Ben Ratliff on Allen Toussaint

"From a distance Allen Toussaint might look like a jazz musician: he’s a sophisticated gray eminence of New Orleans. In fact he’s a pop musician and producer, a great one. He has nothing to apologize for. It’s just that jazz as we know it is not part of his working life. So 'The Bright Mississippi,' his first solo album in 10 years, a largely instrumental record of jazz standards and old New Orleans songs, is a work of the imagination. The record aims at the kind of listener who might have liked the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss album 'Raising Sand': it’s reconfigured Americana, magic regionalism. It’s a producer’s record. And it works, possibly because Mr. Toussaint is no pushover. As a pianist he has his own musical identity, and he’s naturally conceptual. He didn’t produce this record. Joe Henry, the ever-curious singer-songwriter, did. But Mr. Toussaint brings to these songs his own elegant, reserved sensibility. He doesn’t rip them apart or interrogate them on the harmonic or rhythmic terms with which they’ve usually been met; he shines them up and levels them out into slow-rolling and grandiloquent New Orleans songs, full of tremolo chords and serenity" ("New CDs," New York Times, 4/19/09).