National Concert Hall, Dublin
It wasn’t so much chalk and cheese as potato cakes and beignets, with Juliet Turner lending support to the Big Easy’s finest, Allen Toussaint. Turner’s every syllable has a tendency to be laden with meaning, which can result in a leaden delivery, devoid of momentum. It’s a tough gig though, with nothing more than a guitar for support, in a venue more accustomed to orchestras. Turner’s
People Have Names
and
Tuesday Night Ladies
struggled valiantly for breath amid the anticipation of Toussaint’s arrival.
New Orleans is the Crescent City that delights in the subterranean and the illicit, and Toussaint has a repertoire which celebrates that sensuality. In sharp suit and killer suede shoes, he is charm personified, rollicking through a back-catalogue that swings from Working in the Coal Mineto Fortune Tellerand Get Out of my Life, Woman.Toussaint plays the piano like other folk breathe, his natural talent fusing with the instrument's capacity for expansive expression. But from the off, it was clear that this was Toussaint lite, with too many crowd-pleasing medleys alighting fleetingly on the best of his work without ever truly delving beneath the surface.
It's small wonder that everyone from Bonnie Raitt to The Rolling Stones, Lee Dorsey, The Pointer Sisters and Glen Campbell have come to Toussaint for material. His compositional style has a kaleidoscopic quality, absorbing the down-home piano lines of Professor Longhair and merging them with the most sensual and funky grooves this side of Motown. Funny how even one of his best-loved songs, Southern Nights, soars higher in Glen Campbell's interpretation than it does in that of Toussaint himself – it's perhaps a mark of the genre-bending quality of his writing.
Unlike his hot and sweaty show last summer in Whelan's, this concert-hall setting had Toussaint doing a Vegas, with lengthy piano medleys which swung from 10-second snatches of Shostakovich to Edelweissto I'll Take You Home Again Kathleenand Molly Malone. How much sweeter it would have been to hear him digging deep into the loins of What Do You Want the Girl to Do?or Fortune Teller, instead of delivering them perfumed and beribboned.
This was highly accomplished and magnificently polished, but short on that home-town funk that makes Toussaint such a renaissance man as a writer, arranger, producer.
Maybe next time . . .
