TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082790/0827440.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.8 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                MUSIC, Page 57

Hail to the New Orleans Chiefs!


The Neville Brothers catch the magic rhythms of the city

By JAY COCKS -- With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York


    You can hear them in the movies. You can even hear them on
the radio. And it's about time. The Neville Brothers' new album
Brother's Keeper is yet another superb session of musical
crossbreeding; nothing unusual there. It also contains a witchy
reworking of Leonard Cohen's Bird on a Wire, which haunted the
sound track of the Mel Gibson-Goldie Hawn movie and initiated
a course of well-deserved popular success for this magical New
Orleans group.

    Brother Aaron, perhaps their pivotal voice, had his own
breakthrough some months back singing a duet with Linda
Ronstadt on the No. 2 hit Don't Know Much. Now Aaron and the
three other boys are hitting the concert trail, opening for
Ronstadt in 48 dates. The Nevilles have always been great, and
it seems as if they've been around forever. It's just nice to
see and hear them out front now, where they belong. They are
proud regents and purveyors of rhythm and blues New
Orleans-style, which means the music is a gumbo of rock, jazz,
calypso and whatever else comes floating through that sweet
Southern air. It's not the most contemporary sound in town, but
that doesn't matter. The Nevilles have spent most of their
professional lives blithely going their own way and just
letting the good times roll around to them.

    That was a lesson that Aaron, 49, learned early. He could
get in almost anywhere -- movies, basketball games -- and get
away with almost anything if he just waited and sang. "My
favorite song was a thing called The Wheel of Fortune," he
says, "and I used to sing it to whoever was on the door, and
they'd let me in." All he had to do was let loose with a sweet
sample of what his brother Cyril calls "the only voice like it
on the planet." It is a voice with a strong trace of spiritual
dignity, cut with a chaser of fine, raunchy soul, and it is
just right for the choir, or in the bedroom.

    Cyril, 42, youngest of the four brothers, is the feistiest
too, and he talks a lot about the power of rap music. "It's a
grapevine that stretches all the way from here back to Africa,"
he says. One of the best cuts on their exquisite 1989 album
Yellow Moon is a rap-inspired, soul-inflected tribute to Rosa
Parks. Like rap, it's got a strong, simple message. "This
ordinary person made all this big stuff happen," says Cyril.
"If more kids knew about her, they'd understand they don't have
to be no really superperson to create change."

    Aaron usually smiles when Cyril sounds off like this. "Cyril
tries too hard," he says. "Art's outspoken. We call him the
leader. Charles is quiet, always into thoughts, always
reading." If Aaron is the linchpin, Art is the band's elder
statesman. At 52, he has the strongest grounding in the group's
past. "Our music I call voodoo music," he says, "some kind of
enchantin' music."

    The Nevilles' subtle sorcery comes directly from the lively
musical learning that took place in the pre-electronic age in
the country's most musical city. "There was no TV like now,"
says Charles, 51, a grandfather of eight. "We were entertained
by our parents and uncles and aunts, told stories and taught
songs."

    The Nevilles' mother and uncle were a dance team. Their
maternal grandmother sang hymns as she ironed, says Charles,
and had special songs "that went with shelling peas and others
that went with washing clothes." Their father, a cabdriver and
merchant seaman, could whistle like a horn player. The boys
didn't have to go far to catch a band. "They'd just be marching
along, playing," Charles says. "Sometimes they'd be in a
funeral procession. And sometimes they'd be playing and
marching just because they felt like it."

    The boys all jumped into music early, although separately.
Charles scored himself a saxophone as a reward for graduating
with honors from elementary school, then dropped out of school
after the 11th grade to play the chitlin circuit with the Piney
Brown Band. "We were playing for the money we made off the
door," he says, "and there was just about enough to get us from
gig to gig." Art, who first played the organ at age four,
joined a rock band called the Hawkettes out of high school. The
group had a 1954 million-selling single called Mardi Gras
Mambo, on which Art sang lead vocal, but he got burned on the
business end and, by his count, earned $12. While Charles
played in jazz bands throughout the South, Aaron took over the
Hawkettes leadership when Art was drafted. Cyril drifted into
the group in the early '60s, and with Aaron's singular triumph
on Tell It Like It Is (one of the great R.-and-B. ballads of
all time), the Nevilles were primed to coalesce as a family and
as a band. Cyril and Aaron formed the Soul Machine, while Art
created the Meters, who laid the foundation for '70s funk.

    All these various musical and familial directions were
finally brought back home, to roots and roost, in 1975, when
the brothers got together with their uncle George Landry as the
Wild Tchoupitoulas. The Tchoupitoulas appeared on stage in full
Mardi Gras regalia, including some dazzling tribal headdresses,
and laid down the kind of celebratory music that seems to come
from some secret Delta heart -- voodoo music, for sure. The
other Meters dropped out, and the brothers stuck together as,
simply, the Nevilles.

    That's the way you can catch them now, working wonders even
on a version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken? That's a worn, old
spiritual, to be sure, but when the Nevilles take it on, they
also make it over. Step inside their circle, and you can
believe they're not only supreme musicians but passing good at
magic too.