Elvis Costello, a chameleon among modern pop performers, here provides a superb overview of a thirty-year career as a matchless singer-songwriter.

From punk through soul through country, Costello’s musical influences and inclinations have been as far-ranging as his collaborators – Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach, Anne Sophie von Otter, to name a few – and at this date in July 2006 he rekindles a friendship with an old favourite of his, New Orleans R&B monument Allen Toussaint.

In a program of song that reaches back to his earliest album, 1977’s My Aim Is True, Costello takes viewers on a tour of everything that matters in the last three decades of meaningful pop music. But the focus (five of the eleven numbers) is on Costello’s collaboration with Allen Toussaint and their album The River in Reverse, a tribute to Toussaint’s music and a gesture of hope for hurricane ravaged New Orleans.

Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint: a sterling partnership, with the bonus of muscular backing by Costello’s band, The Imposters, and Toussaint’s tight New Orleans horn section.