What a guy! What a couple-a guys!

Allen Toussaint is one of the most generous spirits in music history, a gracious man in a rough culture who gave up on school-trained music to follow Perfessor Longhair. He started out a skinny kid playing piano and selling songs to Cosimo Matassa and Dave Bartholomew, and has gone on himself to be a neglected pivotal figure in the history of American music. But he isn't necessarily as neglected as Dave Bartholomew, known if at all as Fats Domino's producer, but someone who created a space and time for the most electrifying, innovative music yet.

There is a sliver between the post-Big Band-era swing and the be-bop offshoots that was R & B -- when Louis Jordan, Dave Bartholomew, Paul Gayten, Larry Darnell, Roy Byrd and others played that club music with singers like Annie Laurie, Alma Monday, and Chubby Newsome. Then R & R happened and it became a different kind of club, and now it is technopop or something.

Imagine you could go into the Brass Rail and order a Cour-
voisier and sit down and listen to Dave Bartholomew's quintet sharpening up material they might be laying down over at Cosimo's J&M Recording Studio the next day. Damn. Or imagine you got a job working at the Roosevelt pouring water for some banquet Mr. Toussaint was putting on.

Alerted by another Southern gentlemen and frequent contributor.