punk meets funk
Elvis Costello would probably be the first to admit that he wasn’t the greatest songwriter onstage Wednesday.
True, Costello’s catalog is far from shoddy. But he tends to aim high when he collaborates, having already worked with Burt Bacharach and, earlier this summer, with the Boston Pops. Now he’s upped the ante by working with Allen Toussaint - not only one of New Orleans’ master tunesmiths, but a pianist with decades of tradition at his fingertips.
From the start, when Toussaint strolled onstage during Costello’s New Orleans-inspired “Monkey to Man,” it was clear this wasn’t going to be a competition. Instead, a spirit of collaboration ruled, as Costello brought along his Imposters - two-thirds of whom have been with him since 1978 - and Toussaint his four-piece Crescent City Horns (plus guitarist Anthony Brown, who stayed in the shadows while Costello played leads). Toussaint’s horn arrangements added an elegant touch to a few handfuls of Costello favorites; in turn, Costello got Toussaint to drop his gentlemanly reserve and pound the Steinway grand with abandon.
Hurricane Katrina was invoked often in songs from their newalbum, “The River in Reverse” - Costello’s title track was a rare show of righteous anger - but so was the eternal spirit of New Orleans. The songs that sounded most topical were “Freedom for the Stallion” and “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further,” both of which asked if America still cares about its less fortunate. Yet both songs were written by Toussaint in the early ’70s.
Gregarious as always, Costello made a few pointed political comments between tunes. And it must be noted that he sounded far more at home with r & b than he has with the torch and art songs he’s tried in recent years. During “On Your Way Down,” he bounced a nasty fuzztone guitar off Toussaint’s elegant piano runs: punk meets funk. And “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea,” from Costello’s younger days, benefited from a slightly chaotic but appropriate horn chart.
The last encore of a nearly three-hour show built from Paul Simon’s “American Tune” - by far the oddest choice of the night but given real soul by Toussaint’s vocal - to a rave-up on Little Richard’s “Slippin’ & Slidin’.” It’s a longstanding tradition for Costello to end the night with something unfamiliar and a bit jarring, but in this case “The Sharpest Thorn,” a song about a dimly remembered night of excess, ended with the horns alone on a note of jubilation
( extract)
“The best time, personally, I’ve ever had on stage,” is how Costello summed it all up. Toussaint played second fiddle on his grand piano for most of the set, but shone on “A Certain Girl” and on a Professor Longhair variation that began the second encore. And there was an implicit, positive message in Toussaint’s exuberant “Yes We Can Can,” vis-à-vis the New Orleans wreckage.
Boston Globe -
(extract)
Most of the brightest colors were supplied by the four-man Crescent City Horns who added noir tones to ``Watching the Detectives," a calypso-style liveliness to ``Clubland," and punctuated Toussaint's playful ``A Certain Girl" with a series of bright brass exclamation points.
Toussaint sang only a handful of songs but made his presence known on the Steinway, enlivening the evening with licks both rollicking and solemn, sometimes on the same song as on the deceptively upbeat lament ``Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further?"
Costello seemed especially energized and was in strong voice -- crooning R&B tunes, yelping rockers, and applying his acidic bark to vigorous new protest songs -- and made it easy to believe him when he said that this was the most fun he'd ever had onstage.
Near the end of the evening the regal Toussaint transformed the lyrics of Paul Simon's gently weary ``American Tune" into both an elegy for lost ideals and a poignant rebuke of those who've lost them. It was stunning.
MUSIC REVIEW
Costello stages a Big Easy revival show
By Sarah Rodman, Globe Staff | July 13, 2006
The best advertisement for a visit to post-Katrina New Orleans isn't being produced by the Louisiana tourism office. Veteran rock tunesmith Elvis Costello and Big Easy musical treasure Allen Toussaint have teamed up for a tour this summer that serves as a striking reminder of the ebullient music of the city.
Last night at the Bank of America Pavilion Costello exhorted the three-quarters-capacity crowd to take a journey to the region to support its economic recovery. But if anyone is buying plane tickets today it was not Costello's words that did the trick but the mighty rock and soul performance that he, Toussaint, the Imposters, and the Crescent City Horns cooked up for more than two hours.
Part protest -- an action figure of President Bush was the only stage prop -- and part jamboree, the assembled group played most of the pair's recent album, ``The River in Reverse," and, as Costello put it, slapped ``a new coat of paint" on a passel of his greatest hits and deep cuts.
Most of the brightest colors were supplied by the four-man Crescent City Horns who added noir tones to ``Watching the Detectives," a calypso-style liveliness to ``Clubland," and punctuated Toussaint's playful ``A Certain Girl" with a series of bright brass exclamation points.
Toussaint sang only a handful of songs but made his presence known on the Steinway, enlivening the evening with licks both rollicking and solemn, sometimes on the same song as on the deceptively upbeat lament ``Who's Gonna Help a Brother Get Further?"
Costello seemed especially energized and was in strong voice -- crooning R&B tunes, yelping rockers, and applying his acidic bark to vigorous new protest songs -- and made it easy to believe him when he said that this was the most fun he'd ever had onstage.
Near the end of the evening the regal Toussaint transformed the lyrics of Paul Simon's gently weary ``American Tune" into both an elegy for lost ideals and a poignant rebuke of those who've lost them. It was stunning.
At the two-hour and 15-minute mark we reluctantly skipped out of the party to make our deadline to the determined grooves of ``Yes We Can Can." The band seemed as tireless as the crowd.
While there is nothing about Hurricane Katrina for which to be grateful, this collaboration, which Costello said wouldn't have happened without the storm, proved that devastation needn't be total when it comes to the essential spirit of a place.
That Costello and Toussaint are able to bottle that New Orleans essence and sprinkle it liberally across the country on this tour is a fine testament to that spirit.
Boston Herald
Costello, Toussaint make for joyous union
By Brett Milano/ Music
Friday, July 14, 2006
Elvis Costello would probably be the first to admit that he wasn’t the greatest songwriter onstage Wednesday.
True, Costello’s catalog is far from shoddy. But he tends to aim high when he collaborates, having already worked with Burt Bacharach and, earlier this summer, with the Boston Pops. Now he’s upped the ante by working with Allen Toussaint - not only one of New Orleans’ master tunesmiths, but a pianist with decades of tradition at his fingertips.
From the start, when Toussaint strolled onstage during Costello’s New Orleans-inspired “Monkey to Man,” it was clear this wasn’t going to be a competition. Instead, a spirit of collaboration ruled, as Costello brought along his Imposters - two-thirds of whom have been with him since 1978 - and Toussaint his four-piece Crescent City Horns (plus guitarist Anthony Brown, who stayed in the shadows while Costello played leads). Toussaint’s horn arrangements added an elegant touch to a few handfuls of Costello favorites; in turn, Costello got Toussaint to drop his gentlemanly reserve and pound the Steinway grand with abandon.
Hurricane Katrina was invoked often in songs from their newalbum, “The River in Reverse” - Costello’s title track was a rare show of righteous anger - but so was the eternal spirit of New Orleans. The songs that sounded most topical were “Freedom for the Stallion” and “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further,” both of which asked if America still cares about its less fortunate. Yet both songs were written by Toussaint in the early ’70s.
Gregarious as always, Costello made a few pointed political comments between tunes. And it must be noted that he sounded far more at home with r & b than he has with the torch and art songs he’s tried in recent years. During “On Your Way Down,” he bounced a nasty fuzztone guitar off Toussaint’s elegant piano runs: punk meets funk. And “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea,” from Costello’s younger days, benefited from a slightly chaotic but appropriate horn chart.
The last encore of a nearly three-hour show built from Paul Simon’s “American Tune” - by far the oddest choice of the night but given real soul by Toussaint’s vocal - to a rave-up on Little Richard’s “Slippin’ & Slidin’.” It’s a longstanding tradition for Costello to end the night with something unfamiliar and a bit jarring, but in this case “The Sharpest Thorn,” a song about a dimly remembered night of excess, ended with the horns alone on a note of jubilation
The Phoenix, MA
Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint
Foray to Funkytown
By: JIM SULLIVAN
7/14/2006 12:45:50 PM
Elvis Costello long ago established himself as the best songwriter of his generation. But he remains determined to explore every genre under the sun, collaborating with everyone from Billy Sherill to Paul McCartney, from the Brodsky Quartet to his wife Diana Krall, and Emmylou Harris to, most recently, New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint. The downside for fans of Costello the pop genius is that every now and again he overreaches and you just want him to go back to what he does best.
That was the case when Costello and Toussaint landed at the Bank of America Pavilion a week ago last Wednesday night to fend off a major downpour with a two-and-a-half hour workout in support of their new The River In Reverse (Verve Forecast). It was clearly the Costello show, but Toussaint, Costello pointed out, wrote new charts to nine Costello-penned tune they performed, and it was Toussaint’s four-piece Crescent City Horns who imbued classics like “(I Don’t Want To Go to) Chelsea)” with sass and brass, trombonist Sam “Big Sam” Williams in particular emerging as a star soloist.
This was a trip to funkytown. Costello returned, in large part, to the soul man styling of 1980’s Get Happy!!, and they played “High Fidelity” from it, too. The band — which included longtime Costello compadres Steve Nieve on keys and Pete Thomas on drums — were on point for the 10 tracks that made the cut from River In Reverse, an album Costello said would never have been recorded if Toussaint hadn’t relocated to NYC after Hurricane Katrina. And Costello went on to bash Bush for his bungling of the disaster as an intro to “Broken Promise Land.”
“The best time, personally, I’ve ever had on stage,” is how Costello summed it all up. Toussaint played second fiddle on his grand piano for most of the set, but shone on “A Certain Girl” and on a Professor Longhair variation that began the second encore. And there was an implicit, positive message in Toussaint’s exuberant “Yes We Can Can,” vis-à-vis the New Orleans wreckage.