“Being musical” means much more to Cherie Gilmour than singing or playing in tune.
Oh, I didn’t know you were musical,” a friend said to me recently, with bemused awe as though I’d told her I identified as a trumpet. I’d just admitted to years of piano lessons and that I can slalom awkwardly through Debussy’s ‘Arabesque No. 1’, which I played in front of examiners for my HSC.
But my innate musicalness was always something far more than that. While it was classical music I’d learnt on the piano, I grew up in a house where the halls of our clean, white suburban Sydney home were filled with the rhythms of the bayou: the polyrhythmic festival tunes from the high priest of funk and blues, Malcolm “Mac” Rebennack, also known as Dr John.
My father, a tie-wearing intellect who analysed data during the day, would come home and pump out Dr John’s syncopated bangers on the piano, painting the house with a rainbow of sounds. He would be absorbed in the music, “ba-ba-bapping” away as he played. Sometimes he would call me over, being the only child who’d persisted with piano lessons a fraction longer than his other children, to listen to a pleasing phrase. “Listen to this,” he’d say, playing some finger‑fancy chords that looked chaotic on the notated page but made sense out loud. He would grin like a child on Christmas morning, his whole body vibrating in delight.
Dr John was a joyful departure from the metronomic precision of Debussy, offering an alternative vision of what music could be. In this case: messy, loud and unapologetically soulful.
From 1999 to 2003, the ABC ran a relatively short-lived live music show called Studio 22. A roll call of 90s music royalty would play for a small studio audience: You Am I, Ani DiFranco, Archie Roach and, unbelievably, in one of his many iterations, Dr John, the Night Tripper.
My sister and I were swiftly pulled out of school for the day to trek into the ABC studios. At 13, I recall the weight of great responsibility. Dad couldn’t get out of work, so we were there as his proxies, to bring home a piece of Creole and hopefully get a photo with the man himself. We sat in the small studio, buzzing with anticipation.
And then he emerged from some dimly lit back door: a formidable, hulking presence in a leather hat, wielding a voodoo-themed cane. My Christian mother prayed quietly under her breath. He sat at the piano and started belting out ‘Iko Iko’, the iconic New Orleans standard, also called ‘Jock-A-Mo’, written in 1953 by James “Sugar Boy” Crawford and His Cane Cutters. Listening to Dr John play was to travel to another world – a New Orleans funeral procession with sizzling hot trumpets and a smart-suited, sunnies-wearing bandleader with a whistle.
I’d never thought of myself as particularly musical. Music was simply part of my childhood landscape, as invisible as the air I breathed. We sang at school, at church and at home. The soundtrack of our family life was either Dr John (Dad) or the stirring symphonies of Debussy (Mum), which explains the gap in my knowledge of popular 70s and 80s music – starkly evident at a recent karaoke session where I stumbled over David Bowie’s ‘Starman’. On my grandmother’s 90th birthday, my dad and his two brothers sang an impromptu a cappella of ‘Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’’, perfectly pitched and harmonised, and no-one thought anything of it.
A piano now sits in our house, gathering dust. It’s an electronic Clavinova, like the one we had growing up – now a muted witness to the joyfully chaotic rhythms of my youth. I watch my two small kids hover curiously over it, jabbing at the keys like monkeys at a computer. I wonder what musical DNA is lying dormant inside of them and how to coax it out.
Because it wasn’t piano lessons that lit me up; it was Dad. Watching him play was like seeing Clark Kent step out of the office and turn into Superman, his corporate job no match for the voodoo-inspired funk of Dr John.But, more than music itself, there’s nothing greater than being around someone wholly dedicated to their craft. I tell myself this when I steal away from my family to write, bringing characters to life from the depths of my imagination. It’s the feeling of seeing life in technicolour, of being electrified by passion.
I will enrol my kids in piano, drum or guitar lessons, but I know they alone won’t ignite a lifelong obsession. Instead, I will sit them in my parent’s lounge room at the feet of their beloved grandfather, now well into his 70s, while he transforms into Dr John, looking directly at them, his eyes blazing with pride, as he says, “Listen to this.”
By Cherie Gilmour
Cherie Gilmour is a writer from Torquay, Victoria, whose work has appeared in The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and Eureka Street, among others.
Published in ed#765