Life, Love And Faith

Between spending the ’60s writing countless future standards and guiding the region’s distinct take on soul with his in-studio arrangements, Allen Toussaint would be rightly revered as a primary architect and ambassador of New Orleans R&B even if he’d never put his actual voice on tape. But thank god he did: following the album era’s precedent for elevating once behind-the-scenes songwriters like Isaac Hayes and Carole King to spotlight status, Toussaint cut a brief but potent stretch of headliner albums during an ultra-fruitful ’70s creative period that hit an early stride with Life, Love and Faith, his first for Reprise. The masterpiece here — if you had to stick to one — is “On Your Way Down,” one of the most laidback-sounding yet ultimately incisive takes on the alienating side effects of phony rugged-individualist social climbing and the karma that comes with abusing it. Toussaint’s gentle yet ruminative tone is almost addition-by-subtraction — it makes his chiding cut even deeper than a seething scowl does, and that elegant understatement adds the same power-of-nuance heft to his romantic infatuation (“Electricity”), his search for peace in a rural idyll (“Out of the City (Into Country Life)”), and his ambivalence about the ability of man-with-a-plan institutions to help  struggling people (“Victims of the Darkness”). And in a decade where his reputation as a mastermind of soul songwriting and arrangement got him in good with everyone from Dr. John to The Band to LaBelle, it’s a special thrill to hear his own voice get to express itself over the same broad-breadth funk and virtuoso piano-driven resonance that he gave so many others.

His 1970 album a victim of woeful distribution and promotion, Toussaint wound up on Reprise Records, backed by the Meters for this crisp, far-ranging 1972 album. The end result was the same, but some of Toussaint’s nimblest tunes are here, packing wonderment and many moving parts into catchy tunes that speak their peace and fade out before the 3-minute mark. “She Once Belonged to Me” weds Philly soul elegance to a downhome New Orleans groove. Toussaint drops an anthem like “Victims of the Darkness”  while avoiding the easy platitudes of the era. And “Soul Sister” is an admiration of an Afro’d muse that feels righteous and innocent at once.