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You'd think, given the length of my Friday piece about Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint's new collaborative album, The River in Reverse, and how their appearance Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl coincides with the Playboy Jazz Festival's salute to New Orleans this year, that I would have included everything worth mentioning from my interview with the two disparate legends. (That is, you might think so if you're reading this Friday or later. If you come across this before then, well, consider it a sneak preview.)
But as often happens, I have leftovers, and these bits - and the subject who spoke them - are too interesting (to me, anyway) to leave languishing in my notebook.
One response focuses on Costello & Toussaint's appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in April, where they were on the main stage just before Bruce Springsteen unveiled his Seeger Sessions show. By all accounts (as I've mentioned elsewhere) it was a most moving experience; Toussaint called it "the most important Jazz Fest ever" when I asked him about it.
My question to Elvis was trite - something about how it felt to be part of that particular event. That's the sort of query I wouldn't suspect Costello to take in stride, but it turns out he's not nearly as prickly as you might think these days. Just serious. Gracious, but focused.
"When you're at big open-air festivals," he said, "it's often about big choruses and not about little details and lyrics. It's just not that kind of listening you go there for. You come for the sensory experience and to be with friends, so the music that prevails are big anthemic pieces.
"But that was not the case at this festival at all. People were really listening. They were also having a great time, but they were really listening to what was being said. It had a particularly memorable feel to it. I don't think I'll ever forget that."
To end our chat, I asked him if he prefers collaboration to solo endeavors, given that in the past decade he's worked with everyone from Toussaint and Burt Bacharach to opera singer Anne Sofie Von Otter. Is it more rewarding or challenging at this stage in his career?
I think his response explains a great deal about his attitude toward his craft and creativity - and why making what some people consider a traditional Elvis Costello album often holds zero interest for him.
"Isn't everything you do a form of collaboration?" he responded. "Even if I were to make a record with just the Imposters, as I did on the last go-'round (The Delivery Man), that is still a collaboration. It's a collaboration with the producer you work with, with the players you have backing you.
"That goes right back to the beginning of my career. I didn't even know quite what I was doing when I first got into the studio with Nick Lowe and the Attractions." (Aside to nitpicky EC nuts: Yes, I'm sure he's aware that he made his first record, My Aim Is True, without the Attractions. He seemed to be speaking generally.) "We just made records. Then we went out and played some shows. Then we made some more records, you know?
"At a certain point some opportunities came my way to really write a body of songs with some notable songwriters, and to do some things that were very different than the music I started out with. And I suppose (those projects) have been noted more than the mechanism that goes into the making of everything you ever do.
"I'm also aware that there are some people in this world who wish I would just make a rock 'n' roll record with ... well, probably they wish it was with the Attractions. But that can never happen. That would be an inferior venture. To my mind, I've made those records already. Those records are great."
To him, dwelling in the past like that "is like when you're 12 years old, and you wrrite on a piece of paper your favorite sports team made up of all the players from all the teams you like, and you think that team would be the world leader. The reality is that every piece of music you make is made in the moment you make it, in the circumstances you're in, with the tools that you've got, with the skills that you've accumulated.
"That's been my experience. And why I still have curiosity and excitement about making music is that I haven't stayed with one idea. I've remained open to lots of new things. And occasonally one of those things is to pick up an electric guitar and start yelling. But that isn't inherently superior to doing something with a string quartet or an orchestra, or to enter into something as joyful as this collaboration with Allen.
"Though much of this music has lament in its voice, and there are some angry or accusatory lines in some of the songs, the actual experience of recording it was one of the most joyful occasions of making music that I can ever remember having anywhere. And that probably is superior to just going into a dark room and bashing out a lot of what you think people want to hear from you, becase you're afraid to let go of the past."
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