By Nick DeRiso
For all of her wandering, Allen Toussaint remains this touchstone for New Orleans-born vocalist Christina Gaudet.
But Gaudet doesn’t let her lasting affinity for a hometown soul legend pigeonhole her wider ambitions on Solid, though it’s subtitled “Featuring new songs by Allen Toussaint.” She’s particularly adept at engrossing Cocteau Twins-inspired dream pop, an ethereal landscape that couldn’t be further away from the aromatic musical gumbo of the Big Easy’s famous French Quarter.
If anything, Toussaint’s trio of oh-so funky compositions seems to gird Gaudet for this ongoing journey away from her native environs.
They met when Gaudet, having moved to New York City, shared the stage with Tony winner Ruth Brown in the Toussaint-penned 1986 Broadway production “Staggerlee.” Later, they recorded together at Toussaint’s Sea Saint Studios.
Each time, Toussaint seemed to trigger something in Gaudet, whose theater work had taken her as far away as Denver, Colo. She began exploring the rhythms and colors of her childhood, and found herself working with soul-stirring songwriters like Leiber and Stroller and Randy Newman in separate stage productions.
When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore in 2005, devastating their native city, Gaudet decided to issue some of the 1990 Toussaint recordings from Sea Saint as a benefit effort. She’d come back around to Toussaint once more. Their duet “Bring It On Home To Me” was a top iTunes seller in 2007, both in the U.S. and in Japan.
Three albums later, Gaudet revisits that successful formula on Solid, her seventh full-length release. Toussaint contributes “Storyville,” “Go Girl Go” and “It Stopped.”
Named for a turn-of-the-last-century red-light district in New Orleans, “Storyville” opens with a bawdy trumpet blast by Jim Seeley that sets a high-stepping tone for this fun story song. Drummer Eric Johnson and bassist Nate Stevens add a loping beat that strongly recalls the best moments from Toussaint’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame career, notably “Mother-In-Law.” Meanwhile, “Go Girl Go,” pushed along by a tick-tock piano signature from John Zych, echoes Gaudet’s own inspirational journey from the Deep South to the bright lights and big city stages of New York.
Gaudet flows effortlessly out of these grease-popping grooves into more contemplative numbers like “Waterfall of Tears” and “Free Life.” The first sounds at times like a mainstream crossover record in the style of Faith Hill, while the second echoes the sweetly empowering R&B of Donna Summer.
“Finding My Soul” could be a 1970s-era groove-band tune, while Gaudet brilliantly updates the familiar slow-jam template for brokenhearted lament on “Mad as Hell” with a vocal that’s laced with wintry shimmer.
This kind of compartmentalized variety would seem too mannered in the hands of a less-skilled group of musicians, but Gaudet’s group pulls it off. They are just as adept at the billowing rock opener “Alice” as they are with the ethereal, Cocteau-esque “Dreaming.”
That said, what sets Solid apart remains Gaudet’s deeply felt root system back to Louisiana.
The record finds its most consistent groove in a middle passage that begins with Toussaint’s “It Stopped,” a strutting tune that emboldens Gaudet with an uncommon swagger. Her repeated verse, in the style of a great old blues, underscores a resolute tale about the last lingerings of love after a surprising betrayal.
From there, Gaudet cuts loose with her own “Carnival Mardi Gras.” She can do many things well, but here Gaudet sounds like she’s having fun, too.
A polished performer, Gaudet is goosed into this hooting grocery-list of signature elements from the New Orleans culture by a swaying second-line sound straight from the streets of her hometown.
For all of her successes away from him, Toussaint remains a center point, like a family dinner table, where Gaudet can be true to her unvarnished self.
There’s a reason their collaborations have produced many of the creative, and commercial, highpoints in Gaudet’s career.
She’s back home again.
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