Joe Henry, the singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer, is featured on the latest episode of NPR's Fresh Air. Henry has helmed two Nonesuch albums—the Carolina Chocolate Drops' 2010 Grammy Award-winning Nonesuch debut, Genuine Negro Jig, and Allen Toussaint's 2009 Grammy-nominated Nonesuch solo debut, The Bright Mississippi—in addition to having produced three tracks on the 2005 benefit album Our New Orleans and one of the songs featured on The Wire soundtrack "...and all the pieces matter," Solomon Burke's "Fast Train."

Henry spoke with Fresh Air host Terry Gross about his own new album, Reverie (Anti-), and talks a good deal about working with Toussaint on The Bright Mississippi a soulful, live-in-the-studio jazz set that showcases the music of Toussaint's hometown of New Orleans, including songs and styles not generally associated with the famed pianist/producer. On the album, Toussaint—backed by an all-star combo including clarinetist Don Byron, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist David Piltch, and percussionist Jay Bellerose, with guest spots by pianist Brad Mehldau and saxophonist Joshua Redman—reinterprets classic jazz and blues tunes popularized or written by fellow native sons of New Orleans like Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and Joe “King” Oliver, as well as pieces composed by such fellow travelers as Django Rheinhardt, Duke Ellington, and even Thelonious Monk.

"It's not what you associate Allen Toussaint with," says Gross. "And you've said you even got him playing songs that he'd never heard before let alone never played before ... It's such an interesting thing for you to do because Toussaint knows so much music, and he's such an important producer himself, and to put himself in your hands and let you be the producer and guide him in a direction that he didn't even know he wanted to go in is I guess kind of a gutsy thing to do."

'Well, it was gutsy for him," Henry replies, "I mean very generous of Allen to have given me that kind of latitude and been willing to go there with me."

The show concludes with a the album's opening track, Bechet's "Egyptian Fantasy." You can hear it along with the complete Fresh Air interview with Joe Henry at npr.org/freshair.

To pick up a copy of Allen Toussaint's The Bright Mississippi, head to the Nonesuch Store now, where CD and vinyl orders include high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s of the album at checkout.

Joe Henry will perform with Brad Mehldau at Wigmore Hall in London on Friday, December 2, the culminating concert of Mehldau's two-year jazz series at Wigmore. For more information and tickets, go to wigmore-hall.org.uk.