![]() Like me, he was grooving to the music unlike anyone else in that hot afternoon crowd, he was dressed in his customary suit and tie. In 1988, I was sitting in the sun at the Jazz and Heritage Festival listening to the great New Orleans blues guitarist and singer Earl King when I noticed Allen Toussaint sitting on the grass just a few feet away. He played clusters of his great songs - 'Working In A Coalmine', 'What Do You Want the Girl To Do?', 'It's Raining' - all hits he had written for other artists - as we puttered up the Mississippi. His concert was on a steamboat - a kind of giant floating ballroom. It was listening to his work in the 70s - his arrangements for The Band, his productions for The Meters, Lee Dorsey and Irma Thomas, and his own solo masterpiece, the album Southern Nights - that I first realised New Orleans music had a flavour and character that couldn't be found anywhere else, not even a few miles up the river.ĭetermined to experience that music in its natural environment, I began making visits to the city. No musician has ever made me more aware of a sense of place. He could quote the New Orleans classical composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the barrelhouse master Professor Longhair in the same phrase, yet whatever he played always had an added elegance that was all his own. As a pianist, he seemed to have the entire history of New Orleans in his fingertips. ![]()
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