Allen Toussaint
Scullers Jazz Club
400 Soldiers Field Rd
Allston, MA 02134-1805
August 20, 2009
Allen Toussaint. You may not know his name. You know his music. Music that was born in New Orleans and grew up in America.
Perhaps you’ve heard of The Pointer Sisters, Boz Scaggs, The Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Manhattan Transfer, Ringo Starr, Gladys Knight and the Pips, B.J. Thomas, Otis Redding, Little Feat, Three Dog Night, Jose Feliciano, Dr. John, Robert Palmer, Sam and Dave, Johnny Winter, The Judds, Lee Dorsey, Al Hirt, Aaron Neville, The Band, Warren Zevon, Irma Thomas, Alison Kraus and Robert Plant? They’ve recorded his songs.
Toussaint produced and arranged for Paul Simon, Patty LaBelle, Paul McCartney and Wings, Joe Cocker and Maria Muldaur traveled to New Orleans to record in Allen Toussaint’s studio.
I knew Toussaint’s name was long associated with New Orleans. I had no idea his musical footprint was so deep.
Last Thursday, Allen Toussaint graced Scullers Jazz Club with a performance that transcended music. A package of dignity, genius, and humanity, he can light up a place as small as Scullers or as big as a few acres at The New Orleans Jazz Fest.

Lights dim. To the stage walks a man in a dark suit, purple and black striped shirt, lavender and rose paisley tie and pocket square. Right away you see the man with the nappy grey hair and salt and pepper mustache
isn’t afraid to mix and match in fashion or music.
“All my life I’ve waited for the red light to come on so I could play my music, ” he says after bantering with the audience over our Haavaad Yaad accents. He hasn’t been on stage for more than three minutes and he has us in the palms of his strong key-striding hands.
Toussaint opens with “There’s A Party Goin’ On” and by the time he gets to “You got nothin’ to lose but the blues…” his fingers have pounded or feathered practically every one of the 88 keys on the baby grand.
Toward the end of the song, Toussaint stops, grins impishly at the audience, and says “Your turn…” The surprised silence that ensued for three seconds was the last time this audience would be caught flat eared. “Well,” he says before the next song, “I heard a lot of silence out there when in was your turn.”
He launches into a medley of his songs beginning with “What’s Her Name.” Every time he pauses and nods our way, the audience roars, “What’s her name, what’s her name!” I’m not talking about a subdued, let’s be cool about this, effort, either. This was as unbuttoned Boston as I’ve ever heard. Toussaint kept it up during “Mother In Law” and ‘Working In A Coal Mine” and the Boomer to Slacker-aged salt and pepper audience nailed every chorus.
First, I had no idea he’d penned those songs (and most of the ones that followed) and second, I was blown away by the crowds unfettered collaboration. I mean you practically have to pay a Boston audience to participate in music of any sort.
Maybe part of it is that rollicking sound that’s been called a rhythm and blues rumba crossed with a second line parade. New Orleans’ French, Spanish, Cajun, Caribbean, African heritage is concentrated in Toussaint’s music and he spins it out in his musical centrifuge.
When Toussaint invites tenor saxman Amadee Castenell, a Katrina displaced New Orleans friend who now resides on the North Shore, to the stage for a soulful medley of “Saint James Infirmary" (Anonymous), “Just Can’t Take It" (Toussaint), “Dirty Water" (Toussaint), and “Riding On The City of New Orleans" (Steve Goodman), Castanell proves his New Orleans credentials are for real.
“Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky From Now On” (Toussaint) a swampy boogie rhythm ‘n bluesy song with lots of pedal morphed into quotes from Edelweiss, Chopin, a Christmas carol, show tunes, pop songs of his own, Grieg, to “Chattanooga Choo Choo’, “Tea for Two”, Jelly Roll Morton quotes, Irish jigs, Polish polkas -yes, polkas as in “Roll Out The Barrel”! - , “My Foolish Heart” with a New Orleans rumba tempo and back again to “Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky From Now On” all so fast your head hurts from trying to keep up and your jaw is slack with awe and your brain is slapping its knee in joy.
After that, Toussaint settles everybody down again with “So Far Away From Home,” Paul Simon's song built on the architecture of J. S. Bach.
Toussaint often pairs “We Are America, (unknown composer)” a history lesson wrapped in a ballad, with his original of “Yes We Can Can,” (and I couldn’t help thinking of Obama’s campaign slogan) and he does tonight. The piano bench may as well have been a pulpit. The man is preaching what he believes.
When he gets to “The Sweet Touch Of Love,” music used in hot Axe Body Wash commercials, you realize how deeply his music has penetrated the culture.
Toussaint’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman,” a hit by Lee Dorsey in 1966, re-recorded more times than any of his other songs, is an up-tempo song with echoes of Jelly Roll Morton, Scott Joplin, Professor Longhair and the steeped New Orleans tradition. Toussaint’s thin singing voice has never been his calling card but it delivers his songs with infectious energy.
What happened next is spellbinding, and it isn’t even music. Toussaint quietly talks us through a reverie, a tone poem, about childhood trips in which his father packs the family in a 1936 Buick for a trip to visit relatives far far out into the Louisiana countryside. Toussaint remembers his father saying, “You need to know where you came from so you know where you’re going.” His richly detailed, extended description of the trip is filled with a rootsy sense of place and of belonging.
I’ll bet Toussaint has played softly on the keys and retold this story a thousand times and I cant imagine it feeling any more authentic, heartfelt, and spontaneous than it does right now. By the time he sets to playing “Southern Nights,” the song it inspired, my companion is in tears.
If you’re old enough, you might remember Joel Chandler’s "Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings" which Walt Disney made into the film “Song Of The South.” Toussaint’s final song, “Southern Nights,” is a true Song of the South.
The audience is on its feet cheering. Toussaint shakes hands with patrons in the first row and doesn’t head back to the piano. Sustained cheering could not possibly have produced an encore that could top "Southern Nights". Allen Toussaint slowly exits the room, shaking hands all the way out.
One vignette: at the merchandise table, Mr. Toussaint, still perspiring, stood up from his chair every time a new person came up to ask him to sign an album or CD.
Like I said, dignity, genius, and humanity.
Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals
Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.
The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.
Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”
A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”
Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).
Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.
These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.
They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.
The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.
The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.
The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals. Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod. Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”
Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."
Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch
The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.
Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.
Photos by Paul Tamburello
September 13, 2009 in Commentaries | Permalink | Comments (7)
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