Don Van Vliet (born Don Glen Vliet January 15, 1941) is an American musician and artist best known by the stage name Captain Beefheart. His musical work was conducted with a rotating ensemble of musicians called The Magic Band, active between 1965 and 1982, with whom he recorded 12 studio albums. Noted for his idiosyncratic singing voice with its wide range Van Vliet also occasionally played the harmonica, saxophone, bass clarinet, piccolo oboe, shehnai and keyboards. Often impossible to categorize, his music blended rock, blues and psychedelia with free jazz, avant-garde and contemporary experimental composition. An iconoclastic mix of shifting time signatures and complex rhythms, atonal melodies, jagged, dissonant guitar playing, and often humorously surreal lyrics it was crafted through his dictatorial control over his musicians and creative vision.