Dusted's mid-year picks

Some interesting albums on Dusted's mid-year report, which came out Friday. I've only heard a few of these (my own, Akron/Family's Set 'Em Wild Set 'Em Free, Animal Collective, Allen Toussaint and the Death reissue), so lots of work to do.

Also, my review of the super freaky Magnificence in the Memory by mid-1970s LA cult band (not in the sense of only having a few rabid followers, but more in the sense of actually being a cult) YaHoWha.

Here's "Treat You So Right"

Toussaint’s turn to jazz

I had the distinct honor, a few weeks ago, of interviewing Allen Toussaint about his new album The Bright Mississippi, out now on Nonesuch. Here’s the result, up today at Blurt:

New Orleans Vitality: Allen Toussaint

Since the 1960s, Allen Toussaint has been nearly synonymous with New Orleans' funk, soul and R&B, writing classic songs like "Fortune Teller," "Sneaking Sally Through the Alley," "Working in a Coal Mine," and "Pain in My Heart" and working with everyone from Lee Dorsey to Paul McCartney to Labelle to Fats Domino to Elvis Costello.

What Toussaint had never really done, until this year's The Bright Mississippi, was to play jazz. Funny, because Toussaint grew up in the town that invented jazz and played piano in its juke joints and dance hops from the age of 13 on. His neighborhood, Gert Town, was full of musicians, an old banjo player on one side of the block, a blind guitarist on the other. The music of New Orleans' funeral marches and Dixieland clubs was in the air, drifting through the windows, playing on radios, and yet Toussaint never tried his hand at it. "Well, I heard jazz, but I didn't take to performing it really," says Toussaint. "I had been busy with the R&B and didn't really know how to find these wonderful songs."

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Allen Toussaint’s jazz album

I’ve got a review of Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi up today in Blurt, interview to come later.

Here’s a bit:

In The Bright Mississippi, New Orleans R&B composer and pianist Allen Toussaint revisits the classic jazz of his childhood, interpreting wonderful old-time cuts by Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington. Though Toussaint's band for this album includes avant garde heavyweights like Don Byron and Marc Ribot, the tone is quite traditional, the steady swagger of funeral march drums and percussion anchoring arabesque swoons and swoops of melodic improvisation. Toussaint himself conjures lush, extravagant textures of ragtime piano, his playing now staccato and rhythmic, now flowering into rolls and cascades and fluid runs of notes. And the rhythm section - David Piltch on upright and Jay Bellerose on drums - imposes a stately, restrained dignity over the whole enterprise, with widely spaced thump of bass, clicks on rims and musing, dreamy swirls of brushes on snares.

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Here is Mr. Toussaint with one of my other favorite singer songwriters -- Elvis Costello – performing “Fortune Teller”



Toussaint was heading to the New Orleans Jazz Festival when I spoke to him, but was also looking forward to a series of concerts at New York City’s Vanguard, where he’ll have the whole band from The Bright Mississippi. Should be pretty great.

In other news, I went to see Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Ponytail last night…and loved both, though in entirely different ways. (Pains for the songs…Ponytail for skill, enthusiasm and transcendently complicated grooves.) More on this later...

I’ve been busy, but nothing to show for it

So I’ve been writing up a storm lately, but no one’s running my stuff, so nothing to post.

(I have a really nice interview with Fennesz that PopMatters has been sitting on since January…I’m thisclose to saying fuck it and just posting it here.)

But meanwhile, I interviewed Allen Toussaint earlier this week and just finished my interview piece on him. He’s written some very famous songs – “Fortune Teller”, “Sneaking Sally through the Alley”, “Get Out of My Life, Woman,” “Southern Nights,” etc. – which have been covered by lots and lots of bands. This is maybe the oddest, and also one of my favorites…Devo covering “Working in the Coalmine,” which was originally written for Lee Dorsey.