Toussaint a musical chameleon
PREVIEW
Allen Toussaint At: Winter Roots Roundup V Where: Festival Place, Sherwood Park When: Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $50-$60 through the Festival Place box office, festivalplace.ab.ca)
Few names have ever meant as much as Allen Toussaint’s in bridging the New Orleans music tradition with popular culture. The pianist-singercomposer-arranger stretches with ease between blues and jazz, R&B, funk and pop.
At 76, he admits he’s always been a bit of a chameleon.
“My tastes were all over the place,” he remembers. “In the early days I just assumed that everything I heard was something I had to tackle, to learn how to play, even the great classics, in my own humble fashion. That meant all the piano stuff and all the arrangements too, because I wanted to arrange and write on my own.”
His ethic worked. Toussaint was still a young man when he went from being a pianist and songwriter to a talent scout for small record labels and a record producer. During the 1960s, he started working with a wide range of artists, including the best of New Orleans: Irma Thomas, Dr. John, Lee Dorsey, The Meters and The Nevilles.
Over subsequent decades, he would write and produce songs with Solomon Burke, Robert Palmer (Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley), Sandy Denny, Labelle (including the No. 1 hit Lady Marmalade) and Paul McCartney (Venus and Mars). He’s had 20 albums under his own name, and dozens of artists have covered his tunes, from the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones and Little Feat to Boz Scaggs, Ringo Starr and Robert Plant.
Yet Toussaint has maintained his own identity, more often helping to set trends than follow them.
“When artists came from afar to New Orleans, I knew that some wanted the cash register to ring, but I never joined the party to make assembly-line music.”
He grew up in one of the oldest New Orleans districts, Gert Town, which he remembers as “a very humble neighbourhood, rich in spirit.” He “fell into music” at age six.
“I was introduced to the piano, went up and touched it, and fell in love immediately. I never stopped and where I am now is simply a continuation of that.”
For most of his career, the soft-spoken southern gentle- man was happy working behind the scenes with other artists, periodically releasing his own records, seldom performing outside the Crescent City. Then in 2005, hurricane Katrina wreaked havoc on New Orleans.
After his house and studio were wrecked, Toussaint took up temporary refuge in New York until he could rebuild. That led to a whole new set of contacts and opportunities with the likes of Elvis Costello, Eric Clapton and others. Nearly eight years later, he’s ultimately glad that he was kicked out of his comfort zone.
“It was life-changing all over the place. It put me out there performing alone and with my group, doing collaborations with people I had never met before. The studio has been a good haven for me but when you’re onstage, the aim is right there in front of you, to reach people.”
As he heads into his seventh decade in the music business, Toussaint’s contributions are being celebrated more than ever, despite the fact that he just lost out again at the Grammy Awards, with his seventh nomination.
Last year Toussaint collected a long list of his own tunes and a few fave classics on an excellent live solo concert CD/DVD set Song Book on Rounder Records. Next to standards like St. James Infirmary, it has his signature tune Southern Nights and other hits like Working in the Coalmine and Whipped Cream, some dating back to the late 1950s.
Joe Henry put him with a set of top young jazz names to produce the acclaimed 2009 Nonesuch disc Bright Mississippi and they hope to record again this year. Toussaint’s music figures in two recent stage productions: New York choreographer Twyla Tharp created a new dance project Waiting at the Station using his songs, while he wrote new material for a stage adaptation of a children’s book series, The Magic Treehouse. He was featured in the first two seasons of the HBO miniseries Treme, and in 2012 President Barack Obama awarded him the U.S. National Humanities Medal at the White House.
For his appearance at the Winter Roots Roundup on Saturday, Toussaint brings a quartet including guitarist Renard Prochet, bassist Roland Guerin and drummer Herbert Lebeaux.