Saturday, February 17th, 2007
Reviewed by Paul Cebar
Let me begin this review with a bit of a disclaimer. Near the end of the 70’s, I had the great pleasure to work my way into the captivating world of playing in a band by rubbing shoulders with my fellow R&B Cadets (John Sieger, Robin Pluer, Mike Sieger, Cy Costabile et al.).
Aside from John’s wonderful original music, the band’s repertoire was the result of a headlong effort to discover and rediscover the wonders of 50’s, 60’s and 70’s R&B. At certain times in the life of the band, fully half of the non-original material that the band performed came from the pen of one Allen Toussaint.
As Elvis Costello so craftily demonstrated this past year on his bracing,”The River In Reverse”, collaboration with Mr. Toussaint, in his own reticent, self-effacing, seemingly offhand though effortlessly elegant manner, Allen Toussaint has crafted an enormously expansive body of work that rewards scrutiny and re-examination with an impossibly winning mixture of light-heartedness, gut-level soul searching and sly, streetside philosophizing. Funky as hell to boot .
A quintessential writer-arranger (and virtuosic pianist), Toussaint first made his mark as a wizardly, behind the curtain creator of vehicles for an eccentric grab bag of insouciant streetwise characters in that most colorful hotbed of street level eccentricity that was late 50’s – early 60’s New Orleans. While allowing the likes of Lee Dorsey, Ernie K. Doe, Benny Spellman and truly countless others to “keep it real”, Toussaint’s delicious craft allowed him to keep it dreamy, debonair and ever so modest. Irresistible, in a word.
Fitting then, that on this his first headlining tour in an awfully long time if not ever, Allen and his lean 5-piece band (more on that in a minute) saw fit to launch into a medley to introduce those less familiar in the audience with the scope of the initial burst of creativity that put his collaborators on the map and his nuanced musicality at the root of many a later musical development.
Beginning with “A Certain Girl”, featuring an effective interpolation of Rhapsody In Blue in his piano solo, proceeding through “Mother-In-Law” (both tunes originally recorded by Ernie K Doe), followed by a pungent “Fortune Teller” (cut originally by Benny Spellman) punctuated by a caustic guitar solo from New Orleans veteran Renard Poche, romping through “Working In A Coalmine” (written for the impish auto mechanic, Lee Dorsey) during which Allen demanded and immediately got the audience’s help on the background vocal “whoops”(“I need my whoops”was how he phrased it) and finishing with a reprise of “A Certain Girl”,this was musicmaking of high spirits, loving memory and spare mastery.
After recounting Benny Spellman’s amusing arrogance in the wake of his role as the bass voice on K Doe’s “Mother-In-Law”, Toussaint slid into “Lipstick Traces”, his vehicle for Spellman, replete with a lovely, searching ”Won’t you come on home” bridge after which he quickly remarked, ”I did get Benny off my back for a couple of minutes with that one”.
Then, a stirring version of “All These Things”, his ballad written for a very young Art Neville with a terrific unison figure executed with”Aw shucks, that was nothing” aplomb by the seasoned combo.
After explaining that this tune was one of his entrees to the country market through a cover by Joe Stampley, he then self-deprecatingly mentioned that his recording of the following number sold 5 copies but that didn’t matter once Betty Wright recorded it and took it to the upper reaches of the R&B charts.
A storming version of the miraculous “Shoorah, Shoorah” ensued. He then spoke of the inspiration provided by a sandy-haired Scotsman whose genuine soulfulness and reliance upon warm Pabst tickled him into writing a few of his favorite tunes. (Though he never mentioned his name, this was the woefully under-recognised Frankie Miller.)
Cue “Brickyard Blues (Play Something Sweet)” and its plea for directness plus that wonder of a bridge. ”It’s enough to make a light in the dark, It’s enough to make a bite into a bark….”
Then, addressing the ”plenty of curses and lots of blessings” of the Katrina experience; one of the latter being the by-product of bringing Toussaint and his band out of New Orleans and into the Pabst tonight. He spoke of the experience of working with Costello and of Elvis’ encouraging recognition of the near prophetic prescience of Allen’s back catalog. (Toussaint is far too modest to speak of his own work as prophetic, however.)
He prayerfully slipped into his curbside entreaty, “Freedom For The Stallion” and damned if it didn’t strike my ear as the crafty and soothing elder brother to Curtis Mayfield’s masterful ”People Get Ready”. The Pabst is a fine dark place for crying tears of joy and otherwise.
“Freedom For The Stallion, Freedom for the Mare and her Colt
Freedom for the Baby Child who has not grown old enough to vote
Lord , Have Mercy, What you gonna do
About the people who are praying to you?
They’ve got men making laws that destroy other men
They make Money God, It’s a Doggone Sin
Oh Lord, You’ve Got To Help Us Find A Way”
Then, into “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” initially recorded for Lee Dorsey’s “Yes We Can” album and last year, the centerpiece of “The River In Reverse”. An unblinkered examination of our responsibility to each other in terms much more playful than most such things,
“What happened to the Liberty Bell
I heard so much about?
Did it really ding dong?
Ding Dong
It Must Have Dinged Wrong
It Didn’t Ding Long
With a reminder that it’s Carnival Time, the maestro and his crew paid a visit to the kingdom of one of his mentors, Professor Longhair, in the guise of a medley of “Big Chief “and “Tipitina” offered instrumentally with heartbreaking minor key restatements of the themes in a ruminative, meditative fingering of the grain of the experiential weight of these ostensible frolics. Intimations of loss, of the thinker abstracted from the festivities, of the flight of fancy…………..followed by a quick glance at “Yes We Can” with a delightful, rapid-fire accelerating vocal duet with tenor saxophonist Amedee “Breeze” Castenell.
Following the introduction of band members, Chris Severin on bass, Herman Le Beau on drums, Renard Poche on guitar and the aforementioned “Breeze in Db” on saxophone, Toussaint began to muse with pianistic punctuation about trips he, his father and siblings had taken ”out to the country where the old folk live”. Beyond the reaches of electricity,”none of that big B flat Big City Hum.”
Sketching a hierarchy of Creole forebears, ”This was before the world belonged to children”…”We didn’t know grown folk lied yet”, he rhapsodically conjured the extended family as self-sufficient and ever so contentedly sitting on the porch looking to the moonlight at play in the leaves above, “that soft sweet light show shining”.
Drifting into the near falsetto frailty of “Southern Nights” and forever rescuing it from the overplayed, glib vicissitudes of Glen Campbell’s lucrative hit version, this was the vulnerable, enormous beating heart of a grand storyteller sweetly intoning his long-hidden empathetic embrace of the ineffable thickness of the world. Among other things. With a full band fanfare of the theme, it was off to the wings with a standing ovation.
Then, as an encore, two tunes that have played large roles in others’ repertoires (Bonnie Raitt and Boz Scaggs to name a couple). “What Do You Want The Girl To Do?”, a laceratingly self-critical examination of one’s cowardice in the face of unconditional love. And “What Is Success?’, an examination of the tangled motives of Art and Finance couched in a tune more lilting than it has any right to be. “Truly believing and trying over and over again.” Ah, the gift economy!
Another glance at “Southern Nights” with an especially piquant two-fisted piano storm and off into the night.
The stripped down 5-piece band offered a tantalizing glimpse into the playfulness and exploratory vigor of Toussaint’s process. I’ve made pilgrimages to encounter the spectacle and pageantry of Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans performances replete with scores of impeccably scored horns, choruses of lusty background singers and an occasionally attendant surfeit of Vegas-like glitz and superficiality. Miraculously, virtually none of that tang of the tawdry clogged the musical palate last evening. His is a fragile and intimate muse. What a lean dream. Bravo and huzzah a thousand times.