CostelloNews.com

The Word , May '06

IF YOUR NAME’S ELVIS AND THIS IS TUESDAY..

...that could mean a collaboration with Allen Toussaint, a few standards with Tony Bennett or a night at the Grand Ole Opry. But it could as easily have been country or ballet, film music or jazz. TOBY MANNING meets the intrepid explorer in New York

" SHALL I TELL YOU my week?” demands Elvis Costello, black-suited, purple-tied and anything but tongue-tied in a Manhattan hotel suite at a sprightly 10 am.

“It started at Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble up in Woodstock and I got up on stage and sang with him for two hours. I mean I’ve loved The Band since I was a kid! Then on Wednesday, Diana [Krall, jazz singer and Costello’s wife} and I went out to New Jersey to record with Tony Bennett — how great is that? You walk in, the musicians are all in the room, no booths, no headphones — three takes. I wanted it to go on longer — I was having such a ball singing with him. Then I went and played the Grand Ole Opry as Emmylou Harris’s guest, with Gillian Welch. This is the eighth day, and I’m playing with [ New Orleans soul legend Allen ]Toussaint tonight. Does that answer your question?”

In truth, I’d forgotten I’d even asked a question: there are few pauses for breath, let alone questions, in conversation with Costello, the man who puts the “bullet” in “bulletin”. But some ten minutes previously, I recall I’d suggested he lived a rather enviable life.

“It’s true,” he says with his gap-toothed grin. “I tell you, I’m having about the time of my life at the moment.”

Costello’s avalanche of words is only an attempt to keep up with his work rate. For he’s already released one album this year, the jazz orchestra collection My Flame Burns Blue, and tonight he’s launching another, a soul collaboration with Allen Toussaint. By the time you read this, he’ll probably have released another album, performed with a baker’s dozen’s living legends and, quite plausibly, re-recorded his entire back catalogue in Castilan.

His residence for the past three years in New York is, he says, a central component of all this activity “In London there isn’t the same spirit of continuity. It’s all about the new thing all the time — I hardly even talked to other groups, let alone played with them: I wasn’t as self- conscious about denying the past as a lot of other people who started out the year I began...a lot of people talked a lot of bollocks, but of course what happens is you get music that recycles back on the last five minutes.”

If Costello recycled his last five minutes, it’d still be dizzyingly, confusingly, eclectic. Indeed some fans would prefer it if he did repeat himself from time to time, ranging and tangenting as much musically as conversationally (try connecting the clauses in Costello’s last sentence). For the last 16 years, Costello has been working with an energy that’d shame most youths (his own excepted) while being possessed of a musical open-mindedness that’s utterly antithetical to youth’s closed shop. This is the man who, lest we forget, released a country album in 1981, aeons before anyone had considered adding the “alt”. But it’s the stylistic smorgasbord of 1989’s Spike that now seems pivotal, finding him collaborating with Toussaint, Paul McCartney, Roger McGuinn, Christy Moore and Chrissie Hynde. Since then, as well as three straight-ish pop/rock/country collections, he’s released a sample-based album, an album of torch songs, a wildly diverse covers collection, written the bulk of albums by Wendy James, classical singer Anna Sofie Von Otter and his wife Diana Krall, co-composed four of the tracks on McCartney’s Flowers In The Dirt, written a ballet suite, and made collaborative albums with the Brodksy Quartet, soundtrack composer Richard Harvey Burt Bacharach, Bill Frisell (unreleased), and now the Metropole Orkest and Allen Toussaint. And did we mention his ongoing opera?

Costello shrugs, “I was lucky to have a childhood with lots of music from different sources. My dad was always bringing records from work. He gave me my first Mingus, my first Tammi and Marvin, my first Lou Rawls, my first Joni Mitchell. That’s a lot of music for a 13-year-old to take in at one sitting.”

He freely admits that he narrowed his range of musical interest and expression when he first started recording to try to fit in with the New Wave climate of the time.

“I did narrow it and I listened to what was happening. It’s like walking around the hat shop trying on hats. Once you get the key to the shop you’re going to fuck off and do what you want.”

He’s certainly got the keys now: he can make the records he wants without even having to sell that many, lodged curiously but happily on Universal’s Classics and Jazz division. Perhaps a more interesting question to ask Costello then is what music he doesn’t like?

“Psychedelia. When my parents were divorced when I was 16, my mother and I went to live in Liverpool.” (You forget sometimes, but amidst even the new Americanisms, Costello’s voice is pure posh Scouse.)

“There were two factions in the class at my school — the prog, Canterbury sound, and I couldn’t get with that. And psychedelia. Well, I didn’t want to be out of step. You don’t at that age, and I was the new kid, too. But I tried really hard and I just didn’t get it — they’re just playing out of tune! I liked the Dead, ‘cos they were ugly, and nobody liked them. But I’ve still never listened to a Pink Floyd album all the way through.”

What gets Costello keyed up is music with its roots showing, be it the blues heritage that suffuses jazz and soul, the ballad heritage that informs folk and country, or the classical tradition of string quartet, ballet and opera. This last, incidentally, gives him more in common with Roger Waters than he might care to admit: rock musicians turned opera composers being a rather exclusive club. But then Costello’s already composed a ballet, II Sogno, the score for which makes up half of My Flame Burns Blue, so he’s all set for the scoffers.

“I was aware it was going to be a bit of a stretch for people to accept that I was writing this ballet piece. I’ve got no ego about being seen as a symphonist. Pompous classical critics tend to say, ‘This isn’t symphonic’, and I go, ‘But where does it say it’s a symphony?’ It’s got some charm, it’s got some humour to it, it’s got some good melodies, and I try to use the orchestra in an interesting way.” I’m starting to realise that Costello doesn’t have much time for questions in more senses than one. When I ask him about having taught himself musical notation for the ballet, he’s almost defensively dismissive.

“It’s a technique I developed over seven years. But you can become a doctor or a priest in that time, so it’s not that much of an achievement. Learning anything when you’re older is sometimes thought to be harder but I didn’t learn to drive ‘till was 35. I’d written 200 songs before I decided I needed notated music — it wasn’t exactly holding me back!”

Like many too long in the public eye, Costello is prone to trying to deconstruct questions for critical agendas.

“There’s this bland assumption that these things are only ever done to make yourself look clever. I don’t need to write a classical piece to be taken too seriously — look at all the pompous theorising that’s gone on about my work since 1977!”

He’s just as spiky about My Flame Burns Blue, as if parrying those who either seek to pin a label on him, or to pin him to the spot.

“I didn’t just think, great I’m going to work with an orchestra, better dash off a few arrangements. I’d created this repertoire that only existed for the concert stage. And goodness, if I can’t have some fun with Watching The Detectives, after almost 20 years, then I don’t know what. Taking the film noir thing that was always there and making it literal. It’s only for this one evening, it doesn’t erase the original take, which is one of my favourite records I've made.

ALLEN TOUSSAINT (pronounced Too-Sant around here) puts the “gentle” in “southern gentleman”. Even more immaculately turned out than Costello, the author of Lee Dorsey’s Working In A Coal Mine, Aaron Neville’s Hercules, The Pointer Sisters’ Yes We Can, and Glen Campbell’s Southern Nights may be New Orleans royalty but is incredibly unassuming. Indeed, if anyone is awed, it’s the veteran’s backroom boy who’s awed by performer Costello’s consummate ability to talk. Indeed rather than being affronted when he’s talked over, Toussaint shakes his head in admiration.

This contrasting couple’s collaboration has its roots in catastrophe. Caught up in Hurricane Katrina, Toussaint took refuge in a hotel, only to find his house gutted and his studio utterly destroyed. He sought refuge in New York. He had previously worked with Costello on a cover of Yoko Ono’s Walking On Thin Ice in 1983, then again on Deep Dark Truthful Mirror on the Spike album. After Katrina, Costello began playing Toussaint’s Freedom For The Stallion in tribute to its victims. Both he and Toussaint played at a huge benefit for Katrina victims in New York’s Rose Hall last September. Watching Toussaint at Joe’s Pub the next afternoon, Costello decided the time was right for a “song-book record” — an album of Toussaint’s songs, performed by the pair of them. If the contrast between Costello’s acerbic scepticism and Toussaint’s sunny positivity struck outsiders, it didn’t strike Toussaint.

“I thought it was a wonderful idea,” Toussaint drawls with that distinctive New Orleans French tinge. Even when the idea broadened to include new songs written collaboratively. “I never thought of him as negative — I thought of it as positively saying something. And I like what happens to meanings as you soak them in and as you digest them — at first something has a certain taste, and when you take the second bite, it has a little more profound taste and you get to know it better... I enjoy the digestion. This has truly been a milestone in my life.”

In fact, Costello has become subtly, but noticeably sunnier ever since he stopped drinking ten years ago. In fact, on a new number wrote about Katrina, he essays a kind of spiky conscious soul — The River In Reverse.
“It seemed kind of foolish, like a denial, to say that nothing about this moved me to say anything at all,” Costello says, pre-emptively fending off predicted criticism. “The presumption of American foreign policy telling other people how to live is horrifying when something like Katrina reveals how some people in this city are being asked to live as a matter of course. The people who were least equipped to survive it were abandoned by government. Why? Because they don’t vote.”

So it was a political move to complete the recording in New Orleans itself, using Toussaint’s regular horn players.

“It was very moving to be somewhere you’re used to so much bustle, so much life,” says Costello. “The franchise businesses have all shut up shop; no tourists of all; hotels full of people who’ve been relocated. A lot of Hummers and people in sand-coloured uniforms carrying automatic weapons. And there’s still a curfew!”

Lest anyone decide this is the musical equivalent of Oscar-hungry actors doing “disabled”, Costello says, “If this sounds like some terribly grave thing we were doing, it was anything but. We set up in the room together, no separation, the horns all over the drums, but it doesn’t matter, because they’re going to play it right. It was truly joyful. And we finished the album in 11 days.”

It’s not often you get to see someone like Elvis Costello in a stripped-back, intimate setting, so tonight’s show at Joe’s Pub is an absolute treat. The venue may look like the inside of the Tardis, but the performance is a highly human, tautly emotional affair.

There’s even more purple present tonight, Costello wearing a purple suit and both performers boasting purple ties. And while, seated at the piano, rolling out licks piquant as gumbo, Toussaint says not a word; Costello is loquacious, indeed purple between songs. And if anyone were in any doubt about the coherence of the collaboration, Costello sings a quite astonishing Freedom For The Stallion, while new song The Sharpest Thorn reveals their contrasts to be complementary: Toussaint’s insouciance balancing Costello’s spikiness.

That spikiness is unstinted the next day, however. When I ask about the quantity of collaboration in the second half of his career, Costello immediately parries: “All records are to a degree collaborative. My early records were a collaboration with Nick Lowe.” But then, as the sparkling water flows, he expands. “And then as you get older, you’re trying things from consciously different worlds that require more accommodation, like with Burt Bacharach — very precise values about music, written down music; with the Brodksy quartet, if I’d gone in there and said, “It goes, la-la-la...”, they’d just look at me like I’m an idiot. You’ve just got to know the language of communication.”

Can he maintain this diversity of work?

“All I’ve been trying to do is not work for somebody else,” he says. “If I get up at 6.30 in the morning — that’s my choice. I don’t see any reason to lay in bed. There’s a lot of things to do that are exciting and fun — it’s not just all about sensual things. It’s not about challenges and how you’re perceived. It’s not about ambitions, it’s not even about money. Having hits and bullshit like that doesn’t make you any happier. Pop stardom was fucking hideous. I’m enjoying it a lot more now, not worrying about whether things are successful.” An enviable position. and indeed, a truly enviable life.