Resurrection

I'm not going to write a review of Allen Toussaint's "The Bright Mississippi," easily the most talked about record to come out this past year. Plenty of other people have already done that, and there are some pretty good reviews posted at Amazon.

For rock-and-roll hall-of-famer and New Orleans native Toussaint, now 71, "Bright Mississippi" caps his 50-year career as a record producer, music arranger, composer, and studio musician in New York and New Orleans, during which most of his energies were directed to soul, funk, and R&B projects. "Bright Mississippi" is his first foray into the type of music I like to call American classical, and the 12 tracks on the disc are much more than just song titles. Each is a "signature" tune closely associated with a musician possessing significant historical cred, so that the track list is also a roster of this music's greatest names: Egyptian Fantasy (Bechet), Singin' the Blues (Beiderbecke), Winin' Boy (Morton), West End Blues (Armstrong), Blue Drag (Django Reinhardt) and Solitude (Ellington) are augmented by standards that everybody has played, such as St. James Infirmary and Just a Closer Walk with Thee.

It's all instrumental except for one vocal track, and although the instrumental attack is intense in places (Toussaint's piano playing especially), it goes down very easy.

However, the greatest importance of this carefully-chosen sampling of American classical pieces, which has generated such a surprising amount of buzz and excitement for an instrumental collection, is not just musical. Toussaint has made a a couple of emphatic statements with this record; one is "This music is still important;" the other is "We're still here."

Even as the American Empire totters toward its grave, American culture, as embodied in the musical heritage of New Orleans, has shown itself to be not just still alive, but vigorous, fresh, vital, and robust. Washington D.C., the national epicenter of corruption and the shell which houses a now nearly totally dysfunctional government, may have forgotten about New Orleans, but New Orleans refuses to go away, and in fact will be back on her feet and stronger than ever when Washington D.C. is a haunted ruin.

Our government, saddled with debt, crippled by Byzantine rules, protocols, and procedures, addled by war, overrun by lobbyists and rotten with payoffs and corruption, now seems a fragile and ephemeral thing. Who knows how much longer it can last before it declares bankruptcy and awaits the rush of creditors hoping to salvage something from the general ruin? But the music, literature, and language of America is made of much tougher stuff, and is in no danger of passing away.

We'll still have a country here, even if we might not always have a government. I'm not worried about America.

We're indebted to Allen Toussaint for celebrating the most classical and traditional music of our precious heritage in such an appropriately reverent and well-timed manner, and the titles on this record are like a strand of jewels.

And after this temporary, de facto, rotted, and dysfunctional government has passed away and Washingon D.C. is a ruin, we should locate the capitol of the new government that replaces it in New Orleans, where the heart of America's cultural heritage still beats.