![]() The likes of Ernie K-Doe, Spellman, Thomas Art and Aaron Neville, The Showmen, and Lee Dorsey all passed through those studio doors.Īfter that army stint, Toussaint teamed up with business partner Marshall Sehorn. (Six years after that, Jamaica’s Augustus Pablo voiced it through his melodica, making Toussaint’s “Java” into a keystone of dub reggae.) Joe Banashak of Minit Records tapped Toussaint as a Swiss Army knife for his label, Toussaint serving both as A&R man and producer. It contained a jaunty little tune called “ Java,” which would become a hit and Grammy Award for trumpeter Al Hirt six years later. Toussaint (as “Al Tousan”) also cut his first album in 1958, a set of instrumentals titled The Wild Sound of New Orleans. By 17, Toussaint was gigging around town, at times subbing in for the likes of Fats Domino and Huey “Piano” Smith. Post-war New Orleans was a boon for pianists, Professor Longhair’s heavily syncopated “second-line” style of playing exerting the biggest influence on a generation of musicians. Sure, the Band might have written “ Life is a Carnival,” but it’s Toussaint’s horn charts that make it feel like you’re in the middle of one strutting through Bywater.īorn in 1938 in Gert Town, the Mid-City district that the legend Buddy Bolden once called home, Toussaint’s father worked in the railroads and played trumpet, while his mother (whose maiden name, Naomi Neville, Toussaint would use as a songwriting pen name) got him piano lessons as a child. In terms of inspiration and determination, it’d be hard to top the tune Toussaint penned for the great Lee Dorsey – a song later covered by the Pointer Sisters and then appropriated by a certain presidential campaign – “ Yes We Can.” Then there’s the tongue-in-cheek raunch of “ Ride Your Pony,” the strip joint anthem. ![]() Thankfully, Toussaint was discharged in 1965 and got right back to it, his work ethic providing our universe with a veritable King Cake of wit, sophistication, funk, and elegance. As penned by the young Toussaint in the early ‘60s, numbers like the punchline pop of Ernie K-Doe’s “ Mother-In-Law,” Irma Thomas’s “ It’s Raining,” and Lee Dorsey’s “ Ya Ya” (as well as a two-sided doozy for singer Benny Spellman, “ Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette)” b/w “ Fortune Teller”) kindled the imaginations of listeners on both sides of the pond and codified the sound of New Orleans for future generations. Even with that cut-off date, Toussaint’s fingerprints would still linger over American and British popular music. No more session work on the piano, no more sheet music bearing his penciled-in charts, no more songwriting credits. How influential is the man? Try to imagine an alternate – albeit far less joyously musical – universe, where Allen Toussaint is drafted into the US Army to serve in 1963, never ever to return to music-making. As a producer, A&R scout, arranger, songwriter, and reluctant artist himself, Toussaint exemplified every aspect of the city: its deep history, its Creolized musics, its rhythms (bouncing from the playground to the boudoir and back), its bright pageantry and country plainspokenness. ![]() ![]() His vast songbook is sweet, vibrant, festive, and indelibly New Orleans. No one epitomized the many strains of the Crescent City like Toussaint. It’s a sound impossible to boil down to a singular essence, but Allen Toussaint comes closest to embodying the entire musical gumbo. The birthplace of jazz as well as Cajun music, the town where country blues met brass bands, where African, Cuban, Caribbean, and Amerindian rhythms swirl and eddy and raise up all of it. If you were to try and capture the sound of America using the music emanating from only one city, New Orleans would be the place. ![]()
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