Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint

"What happened to the Liberty Bell I heard so much about? Did it really ding-dong? It must have dinged wrong. It didn't ding long.—Allen Toussaint, from "Who's Gonna Help Brother Get Further?"

Two men are caught in the spotlight, both middle-aged, both impeccably dressed. One is black, one white, each is wearing a dark suit, and, altogether inadvertently, both are wearing purple ties. It is a Monday night in February at Joe’s Pub, an intimate showcase club in New York City, and Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint are previewing their new album with a two-man performance for their record label and its foreign distributors. Elvis, the more rumpled one, rakish in a purple shirt and Stetson-styled dress-up hat, takes on his familiar frontman role—eloquent, witty and characteristically generous with praise for his 68-year-old musical partner, who sits erect and attentive at the piano, a small smile playing about his lips. Allen Toussaint, with a perfectly sculpted gray Afro and moustache, is a New Orleans legend. He has produced hits for such other New Orleans legends as Irma Thomas, Ernie K-Doe, Lee Dorsey and The Neville Brothers, and has provided assistance to rock stars from Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, Dr. John and The Band to—Elvis Costello. But he is—as he will be the first to tell you—a man who has always operated behind the scenes. “The proof of my labors still gets out there,” says Allen, “it’s just not brought out there by me.”

Elvis decided at their brief soundcheck/rehearsal this afternoon that he will play guitar on only one song, so he looks to Allen for his cue. From the first notes it’s clear he is as drawn in as anyone in the room by the spare and stately power of the music. They lead with one of their first collaborations, “The Sharpest Thorn,” guided by Allen’s elegant, almost classical accompaniment. They sing old songs and new songs alike, with Elvis almost invariably providing the lead vocal, and Allen—as on so many of his hit productions—providing the indispensable second voice. There are echoes of Allen’s mentor, New Orleans piano legend Professor Longhair (“the Bach of rock,” as Allen dubbed him without a trace of irony), throughout the program, but only on Allen’s “Who’s Gonna Help Brother Get Further?” (a song he wrote in 1970 that brilliantly delineates the 20th Century African-American urban experience without ever sacrificing its wryly idiomatic tone) does Allen take the lead. There are angry songs by Elvis that focus on the current political situation, there are tender love songs, there are songs that work as sheer entertainment, but the mood of the evening never falters, the sense that each and every person in the room, including the musicians, is lost in the music. By the very joyfulness of its expression this is, decidedly, music to make you smile.

"I think the marriage of [our styles] is very interesting inasmuch as how bold Elvis is, how attuned and aware of what's going on. He's not a coward, and that's good—for someone to have such a talent and be able to bring it forward. He says things that many people would like to but don't know how to say. Elvis has taken me by the hand and said, Let's take a trip."—Allen Toussaint

"Allen is a tempering influence on my tendency to really—I mean, if I'm let off the leash, I will go into it quite a bit, [but] you know, he will say just the right thing. It's not to say that either of us expresses our ideas better than the other, but he's got such an instinctive and natural ability to lend each of his talents in a different way and in different proportion—and, most important, [with] generosity."—Elvis Costello

It is the most improbable of collaborations. For the last 20 years at least, Elvis Costello—the former Declan McManus of London and Liverpool, at one time a certified pop star—has been a whirling dervish of creativity. In the last two years alone he has been working on an opera about Hans Christian Andersen for the Royal Danish Opera, put out a raw roots album (The Delivery Man) with his band, The Imposters, sung and recorded with a 52-piece Dutch jazz orchestra, Metropole Orkest, and showcased a 15-minute suite from the ballet he was commissioned to write for Italy’s Aterballetto dance company with symphony orchestras around the world. In the last few months he has performed at the Apollo, sung on a duets album with Tony Bennett, performed with Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch at the Grand Ole Opry, shot a VH1 tribute to his music with Billie Joe Armstrong, Death Cab For Cutie and Fiona Apple, and embarked on numerous other plans for a far-flung series of events in virtually every one of the seven lively arts. As Allen Toussaint says admiringly, “Elvis operates at one speed—top speed. If you wound him up any tighter, I think he’d explode!”

Allen, meanwhile, has led what can only be described as a quiet, somewhat reclusive life in New Orleans—if quiet reclusivity can be said to include a gold Rolls Royce and a Mercedes convertible, a home, production company and well-appointed recording studio, Sea-Saint, in the same comfortable Gentilly neighborhood, and a position of sufficient prominence in the world of music that for close to three decades everyone came to him. He saw no reason, and no likelihood, of ever leaving his hometown (“Everything that was dear to me was near to me”)—until Katrina. With Katrina he made the same preparations he always had: he boarded up his home and studio with the same numbered boards he had used before, and he prepared to wait out the storm at the Astor Crowne Plaza on Bourbon Street. When it became obvious Katrina wasn’t just another storm, he hired a school bus to take him to Baton Rouge, flew to New York, and there embarked upon a life he had never envisioned. With the help of his friend and business partner, Josh Feigenbaum, he found a comfortable midtown apartment, started playing a solo Sunday-brunch gig at Joe’s Pub (“This was something that was totally foreign to me”) and joined in the fundraising tributes sprouting up all over, but particularly in New York City.

That was how Allen came to know Elvis Costello. They had worked together previously when Elvis joined the legion of musical pilgrims coming to New Orleans for an infusion of elegant funk (it is Allen’s piano you hear on “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror” from the 1989 album Spike). Elvis had begun singing Allen’s “Freedom for the Stallion” as a salute to New Orleans in Katrina’s immediate aftermath, and then he and Allen performed it together at Lincoln Center, reprising it the next day at Joe’s Pub. That, according to Elvis, was where the idea for the album was born. At first it was going to be a salute to Allen’s work in the form of an Allen Toussaint Songbook, but within days the concept expanded to include Elvis’ fiery new composition, “River in Reverse,” written the afternoon of the Parting the Waters benefit at Town Hall, and then very quickly—as Elvis continued to connect with Allen on an almost daily basis—it grew to incorporate a more ambitious collaboration. Allen had by now learned that his house and studio were lost. He and Elvis were backstage at Madison Square Garden’s From the Big Apple to the Big Easy benefit, and Elvis went up to him, “and I just said quietly, ‘So sorry to hear it,’ the way you would, and he just said, ‘The things I had served me well when I had them.’ Which I thought was a remarkable reaction. And then he said, ‘I’ll have to write some more.’”

“I loved New Orleans so much,” says Allen, “it took a lot for me to leave.” He still was not certain, even after coming to New York, that he was ready to step into the spotlight, but on the other hand there was no denying that the ground had shifted. In the last decade, the stars had stopped coming to New Orleans, and Allen, for his part, resolutely—some might say obstinately—refused to leave home for any of the opportunities the world might have to offer. Looking back on it, Allen says, “I was busy every day, I was making music and making tracks. I stayed with the music as if I was on a mission—but without a mission. Because I didn’t have something that I had to have ready the next day or the next week. When Katrina came, it’s almost as if Katrina said, ‘OK, you’ve been here doing this, let’s go put it to use.’”

"The music itself—not only the words—has a subtext. I don't that Allen's ever thought about it or analyzed it—I don't think that's in his nature. There are certain writers who are analytical, and there are others that just accept the thoughts that come to them. Whether they are about matters of the heart or matters of the world, they treat them equally. I might be opposite to him in that. You know, I consider everything that comes to me. But sometimes you can be in the middle of a song and recognize what it's actually saying, and that's the power of [the music]."—Elvis Costello

One of the things that drove the album from the start was the growing realization—not just on Elvis’ part but on Allen’s as well—of the richness, depth and complexity of Allen’s old songs. Elvis had known most of the compositions they were considering for the album for at least 20 years, but the full range of their social, political and emotional implications had never occurred to him, probably as much as anything because of the good-time New Orleans feel of their original presentation. Allen, too, was surprised by some of their nuances. He had never seen himself as political. He was not one to “shake a fist at the politician or the political scene—or beat someone over the head about something, even if it’s artistic. But Elvis found some of these songs of mine that were written 30 or 35 years ago totally applicable to the [current] situation, and when I hear them I see now that, yes, I guess that that was their destiny.”

Perhaps it was the fluidity of their composition that allowed them to find so unexpected a new life. Perhaps it was simply Allen’s evolution as a songwriter. He looks back on some of his classic early compositions as embodying the “soft-shoe approach—you know, light-hearted, debonair, not thick in any fashion. But then I guess I got to a point in my life where it became, ‘OK, I got this, but now it’s got to have and then some.’ Not to be different but because it deserved to go somewhere else. Because I found pleasure in that. Sometimes,” Allen says with a shrug, “my son says, ‘Daddy, why don’t you write like you used to, before you started wearing those suits and ties?’” He laughs, and his voice trails off. “I don’t know….”

There was never any question about what Allen was going to do with his life. He knew, he says, from the time he was six-and-a-half years old, and his parents simply accepted it because they had no choice. At 13 he started his own group, The Flamingos, with blind R&B singer/guitarist Snooks Eaglin. He made sure Snooks got all the words right, and he painstakingly wrote out note-for-note arrangements for the band for the same reason Elvis would learn to read and write music in his 40s—to be able to present the music properly, even if it was, in Allen’s case, just the jukebox hits of the day. Once he entered the recording end of the business in the late ’50s, he began writing songs himself for the most natural reason: The recording artists needed songs. “They need a song? Of course, write a song. Sometimes at a recording session they would need another, so we’d go on break, and I’d write another right then and there. Ever so humble, I must say, but song it was.”