In 1965, a 22 year old Maceo Parker appeared at the Harlem Apollo as James Brown's new saxophonist. He was introduced to the crowd with a solo slot where Parker wandered - still playing - up and down the aisles. Then someone caught his eye.

"There was this cute little lady standing up dancing. I wander up and I sit in her seat, still playing. At the end of the song I get up, take her hand and motion for her to sit down. It's only then I realise I'm sat next to Keith Richards and had been serenading his girlfriend. A few years later I got a call from him asking if I'd like to play on Talk Is Cheap, so he clearly didn't mind."

Maceo Parker is history's greatest sideman. For the last 42 years he's almost always been in gainful employment - from James Brown and Parliament / Funkadelic to Dee-Lite, Bryan Ferry and De La Soul. Not many people could sit in comfortably with Red Hot Chili Peppers and 10,000 Maniacs. Fewer still could, aged 64, be a key part of Prince's touring band, but Parker is a man whose love of "funky music" is so strong he closes his eyes and tilts his head towards the ceiling each time he uses the phrase, a man whose mouth splits into a smile as he recalls - and sings - ancient, on-the-one vamps. I mention how his solo on Maceo And The Macks' 1974 single The Soul Of A Blackman (also on the album Us) is probably my favourite 20 seconds of music in the history of recorded sound. I add that just thinking about it has made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. "Oh, mine too!" he yells, suddenly excited. "That's an old Man's World vamp on that tune. Just thinking about those sessions makes me feel strange."

You can hear the band react - shocked - to those two notes. They yell.

"Oh yeah! I remember that! You can hear it on the record - James just whistles! That was amazing..."

Some musicians are capable or creating incredible magic and Parker is one. As a child he says he realised that "music was in me". At 5 or 6 he would pick out strings of chords on the piano - "it felt entirely natural for my fingers to make those shapes," he says. "I accepted this as my talent."

Within 18 months of joining James Brown's band, Maceo (and his drummer brother Melvin) had recorded Papa's Got A Brand New Bag, I Got You (I Feel Good) and Cold Sweat and changed the entire sound of pop music. This was harder, more direct, more rigorous and disciplined. Music that was - at once - both entirely strict and entirely free.

"Everything we played was really, really easy," Parker says. "But we performed every single element of it to the highest degree, so it made everything come alive. We knew we were onto something but, you still need luck, you need to let this all come through."

How do you begin to tap that magic?

"What happens with me is, a split second before I play something, I've heard it already. It's there in my mind. I know what to throw away and what to keep. A lot of musicians can't play on one vamp. They try to play more things or just can't stop themselves getting more notes in, but what I discovered was that I could make it interesting while still keeping it locked."

Is that what funk actually is? The ability to make something simple endlessly intoxicating?

"Absolutely. Funk is about a respect for simplicity."

In 1970 Maceo (and most of the rest of Brown's band) staged a mutiny and formed Maceo & The Kingsmen. Their album, Doing Their Own Thing, was fantastically tight funk, but it died on its arse.

"That was hard times," Parker says. "James used his influence and power to keep us at a level that suited him. He made sure we wouldn't make it unless we did it through him. He had so much power then."

Three years later, having spent 18 months in New York hardly playing at all, Maceo went back to his old boss. That must have been hard?

"Not really!" he laughs. "What else could we do?"

In 1975 Maceo joined George Clinton's Parliament, a band where discipline was a somewhat looser concept.

"George had no restrictions. People would fall off the bus and perform."

A lot of people involved with Parliament - up to and including Clinton - developed serious drug problems. But you never dabbled.

"As a kid I promised to myself that I wouldn't waste this talent. They were always there, but I didn't need them to play. Look at Sly Stone - for someone who is that talented? He did a tune called In Time (starts to sing) ‘There's a mickey in the tasting of disaster…', that is one of the funkiest tunes ever. Funky! I used to play that tune every day, 900 times a day. I did! But he liked being someone else, maybe that inspired him, but it wasn't him."

In the 80s Maceo's old records were plundered wholesale by hip hop producers - something he's still rather sniffy about - and had his work become sanctified by record collectors who, in turn, encouraged a new generation to go and see him perform.

"You don't live in the past," he says. "If you graduated from a university a long time ago you don't still wear the blue and gold of the team colours, that would be crazy, but the memories are still there. Sometimes I ask myself did I know when we were recording Cold Sweat or Giving Up Food For Funk that I'd still be playing them forty years later? No!

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When you call a track Pass The Peas you're clearly not thinking about the cold dead eye of posterity.

"Oh man! Pass The Peas is incredible! That's one of James' titles. A brilliant title. We knew we had to call it something, but Pass The Peas? Before we started recording we were all singing, ‘Pass the peas, pass the peas' then James sang, ‘Pass the peas like we used to say' and we were all like, ‘What the hell you mean, like we used to say? When did we ever say that?' But it stuck and 35 years later I cannot play a show without performing that song. They won't let me out the building until I play it. Sometimes I make ‘em wait til last, but sometimes I have to do it by track two just to quiet them down. But that's how it is, music goes with you for your whole life."

Maceo Parker plays The Indigo2 on October 22. Roots & Grooves is on Intuition.

Rob Fitzpatrick