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Elvis Costello and R&B veteran Allen Toussaint joined forces to raise money for victims of the New Orleans flood - and hit it off so well they made an album together.
Like countless tasteful and knowledgeable musicians around the world, Elvis Costello has long admired the New Orleans R&B supremo Allen Toussaint. But it was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August last year that led to a collaboration between the two men - and a new album.
In the early 1960s, Toussaint wrote and produced many of the funkiest tunes to emerge from the Crescent City, most famously for the soul vocalist Lee Dorsey. He became one of black America's most in-demand hit-makers, providing the backing for countless singers, including Dr John, two of whose best albums he orchestrated.
As the hurricane hit last year, Toussaint, like thousands of New Orleans residents, was forced to flee his home and ended up in New York, where Costello now lives (with his wife, Diana Krall). The men had worked together before, on Costello's 1989 album Spike.
Now they found themselves appearing at benefit concerts for victims of the disaster in mid-September. At the final event, they performed together in Costello's choice of an old song of Toussaint's called Freedom for the Stallion, whose plaintive lyrics of inequality resonated with the indignant mood of the moment.
"That week reconfirmed the strengths I'd always found in Allen's songwriting," says Costello. "So I thought, let's see if there's a record to be made out of this. I consciously thought: there are some people who, despite all the great songs Allen has written, don't know as much about him as they might do."
The best-loved entries in Toussaint's songbook include Lee Dorsey's Working in the Coalmine, Southern Nights, made popular by Glenn Campbell, and Hercules by Aaron Neville. He also produced Labelle's evergreen disco anthem Lady Marmalade, but his achievements over the years have tended to be recognised only by students of the small print on old 45rpm record labels - people like Costello.
If Costello is lodged in the public consciousness as the bespectacled punk rocker, it's worth remembering that he first attempted his own spiky variant on vintage R&B on 1980's Get Happy!! album. For him, this new album, The River in Reverse, is the culmination of a lengthy passion for early soul. He duly scoured Toussaint's repertoire for hidden gems that, like Freedom for the Stallion, might take on added meaning today.
One song, On the Way Down, was originally about karma repaying a scheming lover, with the memorable refrain: "The same dudes you misuse on your way up, you might meet them on your way down." After a minor refashioning tweak by Costello, it's a transparent rebuke to the authorities who left citizens of New Orleans for dead.
"It doesn't say anything that you would call political," he says. "But there's this sense of 'promise kept' in there. Also, on Nearer to You, when it came to the bit, 'I know you say that you'll be home soon', I could barely sing it. A song can jump up and bite you when you least expect it."
Costello wrote the song The River in Reverse in the course of the New York benefit shows and when he and Toussaint reconvened the following month, Toussaint happily co-composed afresh alongside him. Recording ended in New Orleans in December, at the first viable studio to open its doors, post-Katrina.
When we all meet in London, Costello does most of the talking. Toussaint, a smartly dressed, reserved and well-preserved man of 68, quietly sips his herbal tea. However, Costello buttons up and listens, rapt, when Toussaint starts to open up, in his soft Southern twang, about the blend of blues, boogie-woogie and hillbilly stylings he grew up on, and about local pianists such as Professor Longhair and Ernest Penn, from whom he picked up the boogie-woogie craft.
He also reminisces about Lee Dorsey. "He was such a high-spirited guy. We rode motorcycles and raced Cadillacs together. We'd stop off at a joint, and Lee would go up to the jukebox, punch all his own songs up, sit real close to it and listen. He'd play Can I Be the One? At the end, there was a little bell I rang. By this time, everyone in the joint's listening, too, and he'd jump around, go crazy - that bell was his top moment in the whole recording."
In the CD booklet to The River in Reverse, Toussaint characterises Costello as "one who recognises much of what others miss". Perhaps that is why this collaboration snaps into place like a dream. The River in Reverse is defined by its integrated personnel - the soulful finesse of Toussaint on piano, with his horn section in tow, electrified by the raw rock of Costello's band, the Imposters.
Equal parts old and new compositions, the album has a great sense of the illustrious New Orleans tradition being upheld and updated. With its celebratory finale, Six-Fingered Man, you're reminded of the vibrant "second line" parades that follow a New Orleans funeral - fitting closure, perhaps, on the nightmare of last August.
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