In an illustrious recording career spanning some five decades as an artist, songwriter, arranger, producer Allen Toussaint has never fronted a project anything like this. Containing only one vocal track, his latest collaboration with producer Joe Henry spotlights Toussaint’s bluesy elegance as a piano player. And in doing so, it leapfrogs over his New Orleans influences such as Professor Longhair and contemporaries such as James Booker. Instead, it goes all the way back to the seminal compositions of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Sidney Bechet, while extending the musical context to encompass Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt.
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And it’s wonderful from beginning to end, with not a hint of embalming anachronism, as Toussaint and his accompanists sustain a vibrant immediacy throughout the timeless music. Among the younger jazz artists with whom he renews the legacy, as if passing a torch, are pianist Brad Mehldau, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman and, most crucially, New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton, whose intertwined lines with clarinetist Don Byron establish the brassy spirit of the sessions on the opening rendition of Bechet’s “Egyptian Fantasy”.
The rest of the band on these acoustic arrangements are Henry’s frequent co-conspirators: guitarist Marc Ribot, upright bassist David Piltch and percussionist Jay Bellerose. Like Toussaint (and unlike the session’s other guests), these musicians aren’t known primarily as jazz players, and this isn’t really a jazz album, but one that depends more on ensemble interplay than individual displays of virtuosity.
Yet within those tapestries, highlights abound. There’s the deft acoustic guitar of (the more typically electrifying) Ribot on “St. James Infirmary”, here more jaunty than funereal, and “Blue Drag”, where Toussaint makes no attempt to emulate the gypsy jazz of Reinhardt. There are the ornate flourishes of the piano duet pairing Toussaint and Mehldau over the bedrock New Orleans bluesiness of Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues”. There’s Payton’s melodic buoyancy on “Singin’ The Blues” and his more muted meditation of “A Dear Old Southland”, where Toussaint provides hints of Scott Joplin’s stateliness and George Gershwin’s “Summertime”.
Though one might think that Monk’s angularity would present the biggest challenge for Toussaint, it’s the former’s title track that sounds most like one of the latter’s early instrumentals. It’s a revelation, on an album filled with them. As big a fan as I am of Joe Henry’s own releases, if he would do nothing for the rest of his career but produce Allen Toussaint albums, that would be fine by me.
