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"NOLA Solo"

Allen Toussaint; Henry Butler

Friday, May 11 • 8pm

“Allen Toussaint has exerted an unparalleled influence over the New Orleans music scene.”—New Orleans Times Picayune

Program Notes

Listening to New Orleans piano is a journey back to the roots of jazz. Though horn players like Buddy Bolden, Joe "King" Oliver, and Louis Armstrong are well known, ragtime piano was also a formative ingredient for jazz. In fact, the piano also might have been the origin of the word jazz. In the apocryphal tale, clock-watching madams in New Orleans' Storyville red-light district, looking to move new customers in, would ask the house piano player (a role played by Jelly Roll Morton) to "jazz up" his playing. That sped up, syncopated rhythm is at the core of jazz.

Allen Toussaint carries the ebullient musical legacy of his hometown with him wherever he goes. Early in his career he was well known as a songwriter and producer, penning such hits as "Working in the Coalmine," "Mother-in-Law," and "Southern Nights" and manning the boards for fellow Spring Season performer Etta James, as well as Crescent City legends The Meters and Dr. John. He returned to performing in the ’70s, and his knack for laying down deeply funky tracks made his music a gold mine for savvy hip hop samplers through the ’80s and ’90s. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina displaced Toussaint. He and singer-songwriter Elvis Costello paid tribute to the disaster on 2006's Grammy-nominated The River in Reverse. With a piano style inspired by his mentor, Professor "’Fess" Longhair, Toussaint delivers a wholesale punch.

Another pianist steeped in "Fess'" New Orleans tradition—and left homeless by Katrina—the multi-talented Henry Butler has moved effortlessly between jazz, Afro-Latin, German lieder, and R&B. As a student at the Louisiana School for the Blind, Butler mastered a wide range of instruments, including the valve trombone, drums, and the piano. He is also an accomplished vocalist, with a Masters Degree in vocal music from Michigan State University. Butler began his recording career playing straight-ahead jazz with the likes of bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, but soon returned to his hometown music. In recent years he's delved into the blues and seeds his live shows "with crowd-pleasing ingredients from [his] hometown's musical gumbo...that can mean singing a raw-edge blues, soulful R&B, or dazzling an audience instrumentally a la New Orleans piano greats James Booker and Professor Longhair” (Boston Globe).