NEW ORLEANS VITALITY Allen Toussaint
May 22, 2009
Whether telling musical fortunes or charting the bright Mississippi, the composer and pianist has always been at one with the Crescent City.
BY JENNIFER KELLY
Since the 1960s, Allen Toussaint has been nearly synonymous with New Orleans' funk, soul and R&B, writing classic songs like "Fortune Teller," "Sneaking Sally Through the Alley," "Working in a Coal Mine," and "Pain in My Heart" and working with everyone from Lee Dorsey to Paul McCartney to Labelle to Fats Domino to Elvis Costello.
What Toussaint had never really done, until this year's The Bright Mississippi, was to play jazz. Funny, because Toussaint grew up in the town that invented jazz and played piano in its juke joints and dance hops from the age of 13 on. His neighborhood, Gert Town, was full of musicians, an old banjo player on one side of the block, a blind guitarist on the other. The music of New Orleans' funeral marches and Dixieland clubs was in the air, drifting through the windows, playing on radios, and yet Toussaint never tried his hand at it. "Well, I heard jazz, but I didn't take to performing it really," says Toussaint. "I had been busy with the R&B and didn't really know how to find these wonderful songs."
That all changed during sessions for Our New Orleans, a 2005 benefit album for Habitat for Humanity's post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. Joe Henry, who was producing the album, writes that he came upon Toussaint one evening alone at the piano, playing Professor Longhair's "Tipitina":
"What came through the speakers, though, bore little resemblance to the song all of us in attendance knew. It sounded instead like a history lesson in American musical alchemy. I mean to say that in less than three minutes, the performance referenced European classical music, tango, pre-war jazz, parlor folk, and show tunes-all articulated with an eye out for the blues. It sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before and like everything I'd ever heard. Allen shrugged off my wonder at the piece, volunteered his preference of the two takes he'd played (the first; though to his dismay I'd only recorded the second), and then disappeared down Fifty-third Street."
That song started Henry to thinking. Why shouldn't Allen Toussaint turn his considerable skills at the piano towards jazz, playing a hand-picked selection of classics, backed by an all-star combination of players, people like Joshua Redmond, Brad Meldau, Don Byron and Marc Ribot?
"It was all Joe Henry's idea. It's his brainchild," says Toussaint. "The whole idea of the songs and even choosing all of the musicians in various combinations. I'm so glad he did because on my own, I might never have gone in this direction. But he saw a possibility there of something good."
Toussaint says he knew almost none of the musicians before recording The Bright Mississippi -- he had met only with trumpeter Nicholas Payton and drummer Jay Bellerose - and was unfamiliar with much of the material. "But now, I just love all of those songs," he says. "And I like other musicians' performances so much. Joshua Redmond on ‘Daydreams,' that is a wonderful heart and soul. And of course, the ‘Blue Drag,' that's Marc [Ribot] on guitar, just superb, just wonderful."
Toussaint admits that playing jazz piano is different from the R&B and funk styles that made him famous, yet says he took to it with surprising ease. "It was quite comfortable and very relaxed," he explains. "I found it not nearly as taxing as much of the other R&B and funk and all of the rest of the music. It was just playing the songs. The songs are so beautiful, so they took care of a lot of it themselves."
His "Winin' Boy Blues" duet with Brad Meldau, for instance, required only one take for the two pianists to find an effortless groove. "We didn't talk at all. Joe Henry had the foresight on what should happen, and he just told us, ‘When you're ready, go out and play.' And that's what we did. We didn't talk about who would play when or whether you'd take it or I'd take it. We just played it and that was it."
Toussaint says that he never had any doubts about the project, even though it led him into unfamiliar territory, largely because he believes so strongly in Joe Henry. "I would have tried anything he said -- and I'm so glad he tried this. I was really surprised when he told me the kinds of songs that it would be, but now I see what he saw."
He adds, "I just went from song to song and did the best I could, mostly not to ruin them. I had a very good time with them, because they are all delightful."
Although Toussaint had never played jazz before, trying new styles is nothing new for him. One of R&B's most prolific and accomplished songwriters, he has long been adept at fitting melodies, lyrics and arrangements to specific artists' needs. Toussaint says he wrote his first song at age 9, a short duet between trumpet and trombone, and by the time he'd turned 12, he was writing lyrics, too. He came from a musical family. His father had played trumpet in a big band before Toussaint was born, and his brother played the guitar, though only for pleasure, never professionally. He still remembers the day a piano arrived, for his sister, who briefly took lessons.
"Oh, the piano was brought to the house and I walked over and touched it and instant gratification. I feel in love," Toussaint remembers. "And for some reason, very early on, I felt the structure of it. As big as this instrument is, it's 12 things over and over. I began to pick out little simple melodies by ear and listening to the radio and any music on it, I'd try to play that way."
One thing led to another, and by age 13, Toussaint was playing local record hops with a band called the Flamingos. At 15, and still well under the drinking age, he and his band mates started performing at country juke joints. "We'd play anything we heard on the radio, old R&B, Fats Domino, that kind of thing. It was a wonderful way to grow up. We didn't have to wait to see what the grown ups were doing."
By the 1960s, Toussaint had become one of the stars of the New Orleans funk and R&B scene, writing songs for Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville and Lee Dorsey. For each of these artists, he says, he took a different approach to songwriting, trying to find the right voice, mood and sound for every particular talent. "For instance, Lee Dorsey was such a high spirited, happy go lucky kind of guy, so I could write things for him that I wouldn't have dared to have written for Luther Vandross, who was so cool and romantic. I could write a humorous song about working in the coal mine. I can't think of anyone else I could have written something like that and asked them to sing it. But yes, I always wrote for a particular person."
Yet though he wrote songs for particular artists, his works were often covered by singers and bands with far different aesthetics. The Lee Dorsey song, "Working in a Coal Mine," for instance, was memorably covered by Devo. "Fortune Teller" turned up in the repertoire of the Rolling Stones, the Who and the Hollies," and "Get Out of My Life, Woman" was covered 36 times - the best selling version by the Grateful Dead.
Toussaint claims that he loves all the covers of his songs. "Whether they deviate from the song, or whether they stay close to it, I appreciate it all equally. I dearly appreciated it when I get covered, my songs, because that means someone cares enough to do it, they have to spend time with it, get it into their heart and then give it back out."
And for the moment, Toussaint finds himself in the unusual position of interpreting other people's songs, taking them into his heart and giving them back out. After hitting the New Orleans Jazz Fest recently, he's now rehearsing for a weeklong series of concerts at New York City's Village Vanguard, May 19-24, accompanied by all but one of his Bright Mississippi band members. (Trumpeter Nicholas Payton will not able to make the shows.) It will be a return of sorts, since Toussaint maintains an apartment in New York City and lived there for some time after Katrina. Yet, he says, make no mistake, New Orleans is home, the source of all the musical styles - funk, R&B, soul and now jazz - that play into his art.
"New Orleans is my source of energy. I feel that I breathe vitality the minute I get to town."
[Photo Credit: Michael Wilson]
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