Hot As A Pistol,Keen As A Blade

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Following the release of their duo album The River in Reverse, Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint embarked on a six-week North American tour in the spring of 2006 that is chronicled here in a video of their performance at the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal on July 3. As on the disc, the two principals are backed by Costello's trio, the Imposters (Steve Nieve on keyboards, Davey Faragher on bass, and Pete Thomas on drums), and Toussaint's associates guitar player Anthony Brown and the Crescent City Horns. (One of those horns, saxophonist Carl Blouin, did not make the tour, however, reducing the section to four pieces.) For the show, the group has expanded the concept of the album, which featured new versions of old songs associated with Toussaint and some new songs written by Costello and Toussaint or by Costello alone. Other Toussaint-associated favorites have been added ("A Certain Girl," "Yes We Can Can," "Fortune Teller"), along with a set of some of Costello's better-known songs ("[I Don't Want to Go To] Chelsea," "Watching the Detectives," "Pump It Up," "Alison"). As on the album, it's impressive how Costello's and Toussaint's different styles work so well together. In part, this is because each has given something over to the other. Costello asked Toussaint to arrange his old songs to include the horn section, bringing them more into Toussaint's New Orleans sound, and Toussaint has gamely played along with some of Costello's more aggressive numbers. (He disappears for four songs in the middle of the show, however.) The video is generous at two hours and 24 tracks, with bonuses including "Alison," a ten-minute interview with Costello and Toussaint, and an excerpt from the documentary Putting the River in Reverse, which is included in full in a CD/DVD version of the album. There are occasional editing glitches that reveal there was more in the show than fit on the DVD. After the opener, "Monkey to Man," Costello says the previous song was by Toussaint, which may have been true at the concert but is not on the disc; at another point, he alludes to the band's performance of "On Your Way Down," a song that is on the CD, but not the DVD. Such flubs only make the viewer wish the show had been presented in full, but apparently that wasn't possible. ~ William Ruhlmann