Allen Toussaint was in Las Vegas this past weekend performing at the city's free Jazz in the Park series and performs a week's residency at New York's Village Vanguard next week, joined by most of the musicians off his recently released solo Nonesuch debut, The Bright Mississippi. "Allen Toussaint's new album couldn't sound more like New Orleans," says the Boston Globe. The pianist "revisits jazz classics ... and takes them for a stroll through Preservation Hall, imbuing his own funky brand of pop-song charisma." Throughout, "Toussaint's musical soul guides all, making the classics sound like his own." The St. Petersburg Times gives it an A; the Lexington Herald Leader calls it "sublime."
Allen Toussaint was in Las Vegas this past weekend performing a free set at the city's Jazz in the Park series at the Clark County Amphitheater. He next performs in a week's residency at the Village Vanguard in New York City next week, with a number of the musicians off his recently released solo Nonesuch debut, The Bright Mississippi: Don Byron on clarinet, Mark Ribot on guitar, David Pilch on bass, and Jay Bellerose on drums; Christian Scott sits in for trumpeter Nicholas Payton, who will be nearby, headlining his own quintet in residency at Birdland.
"Allen Toussaint's new album couldn't sound more like New Orleans," says the Boston Globe's Tristram Lozaw. The famed songwriter/producer/pianist "revisits jazz classics by Duke Ellington, Leonard Feather, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Django Reinhardt, and Thelonious Monk and takes them for a stroll through Preservation Hall, imbuing his own funky brand of pop-song charisma," says Lozaw. "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."
Throughout the album, and with his stellar band, Lozaw concludes, "Toussaint's musical soul guides all, making the classics sound like his own."
Read the complete review at boston.com.
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Music writer Walter Tunis, reviewing the album in the Lexington Herald Leader, calls it "sublime," citing among its stand-out moments its closing tune, Duke Ellington's "Solitude," a duet with Ribot, that he describes as "a quiet, elegiac Crescent City serenade for the times. The dialogue is blues in its most elegant form, with a piano voice that glows at every quiet turn."
Even with the unbeatable band assembled by Toussaint and producer Joe Henry for the album, "this party belongs to Toussaint ... The Bright Mississippi celebrates a grand musical heritage without overplaying its hand. With artist, producer, band and material all steeped in such exquisite taste, why would it need to?"
Read the review at kentucky.com.
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Florida's St. Petersburg Times gives the album an A, with its pop music critic Sean Daly calling Toussaint "a piano-playing legend, an R&B god—and a cool cat at that" whose new album celebrates the songwriters "who helped create the melting pot magic of N'awlins jazz." He credits producer Joe Henry with creating an album "as creaky and comfy as the dusty floorboards of Preservation Hall."
Read more at tampabay.com.
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