The Generalist

Photo: Alan Toussaint by Grant Scott. An award-winning portrait photographer, Grant Scott is creating a photographic archive of performers appearing at the Brighton Dome over the course of one year. ‘The Dome Sessions’ project will culminate with a major exhibition held at Brighton Dome at the end of 2007. To see more of Grant Scott's work visit grantscott.com

It was a rare privilege and opportunity to meet one of New Orleans most important musicians when Allen Toussaint came to play a concert at the Brighton Dome, on a double-header with the New Orleans Preservation Band.

Throughout a long and sustained creative career as a writer, arranger, producer and pianist, he has known and worked with remarkable figures in many areas of New Orleans music including Fats Domino, Dr John, Professor Longhair, Lee Dorsey and The Meters, who were the house band at his studio for many years. His contribution to the city’s music was recognised in 1998 when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame.

His life and work are deeply grounded in the Crescent City and it has taken Hurricane Katrina to dislodge him to New York City for a period, while he waits for his house to be rebuilt.

At the age of 69, his energy and enthusiasms of music remains undimmed. Next month he will return to Britain as part of a European tour with Elvis Costello, playing material from their excellent 2006 collaboration ‘The River in Reverse’.

He is looking immaculate with an extremely stylish suit and some fine and very natty black sandals with white socks. His manner is extremely polite and reserved.

This recording illustrates the difficulty of this on-the-run audio journalism – and its unexpected rewards. We began our conversation in the back stalls of the virtually empty Dome and had just got settled and working our way into a conversation when there was a most unexpected interruption of a celestial kind (I won’t spoil the surprise).

There is an abrupt transition and the conversation picks up. In between we had walked down into the backstage labyrinth of the Dome and found his dressing room. The air conditioning is so loud that we decamp across the hall into a large cupboard of a room with big mirrors with bulbs round it – a makeup room of sorts. We sit there in front of the mirror and that is where we get in deep to some serious musical conversation. You can hear his fingers constantly moving on the table as he demonstrates the shapes and styles of certain musical chords. There is magic in the air – and maybe the ghost of Professor Longhair.

Files

Interview, MP3 Size: 18.0MB, Length: 34:08 - CDN Link - Direct Link

Links

A great conversation with Harry Shearer, best known as Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap, on Le Show, Shearer’s weekly syndicated public radio programme In Sept 2004

New York Public Radio WNYC’s Soundcheck. (September 2005)

Costello, Toussaint Team for New Orleans CD
Listen to this story... by Ashley Kahn
Morning Edition, December 12, 2005 • Elvis Costello and New Orleans piano legend Allen Toussaint have recorded a new album in New Orleans. The session is in part a symbolic effort to show the city's music industry is not dead.

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