Our New Orleans

What a gift, what a gem. As if to prove the enduring, unconquerable strength and resilience of its joyous culture, the New Orleans music community has rallied from the disaster of Hurricane Katrina with a burst of rich, vibrant new music. Our New Orleans is a set of all-new studio tracks by a host of Louisiana music legends, recorded within two months after Katrina specifically for this hurricane-relief benefit CD. The performances are astonishingly good and also amazingly diverse; several of the strongest clearly stand as direct comments on the tragedy itself. This is one of the best albums to come out of the Crescent City in years ? absolutely essential listening.

The great Allen Toussaint sounds the album?s theme ? ?we can make it if we try? ? in the opening cut, a new gospel-funk version of his classic ?Yes We Can Can? which (if such a thing is possible) actually improves on the original he cut with Lee Dorsey and the Meters in 1970. Toussaint also contributes a gorgeous solo piano piece, ?Tipitina and Me,? which he?s been performing for several years but records here for the first time ? a marvelous minor-key variation on the classic Professor Longhair tune. After some years of what he calls ?semi-retirement,? Toussaint is obviously in the midst of a major creative renaissance. This album continues the terrific work he did last spring on I Believe To My Soul [see separate review], and his upcoming album with Elvis Costello is sure to extend this series of new masterpieces. He appears here again on piano behind his old friend Irma Thomas, as she delivers an unforgettable, gritty, career-peak performance of ?Backwater Blues,? the great song about surviving a flood which was first recorded by Bessie Smith in 1927 but speaks perfectly to the Katrina experience.