The Jazz Blog

Allen Toussaint will be at the 20th AT&T San Jose Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 8th at 6pm at the Main stage! Only $15!

Read this article about him by Richard Scheinin for the Mercury News

 "At any given moment, Allen Toussaint summons a world of piano: rumba-flavored blues, barroom trills, sonata ripples. He can't help it. Whether he is working the slow-drag beat of Sidney Bechet's "Egyptian Fantasy" or reworking one of his own umpteen hit tunes - "Mother-in-Law," "Fortune Teller," "Working in the Coal Mine" - a great gumbo of history and influence goes flooding through his fingertips.

It's at once funky, florid and fastidious, the music played by this legend of New Orleans rhythm and blues. Hearing it, all that history, as Toussaint worked with his rock-steady band Saturday at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, was a rich pleasure. Though just seeing how deeply the dapper Toussaint, 71, seems to appreciate the unrestrained appreciation coming his way in the autumn of his career - that was an equal pleasure.

He was aglow, whether singing "Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley" (he wrote it; Robert Palmer had the hit in '74) or "A Certain Girl" (he wrote it; the Yardbirds, with Eric Clapton, recorded it in '64) or "Working in the Coal Mine" (he wrote it; Lee Dorsey had the hit in '66).

He gleamed through instrumentals, too, including Thelonious Monk's "Bright Mississippi," based on the chords to "Sweet Georgia Brown." Toussaint turned it into boiled Louisiana funk, mischievously quoting from Little Anthony and the Imperials' "Goin' Out of My Head" during his piano solo, while guitarist Renard Poche did a little two-step
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over on the side of the stage.

As Saturday's concert was presented by SFJazz, and as Toussaint's extraordinary new album on Nonesuch, "The Bright Mississippi," finds him at the helm of a soulful jazz quintet, performing the Monk tune, along with New Orleans classics by Bechet, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and others - given all that, one might have expected the concert to more obviously showcase Toussaint's jazz side.

Nope. The 90-minute set was more a greatest hits revue and a mélange, with jazz influences surfacing here and there, as on "Egyptian Fantasy," a hushed call from the Southland, or on "A Certain Girl," which found Toussaint quoting from "Rhapsody in Blue." While singing "Hercules," which he wrote years ago for Aaron Neville, Toussaint kept conflating the piano part with Duke Ellington's "C Jam Blues."

That sort of amalgam is Toussaint's calling card. He knows his Jelly Roll, his funk, his Monk, and he always keeps one foot in the rumba-blues of Professor Longhair, his hero. Saturday, even when singing "Southern Nights," the Toussaint tune taken to the top of the charts by Glen Campbell in 1977, he kept the Professor in his double-barreled piano solos.

In other words, his music is a party - he brings it to the San Jose Jazz Festival on Aug. 8 - and a freewheeling history lesson.

Toward the end of Saturday's concert, the band dropped out as Toussaint, alone at the piano, roamed his memory banks. His improvised montage included snippets of Chopin, Gershwin and Mozart, not to mention boogie-woogie, ragtime, a Scottish air, "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" and "Sukiyaki," the Japanese tune that made the U.S. charts in 1963, which, incidentally, is the year Irma Thomas had a hit with Toussaint's "Ruler of My Heart."

He just keeps on rolling.