Don Van Vliet is a painter and retired musician, best known by the pseudonym Captain Beefheart. His musical work was mainly conducted with a rotating assembly of musicians called the Magic Band, which was active from the mid-1960s through to the early 1980s.He was a singer, but was also a capable harmonica player, and occasionally played noisy, untrained free jazz-influenced saxophone. His compositions are characterized by their odd mixtures of shifting time signatures and by their surreal lyrics.