A few years ago at the Jazz Club, singer Maria Muldaur paused half way through a set she was performing with only one accompanist, Jon Cleary on piano. Spontaneously, she decided to drop the song she'd intended to sing and said: 'Let's hear Jon. Play Big Chief for me'.
Cleary obliged with a rendition of the Professor Longhair classic that got perhaps the biggest round of applause of the night after Midnight at the Oasis. Muldaur watched him with rapt attention and an expression that suggested that, although she'd heard this many times before, she still couldn't quite believe her ears.
Nowadays, Cleary plays piano for Bonnie Raitt, on whom he has a similar effect. Raitt says she watches from the wings and wonders why she isn't supporting him.
Most people with an interest in New Orleans music, and the tradition of piano playing that stretches back through distinguished exponents such as Dr John and Professor Longhair to Jelly Roll Morton and the roots of jazz, agree that Cleary is one of the best living keyboard men working in that area.
This is a paradox. To play in that style convincingly, you have to tap directly into the soul of the city that gave it birth - and, generally speaking, that means having been born there.
But Cleary isn't a native son, and there are few places less like New Orleans than Cranbrook, a village in Kent, southeast England, where he spent his childhood and teenage years. I know this because, although I'm about three years older than him, we both attended Cranbrook School, and I knew him slightly as a precociously talented electric guitarist with a taste for punk rock.