Allen Toussaint - London Camden Jazz Cafe - 6/11/06
4/5
By: Christiana Spens
Well it's not Rock 'n' Roll, but I like it.
Last night I met my long lost Australian cousin for the first time in over a decade, and after taking wrong trains twice and nearly ending up in outer London - "It's so cold and empty. I hate the suburbs" - we eventually got back to Camden and the refreshing perfume of falafel and gin. We walked around looking for somewhere for a drink, and happened to walk by the Jazz Cafι where there seemed to be something happening... We asked if we could just go in, but they said tickets were £35, which were cumulatively our life savings. Some man with a cigarette said, "But it's Allen Toussaint, he's a legend, you'll regret it forever if you don't go, it's worth debt, it's worth starvation..." and persuasive things of that kind. We looked disappointed and slowly began to turn away into the dark blue night.
"Nah, they're cute, let 'em in," I heard the bouncer whisper...
Inside we sipped gin and tonic and raised our glasses, "to being cute," and started to melt into this legendary jazz we'd heard all about. Something about the blue light and grand piano struck a little chord in my musical heart. Of course - jazz - why had I forgotten my love for jazz? So caught up with all those guitars and drums and trying to realise my calling in life as a groupie - I'd forgotten Jazz.
Memories of that old twenties jazz - Stormy Weather, The Cotton Club Stomp, all that cabaret and burlesque scene, all illuminated in the dusky blue lights, and the mellow tones of the big piano, and the voice of a man in his sixties now, a deep New Orleans accent like the voice of a lady I met in New Orleans while working on a reconstruction project after Hurricane Katrina - all deep and soft as a dry August breeze.
He sang about long train rides, lipstick marks on cigarettes and ghosts in Louisiana - he sang evocative 'Southern Nights' and told an anecdotal story about sitting on a porch as a child with his extended family, stopping only when his Aunt took a long hard swig of something alcoholic (a bit like Basement Club nights really, that big 'ole Rockfeedback family... We just need an old Aunt, and a porch).
I started to think that the world would be a better place if everyone listened to some jazz now and then - if they played 'Lipstick Traces [On a Cigarette]' over a tannoy on the tube, for example. Having said that, perhaps it might be more accurate to play, 'Get Out of My Life Woman', or 'Working in a Coal Mine'...
His voice was the thing that lingered in my mind, though, so incredibly sublime and mocking at once, picking up every nuance he wanted to imitate or express, pitching every heartache or misshapen happening exactly as it had to be. It was a musical sensibility I had to admire, the same kind of perfection you hear in the Beatles and Lennon and Rolling Stones, only with another kind of warmth I had not heard before in rock, and another kind of blues.
Perhaps it was because I loved New Orleans so much when I went there, even all trashed as it was after the hurricane. As Toussaint (a New Orleans native) sang, I remembered this collapsed house I walked through (there were no walls) with a boy from Mississippi - everything scattered, all the belongings, and all the old records. The one record I found that was not completely damaged by the hurricane was, ironically, 'The Last Waltz'.
It's hard to explain just how sad it was to see New Orleans like that - to see photographs scattered and water-damaged in broken houses - of people who had died. To see pianos in trees with the keys missing, and limousines in mud, and to hear such silence.
So when Allan Toussaint started singing 'Southern Nights' with the perfect pitch and perfect emotion all expressed through movements of fingers on piano keys, I understood why they call it the Blues. It doesn't matter what the genre is, how you label your liquor: to find this kind of beauty and truth in any music shows it is possible in other songs, bands, singers, cities. The Rolling Stones, after all, did a cover of "Fortune Teller". In a sense, Jazz is the long-lost cousin of Rock.
And with my other long-lost cousin, Jaffa, we talked some more, sipped the last of that liquor and heard the applause, and hugged goodbye on the platform of Camden Town Tube, blues in the air, New Orleans on my mind, and all that jazz.
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