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New York Daily News

'River's' healing waters

Toussaint and Costello craft
a cathartic response to Katrina

BY JIM FARBER

He may have lost his home, his possessions and 40 years of important music memorabilia. But you won't hear a peep of complaint out of New Orleans flood survivor Allen Toussaint.

"For me, it's just a joyous thing to be able to go back now and play in New Orleans," the musical legend says. "It's fitting to be there. My home is being rebuilt. And the city will be better."

Optimism of that order fires much of the music on a stunning new album matching the talents of Toussaint with those of someone who seems to have his fingers in every genre on earth: Elvis Costello. Titled "The River in Reverse," the disk filters expressions of anger and frustration over recent events in the city through a sieve of humor and joy.

"We didn't want to preach," Toussaint explains. "These are songs, not speeches." But they never would have been recorded were it not for the wreckage of Katrina and the many musical benefits that came in its wake.

In the weeks after the catastrophe last year, Costello and Toussaint kept finding themselves playing together at fund-raisers for the survivors. "Over a seven-day period we were seeing each other almost every day," Costello explains.

The two had worked together briefly in the past. Toussaint produced the song "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" on the Brit singer's 1989 CD, "Spike, the Beloved Entertainer." Costello had been attracted to Toussaint's style ever since he was young. As a producer, writer, arranger and sometime performer, the 68-year-old Toussaint has been a key figure in music for more than 40 years. He had a hand in shaping the music of everyone from local New Orleans legends like Irma Thomas, Dr. John and the Meters, to pop names like the Pointer Sisters and Patti LaBelle. It was Toussaint who arranged and produced LaBelle's peak album, "Nightbirds," in 1974, which included the original "Lady Marmalade." Over the years, his songs have been recorded by everyone from Bonnie Raitt ("What Do You Want the Boy to Do") to Glen Campbell ("Southern Nights").

But it was Toussaint's work on the Lee Dorsey hits of the '60s (like "Working in a Coal Mine") that first attracted Costello. "They were different from all the other songs that were called soul at the time," the singer explains. "They didn't sound like soul records from up north in Memphis, New York or Chicago. They had a different approach to rhythm. I'd always associated New Orleans with jazz. I didn't realize there were all these riches there."

In fact, Toussaint's compositions have always transcended the Big Easy's brew of soul, jazz and R&B. His melodies move with their own pop grace. Unsurprisingly, when Costello first thought about proposing the joint project to Toussaint, he considered making a songbook salute to the older star's catalogue. He suggested such an album to his A&R man, Joe McEwen, who, in turn, asked if they could flesh it out with new material. The ridiculously prolific Costello had one piece already: He'd written a song inspired by Katrina ("The River in Reverse") in a scant 10 minutes and debuted it at one of the New Orleans benefits. Costello thought if Toussaint arranged it, it could make a good jumping-off point for a real collaboration.

They first tested the waters together with a rewrite of the classic New Orleans tune "Tipitina." Costello added new lyrics, and together they turned that into the breathtaking new "Ascension Day."

"That broke things wide open," Costello says.

The duo wrote three more songs together in about 25 minutes. They had planned to record the result in New Orleans, but when they were to begin the album the city was still closed. So they opted to start in Hollywood.

Things were going so swimmingly, Costello and Toussaint were afraid they might finish before they ever got down to Louisiana. But, eventually, things found a slower rhythm, and the pair wound up cutting a significant portion of the music in the devastated town.

Once there, Costello wanted to see the worst of it for himself. "The studio was a five-minute drive from the Lower Ninth Ward," he explains. "I didn't feel it was a morbid thing to go. Each of us should see what was there with our own eyes."

Some of the frustration over what he saw shows in the music. "Broken Promise Land" refers to the government's poor response to the crisis. The watery title track seems to, as well, although Costello says he feels it transcends the event. "I'm talking about the general flow towards a world I don't want to live in — a world where we're not taking better care of each other," he explains.

Probably the strongest political statement on the album — Toussaint's "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?" — is also the disk's most clever cut. As Toussaint sings: "What happened to the Liberty Bell I heard so much about?/ It didn't ding dong/It must have dinged wrong/It didn't ding long."

The wit of those lines underscores Toussaint's relentlessly upbeat attitude. To him, even the diaspora of New Orleans musicians created by the hurricane has a positive side. "These players have become our ambassadors," he explains. "Now they're bringing New Orleans to everyone."

Originally published on June 3, 2006
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Costello, Toussaint bound by the river

By JANE STEVENSON -- Toronto Sun

Surviving the storm

At first glance, a British New Wave pioneer and a New Orleans R&B legend -- the latter 17 years older than the former -- might not appear to have much musically in common.

But Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, whose new inspired collaboration, The River In Reverse, hits stores Tuesday, had worked together twice during the '80s.

Last year's life-changing Hurricane Katrina led to the two musicians crossing paths again in New York City, where Toussaint had temporarily relocated and Costello spends half of his time with Canadian wife Diana Krall.

The occasion was a jazz gala-turned-Katrina benefit that Costello and Krall -- in B.C. when the storm actually struck -- had been asked to play by Wynton Marsalis.

"By this time I'd heard that Allen had made it to New York and I said, 'There wouldn't be any better thing than to ask Allen to play (Toussaint's) Freedom For The Stallion with me," said Costello, 51, seated beside the elegant 68-year-old Toussaint in a Yorkville restaurant recently.

"So that was the first time I heard Allen's voice since the previous summer when we'd been on the bill together at the (New Orleans) jazz fest. Allen's presence of mind and stoicism in the face of everything was remarkable. It was kind of humbling."

The first benefit led to a second, The Big Apple For The Big Easy, a big televised event from Madison Square Garden, which saw Toussaint's band back up several artists, including Costello.

"Definitely, at that point, I thought, there were some songs of Allen's that could be heard in this moment that had particular resonance for the circumstance," said Costello.

The River In Reverse eventually became seven Toussaint songs, five Toussaint-Costello collaborations and the title track written solely by Costello in a burst of 10 minutes.

The collaborators arrived in Toronto in early May, fresh off a performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. And it was clear that Toussaint, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who has arranged horns for The Band and Paul Simon, produced huge hits for Dr. John (I Was In The Right Place) and LaBelle (Lady Marmalade) and whose songs have been covered by Glen Campbell (Southern Nights), Boz Scaggs (What Do You Want The Girl To Do?) and Devo (Working In A Coal Mine), was buoyed by some return to normalcy in his beloved Big Easy.

"It was a wonderful spiritual feeling to see so many people saying 'yes.' Because if they're there, they said 'yes,' " he said with a smile. "And I mean on stage and in the audience as well, so it was quite rewarding and the people who put the Fest together, they were almost teary-eyed to see such a turnout."

Recording The River In Reverse also brought Toussaint and Costello, whose summer tour includes stops at Fallsview Casino Resort on July 7 and 8, back to the Crescent City about a month and a half after Katrina.

They'd initially began their work -- with Costello's Imposters bandmates Steve Nieve on B3 organ and drummer Pete Thomas and Toussaint's four-man horn section and guitarist Anthony Brown -- in Los Angeles.

But Costello felt the move was important to Toussaint even if the Englishman wasn't quite prepared for the scene that greeted him so soon after the storm.

"The signs of destruction were everywhere but specifically in the most badly affected areas, it's pretty devastating experience to see with your own eyes," said Costello. "A television picture won't prepare you for it, when you're actually at eye level with it, and see some personal belongings just hanging in a tree, and a car on top of a roof, and a refrigerator upside down. It was like a surrealistic scene."

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Mutual attraction

While not a member of Elvis Costello's most famous backing band, pianist Allen Toussaint has a long history with the U.K. singer, including a new album inspired by Hurricane Katrina

Mike Doherty
National Post

Monday, June 05, 2006

Allen Toussaint claims to have always written "in the moment," but in the wake of Hurricane Katrina the work of one of New Orleans' greatest living musicians has taken on an added resonance. With the help of an unlikely champion, Toussaint's music -- and its message -- are re-emerging just as the music scene in his hometown is bravely making a comeback.

The River in Reverse -- a collaboration with Elvis Costello, the one-time leader of English new-wave band The Attractions -- is the first album to bear Toussaint's name in nine years. For most of his 50-year career, the pianist and sometime singer has operated behind the scenes, composing and arranging songs that have become hits for artists as diverse as Lee Dorsey, Three Dog Night, Patti Labelle and Glen Campbell, who made his Southern Nights a smash. Given the sheer number of people both Toussaint and Costello have worked with, it was perhaps inevitable their paths would cross.

Sitting in a Yorkville restaurant during a promotional stop in Toronto, the dapperly-attired Costello, whose plastic-rimmed shades are the only visible reminder of a career flouting convention, recalls the first time he met Toussaint and recorded in New Orleans, in 1983.

"For outsiders," he says, "it's quite hard to break into that town. I used to get my agent to book me in there, because I'd be pretty confident that the concert would be cancelled for lack of ticket sales and then I'd have a couple of days off. On this occasion, I got to record with Allen."

The experience stuck with him, even if the result (a cover of Yoko Ono's Walking on Thin Ice) vanished quickly into his cluttered back catalogue; the two would work together again in 1988 for a song on Costello's album Spike, and they found themselves sharing stages for Katrina benefit concerts last year. Costello, ever the musical explorer, approached the pianist to do an "Allen Toussaint songbook."

"I knew there were a number of songs that I felt strongly about," he says, "several of which I thought there was no finer moment than now for them to be heard."

He picked out early '70s numbers such as Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further? and Freedom for the Stallion, both of which deal with race relations in America. Costello was spending a lot of time in New York City, and since Toussaint was living there in exile after his New Orleans home was flooded, the pair began writing together, inspired by current events. "I never had looked for as much as what happened in this collaboration," explains the serene (and equally dapper) Toussaint. "Usually an artist is sent to me, in a way 'nekkid,' and I'm to take it from there. That's a totally different element from what happened here. To have this much real collaboration, I must say, was a luxury and a blessing."

Together, the two penned five songs, which evoke sorrow, anger, determination, jubilation and human weakness. Perhaps the most memorable new composition is The Sharpest Thorn, which sounds like a drunken but rueful waltz. "Although we know we must repent," sings Costello, "We hit the scene and look for sins / That haven't even been invented."

Says Costello, "It's a simple tale about somebody who goes out, full of pride, to join a parade, and comes home at the end of the day with confetti in his hair and his pocket's been picked, and [he's] a little wiser and humbler."

Other songs also evoke evil and judgment; Costello attributes this, half-jokingly, to his and Toussaint's Catholic upbringing. In Broken Promise Land, he sings, "There's a place where infidels and showgirls meet." Costello sees this lyric as a key to this aspect of the album. "There are some people who will tell you that what happened to New Orleans was some sort of divine retribution, because it's a sinful place -- where's the charity in that remark?"

Of course, there was a time where the last thing anyone would expect from Costello was charity. In 1977, he told the New Music Express that all he knew of emotions were "revenge and guilt."

"I'd drunk 14 Pernods when I said that," recalls Costello rather sheepishly. "There was a degree of bravado in that remark. I might have been trying to clear a little space around myself to get on with my job by saying something that would be like, 'Wow! Get over that!' I realized after a few years that you couldn't base your career on one view of music or one narrow set of emotions."

The River in Reverse was recorded partially in New Orleans last December, just as the city was slowly opening back up for business. It features both Costello's band, The Imposters, and Toussaint's Crescent City Horns, and ends with a succession of upbeat songs reflecting how Toussaint sees the post-Katrina period as one of new opportunities -- this collaboration being one of them.

"There's loads of great things coming out of Katrina," he affirms. "The small things I see, moving slowly but very surely, will become more obvious and glorious as time goes on. It's going to take a while, because New Orleans always is a bit slower than the rest of America, even in tragedy. That's one of the things that we live with, and which comes from the soul and the strut and the syncopation of the music, as well as the shrimp po' boy and gumbo."

If the reception to the duo's performance at this year's New Orleans Jazz Festival was any indication, many people in the city share his optimism.

"The crowd was just wonderful," enthuses Toussaint. "It was more than I've ever seen at one time. I was expecting the best, because I always do, and the best came and said, 'Here I am.' "

- The River in Reverse is in stores tomorrow.
© National Post 2006