Meet Mr New Orleans

YOU COULD listen to that rich, dulcet, wise old voice telling stories like this all day long. The longer the interview goes on, the more memories Allen Toussaint digs up from an eventful past, writes JIM CARROLL

Early days in his New Orleans parish and worshipping at the piano of Professor Longhair give way to recording sessions with The Meters and Lee Dorsey and penning songs such as Southern Nightsand Working in the Coal Mine. The production gigs when he was the hippest and best gun for hire in town led to the magnificent solo albums. Toussaint really is a one-man repository of the finest American music from the last six decades.

He’s still recording and performing today, still plucking lyrical beauty from amid a scatter of keys and notes. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Toussaint’s eyes are firmly on the horizon and not resigned to peering over his shoulder. “I always feel there are many new places to go without dwelling on the past,” he says. “I have nothing against taking a nostalgic road if that is what you want to do, but I’m not doing that. Sometimes when I’m playing on the piano in the house by myself, I’ll play something from the old days just because I like it. But when I’m playing in front of an audience, I’m playing for that day and not some day gone by.

“You have to have a reason to wake up in the morning and go through your day. If you’re a musician, you wake up to do that and you do so without any thought. I’m still as excited today about where I’m going with music as I was the first day I touched the piano all those years ago.”

New Orleans shaped him. Music was a constant for the young Toussaint as he ran from pillar to post in the Gert Town neighbourhood. “You’d have men who’d take out their guitar from under their bed after work, sit on their porch and play. Late at night I’d hear a guy coming home from a bar playing the harmonica and sounding all right.”

His father, too, had the music bug: a railroad mechanic during the week and a trumpet player for local big bands at the weekend.

The family’s first piano arrived when Toussaint was six and a bit. It was intended for his sister, but Toussaint was the one who was truly smitten.

“I walked over to it and touched it and there was instant gratification. I had a couple of uncles who’d come over to the house and play some old blues. They only knew a couple of songs each, but thankfully they were different songs. I began to learn some humble kind of playing from watching them.”

BY THE TIMEhe hit his teens, Toussaint's mind was made up. "Music had found me and this was it forever. Of course, I didn't know all the ramifications which would have to happen to take me from where I was then to somewhere else, but I knew I'd be doing nothing else come hell or high water."

He’d listen to the radio and try to play everything he heard. “Young fool that I was, I thought every piano player already knew how to play those songs and I had some catching up to do. I tried to learn everything I heard: waltzes, boogie woogie, polkas.”

Sometimes, he’d hear someone like Professor Longhair and stop in his tracks. A spell was cast when Toussaint first crossed paths with that fabled New Orleans music-maker.

“Fess captured me in a way I still can’t really explain. It was the most shocking and exciting thing that I had ever heard. He’d play on the radio and I’d try to keep up with him as he went along. He was so profound. I was 16 years old when I finally saw him playing a small piano at a record hop and watched in awe.”

WHEN TOUSSAINTdecided to learn his trade in greater depth, he took a pew at Minit Records, rolled up his sleeves and went to work. The late 1950s and early 1960s were great years to be working in the city and Toussaint's distinctive hooks as a composer and session player appeared on a string of Crescent City anthems from Irma Thomas, Ernie K-Doe and Benny Spellman.

“New Orleans was a very creative and productive place then,” he remembers. “There was always something new coming round the corner. We were on a roll and we really didn’t know where we were going with the music. I mean I had no idea what I was doing stylistically. My style emerged out of what I was doing and I left it to others to brand me as one style or another.”

When Toussaint wasn't working with other artists, he was writing, producing and playing on his own records. That run began with The Wild Sound Of New Orleansin 1958, took in a couple of great soulful 1970s albums like Life, Love and Faithand continues to this day. Recent releases, such as his collaboration with Elvis Costello on The River in Reverseor this year's luminous Joe Henry-produced The Bright Mississipi,are every part as heady as anything from the old days.

“When it came to recording my own music it was always a little confusing, because I didn’t have a definite direction or sound in mind,” says Toussaint. “But I never purposely went in a different direction and I just wrote for the day. I couldn’t evaluate myself in the same way as I evaluated others, so there was always some element of confusion in my mind. The music just had to take care of itself and that’s the way it came out on those records.”

His work with Costello seems to have struck a deep chord. “The few times I’ve done collaborations have been mighty fine because I’m on the same wavelength as the other musician, but none of them can compare to Elvis Costello. He’s a gem amongst gems. He has so much that he brings to the table. He’s such a complete entity in itself, so working with him is like working with no one else I’ve ever encountered.”

The Bright Mississipi,Toussaint's latest record (and his first solo album in over a decade), is a largely instrumental album that pays tribute to some of the great jazzmen of old. But when Joe Henry first brought the songs to the studio, Toussaint had an admission to make.

"There were more songs I didn't know than I knew. I'd played some before, but I'd never ever played Solitudeand Winin' Boy Bluesbefore. As much as I knew and liked St James Infirmary, I'd never played that before, because my life went in another way."

Toussaint still calls New Orleans home, and he has seen many changes in the city over the years. The musicians, though, still keep coming. He talks about new-school acts such as the Hot 8 Brass Band and the TBC Brass Band as the latest chapter in an never-ending story.

“They’re continuing what we were doing, they’re more links in the chain of tradition. I admire what they’re doing and I feel the future of New Orleans music is in good hands with them.”

THE CITY ITSELFis still on the mend after Hurricane Katrina, and Toussaint is optimistic for the future. "I feel that Katrina has reminded people that New Orleans still exists," he says. "Yes, there is still lots to be done in some of the residential areas which were badly hit. Many of the people who had to migrate to other cities have had a hard time finding a way to come back, because their jobs as well as their houses are gone.

“But I still think the future is bright for the city because the spirit of the city has not changed. It’s coming back to itself slowly, but very surely.”

Allen Toussaint plays Whelan’s, Dublin on July 13. The Bright Mississipi is on Nonesuch