American Tunes Allen Toussaint

• 1 Delores' Boyfriend 03:34
• 2 Viper's Drag 03:18
• 3 Confessin' (That I Love You) 02:52
• 4 Mardi Gras In New Orleans 03:15
• 5 Lotus Blossom 04:20
• 6 Waltz For Debby 03:17
• 7 Big Chief 02:15
• 8 Rocks In My Bed 04:40
• 9 Danza, Op. 33 03:27
• 10 Hey Little Girl 02:38
• 11 Rosetta 04:10
• 12 Come Sunday 05:12
• 13 Southern Nights 03:33
• 14 American Tune 04:59
• Total Runtime 51:30

Info for American Tunes

„American Tunes“, is the new studio album by legendary New Orleans musician Allen Toussaint. Toussaint had just completed the album when he passed away in November of last year during a European tour. Recording took place at two sets of sessions with producer Joe Henry: solo piano at Toussaint's New Orleans home studio in 2013, and with the rhythm section of Jay Bellerose and David Piltch—joined by guests Bill Frisell, Charles Lloyd, Greg Leisz, Rhiannon Giddens, and Van Dyke Parks—in Los Angeles in October 2015. The album comprises solo performances of Professor Longhair tunes and band arrangements of songs by Toussaint, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Paul Simon, and others.

Allen Toussaint's work as composer, producer, arranger, and performer, especially in the 1960s and '70s, helped shape the sound of R&B, soul, and funk as we know it today. He collaborated memorably with artists ranging from Lee Dorsey and Ernie K. Doe to the Pointer Sisters and Labelle, from the Meters and Dr. John to the Band and Paul McCartney. The New York Times recently said, 'In Mr. Toussaint's long career as songwriter, arranger and producer he has honed a piano style that's supportive and allusive; a little trill or tremolo sums up all the splashy joys of New Orleans patriarchs like Professor Longhair and James Booker, and a syncopated chord under right-hand octaves summons gospel. Mr. Toussaint has the two-fisted, rippling vocabulary of the city's piano legacy, but he uses it in dapper ways.'

Toussaint's children, Alison Toussaint-LeBeaux and Clarence Reginald Toussaint, who have long served as their father's managers, said of the American Tunes album, 'Our father approached this project with great care and understanding of the songs selected and paid true homage to Professor Longhair, his musical hero. He wanted to bring as much of the Toussaint touch as he could to these wonderful classics.'

Nonesuch previously released The Bright Mississippi in 2009. Also produced by Henry, the record includes songs by jazz greats such as Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Django Reinhardt, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn. The album received tremendous critical praise, with the Boston Globe saying it 'couldn't sound more like New Orleans. (Toussaint) revisits jazz classics … and takes them for a stroll through Preservation Hall, imbuing his own funky brand of pop-song charisma. The results are coolly sophisticated, an unfussy, mostly instrumental set of slink-and-slide joints shot through with a harmonic imagination that turns even a traditional hymn into an after-hours swing … Toussaint's musical soul guides all, making the classics sound like his own.'

That project indirectly grew from Toussaint's contributions to Our New Orleans, the benefit album that Nonesuch released in fall 2005 to aid hurricane victims in the wake of the Katrina disaster. That collection opens with a version of 'Yes We Can Can,' the Toussaint song the Pointer Sisters made famous, newly recorded with producer Joe Henry, and it included a solo piano piece, 'Tipitina and Me,' co-written by Toussaint in tribute to Professor Longhair.

Joe Henry had first worked with Toussaint when he invited the pianist to join the sessions for I Believe to My Soul, a studio convocation of mature R&B stars. Henry subsequently acted as producer on Toussaint's post-Katrina collaboration with Elvis Costello, The River in Reverse. He describes the most recent sessions: 'I have been working with Allen Toussaint—under his spell and subject to his influence—for a full decade now. He was a quiet radical, musically-speaking, and a prince of great humility.'

Allen Toussaint, piano, vocals
Jay Bellerose, drums, percussion
Bill Frisell, electric guitar
Greg Leisz, weissenborn
Charles Lloyd, tenor saxophone
David Piltch, double bass
Adam Levy, gut-string guitar
Cameron Stone, cello
Amy Shulman, harp
Rhiannon Giddens, vocals
Van Dyke Parks, second piano, orchestral arrangement

Recorded May 20–21, 2013; October 1–3 & 5, 2015
Produced by Joe Henry

Allen Toussaint
Like the Mississippi River that gives New Orleans its crescent shape, the city harbors a free- flowing music scene, awash in its own history and ever open to outside streams of influence. Time is fluid there as well – sounds of the past flow amicably with newer musical styles. An inordinately high percentage of music-makers reside there. Regardless of instrument or style, many command the same admiration other municipalities reserve for civic leaders and sports heroes. To this day in New Orleans, high school boys carrying a trombone or trumpet – more than a football – get the girls. And the city’s top piano players are still addressed as professors.

Allen Toussaint is a senior member of that titled fraternity, a renowned songwriter and producer, who’s celebrated for his distinctively deft and funky feel on the piano and still active after more than fifty years in the business. No fading golden oldie is this piano professor, though many of his successes reach back that far.

The list of those who have benefited in one way or another from the Toussaint’s touch is staggering in its historic and stylistic range, stretching from the late 1950s to the present day, with no end in sight. His studio productions have sold millions of discs and downloads. His catalog of songs has generated hits on the pop, R&B, country and dance charts – many remain on heavy rotation in various radio formats. His tunes continue to pop up as TV themes and advertising jingles. He has an ever-growing international circle of fans, and though normally reluctant to tour, he’s become a more familiar figure at music festivals and popular nightclubs around the world.

Though Toussaint has begun to travel far and wide as of late, he never stays away from New Orleans for long – and his music never does. In so many ways, his enduring career serves as an ongoing tribute to the city of his birth. Allen Toussaint’s biography begins humbly. He was born in 1938 in New Orleans’s Gert Town, a working class neighborhood that straddles Washington Avenue between Earhart Boulevard and Carrollton Avenue, and was raised by his mother Naomi and father Clarence. He’s the “C. Toussaint” credited as songwriter on some early tunes; she’s the “N. Neville” whose name appears more often. Toussaint inherited their love of music, taught himself piano, and caught a couple of breaks as a teenager – joining a local R&B band that also featured guitarist Snooks Eaglin; sitting in for Huey “Piano” Smith with Earl King; laying down piano parts at a Fats Domino session that the Imperial Records star could not make.

Like many musicians of his generation (and those to come) Toussaint drew heavily on the syncopated blues and trill-filled patterns invented in the 1940s by Professor Longhair, aka Henry Roeland Byrd. To this day, most in New Orleans simply refer to him as “Fess”; with musical accuracy and a typically deft turn of a phrase, Toussaint hails him “The Bach of Rock”. When onstage, Toussaint rarely fails to credit his mentor, offering a rendition of “Tipitina,” Fess’s signature tune, mentioning the debt all modern piano professors share.

If Fess is New Orleans’s Bach, Toussaint is its Amadeus: an instrumentalist of uncanny sure-fingeredness and a prodigious inventor of melodies that remain fresh in the ear for years. The parallel is furthered as he also happens to be a master crystallizer of traditional and innovative styles; those classic New Orleans street parade rhythms never sounded more modern than they did after he was done updating them.

Toussaint later proved to have a poet’s ear for lyrics, plus a honey-toned singing voice – unusually smooth and upper-register for one who is essentially a bluesman. Yet his debut on record was an album of instrumentals for the major record company RCA. In 1958, The Wild Sound of New Orleans by “Tousan” included “Java,” later a huge pop hit for trumpeter Al Hirt, and the boogie “Whirlaway,” a marvel of top-gear piano precision. The late ’50s were the wild and fiercely competitive days of R&B and early rock and roll. “Indie” labels were popping up all over. One would make a bundle for a moment, then disappear; others persevered. Toussaint learned fast – about publishing and song copyrights, and how to hang on to them. In the early ’60s, he assumed the position of session supervisor for Minit and Instant Records, writing and producing singles for a variety of local artists. Some – like Irma Thomas’s “It’s Raining” and Art Neville’s “All These Things” – became local hits. A few – Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-In-Law” and Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That” – broke big on the national charts. From the outset, Toussaint was able to imbue his songs with an ageless quality that successive, melody-savvy generations appreciated – and covered. His tune “A Certain Girl,” a 1961 single by K-Doe, was the B-side of the Yardbirds debut single in ’64; in 1980, Warren Zevon – no slouch himself as a songwriter – chose to record it too. Impressively evergreen among Toussaint’s songs is the single-chord gem, “Fortune Teller.” Initially a Benny Spellman hit in ’62, the Rolling Stones and the Hollies recorded it in their early years, and the Who performed it on their famous Live at Leeds album in 1970. As recently as 2007 Robert Plant and Alison Krauss made it a part of their Grammy-winning album Raising Sand.

With Toussaint, no experience was wasted, not even a two-year stint in the military that began in 1963. In ’64, he took his army band into the studio and under the name of The Stokes recorded “Whipped Cream,” a snappy instrumental with a jaunty horn line and a distinctive trumpet lead. Herb Alpert jumped on the melody a year later for the Tijuana Brass, recording it note-for-note, creating a hit single, a memorable album cover and a theme song for the TV sensation The Dating Game.

By the height of the ’60s, Toussaint was New Orleans’s premier producer. Partnering with record promoter Marshall Sehorn, a veteran of independent R&B companies, he built his own studio, dubbed it Sea-Saint, and established a series of record labels. As popular black music styles evolved from 1950s R&B to more soulful sounds and became powered by everfunkier rhythms, so Toussaint’s productions – with Lee Dorsey (who served as Toussaint’s primary muse and voice), the Meters, Dr. John and others – morphed into a progressively heavier sense of syncopation, drawing heavily on New Orleans’s distinctive street parade beats.

Toussaint’s songwriting as well assumed a broader, sophisticated perspective. Some tunes focused on daily, workaday realities and urban life: “Workin’ In The Coal Mine,” “Night People,” “Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley.” Others were more reflective, delivering messages of social protest and racial uplift: “Yes We Can,” “Freedom For The Stallion,” “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further.” …

Booklet for American Tunes