover is a painting of Marie Laveau, a 19th century Catholic-raised Voodoo Queen still said to grant wishes to anyone marking three Xs on her tomb at St Louis Cemetery. The record's front cover, meanwhile, depicts Baron Samedi, the guardian of Laveau's tomb, the lord of life and death, and the inspiration behind many of Rebennack's early stage costumes. Stealing another glance at that walking stick, I ask how much voodoo impacts on his life today.

"I'll still visit Marie Laveau's tomb," he says, "but I won't put no Xs on it. I respect her spirit, but the Great Spirit is bigger than any saint, and I don't like to go to the Vice-President if I can find The President." Later in our interview, he's more passionate when we talk about religious intolerance, and how voodoo culture has been so often sensationalised and misrepresented.

Elsewhere on Creole Moon, "Food For Thot" tips the hat to James Brown, "Monkey and Baboon" is a "critter yarn" influenced by Aesop's fables, and elements of "Bruha Bernbe" are appropriated from a traditional Caribbean witch dance. There are also a number of co-writes with the now deceased Doc Pomus, a close friend of Rebennack's for decades, and one half of the esteemed songwriting duo Pomus & Shuman.

Rebennack remembers Pomus fondly, and with just a little guilt, too, perhaps. When the young pianist used to shoot-up in Pomus's bathroom, the wheelchair-bound singer would worry about gaining entry if Rebennack overdosed. Asked if Pomus's passing has made him ponder his own mortality, he's stoical.

"When I croak," he says, "I hope it's with the same attitude as people like Doc and Art Blakey." He explains that Pomus's last words to him concerned finishing a song for BB King, and that jazz drummer Art Blakey had wanted to die on the last cymbal crash of the last song in the set. "Aren't those the kinda guys to look to?" he asks. "They were hung-up on life, not death."

My 45-minute consultation with Dr John has flown by. So much to ask, so little time. I close by quizzing him about a forthcoming profile by The South Bank Show. "Yeah, it was fun," he says. "They drove me around New Orleans in a Fifties' Cadillac, but we started filming the day after The World Trade Centre attack, so my head was in a strange place, and I'd run out of psychotic meds..."

Psychotic meds?

"The doctor gave them to me for my bi-sexual polar bear condition," he laughs. "There ain't no middle to me without 'em."

Dr John performs tomorrow night at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (Box office: 020-7960 4242).

His album 'Creole Moon' is out now on Parlophone.

The South Bank Show profile of Dr John will be broadcast on 18 November