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Mighty Meters of New Orleans |
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Sunday, 22 January 2006 06:34 |
The Mighty Meters of New Orleans
By John Sinclair
The mighty Meters of New Orleans have made a lasting imprint on the shape of modern music far beyond the dimensions of their initial impact as the studio band of choice for the productions of Crescent City composer Allen Toussaint in the late 60s and early 70s.
The relentless rhythms and incredibly sympathetic support provided by organist Art Neville, guitarist Leo Nocentelli, bassist George Porter, Jr. and drummer Joseph Zigaboo Modeliste ensured that the producer's recordings with Lee Dorsey, Earl King, Dr. John, the Wild Tchoupitoulas, LaBelle, the Band, Paul McCartney and others would be fully realized musical masterpieces.
At the same time, the Meters irresistible 45 rpm singles under their own name Sophisticated Cissy, Cissy Strut, Looka-Py-Py, Stretch Your Rubber Band, Chicken Strut for Josie Records between 1969-71 would place Toussaint's studio band on the charts in their own right. And, as Warner/Reprise recording artists in the 70s, The Meters would move from instrumental features to full-bore band numbers featuring the vocals of Art Neville and his brother Cyril and compositions by all the members of the ensemble on the critically acclaimed LPs Cabbage Alley (1972), Rejuvenation (1974), Fiyo on the Bayou (1975) and New Directions (1977).
Although their recordings were modest chart hits at best, the Meters influence on the world of music was greatly disproportionate to the immediate effect of the band's recordings on the marketplace. Widely known as pioneers of funk, their distinctive sound and soulful, polyrhythmic attack made them early favorites of musicians all across the spectrum of popular music. In recent years they ve inspired a whole generation of modern-day funksters who have staked their musical lives on the sound and spirit exuded by these four native sons of New Orleans.
* * * * *
The Crescent City holds a special place in the annals of American music. It is no secret that jazz developed in New Orleans in the 19th century by conjoining spirituals, marches, ragtime, pop tunes and the blues with the creative imagination of the improvising individual. The classic blues singers of the teens and 20s were introduced to records by New Orleans composers Perry Bradford, Clarence and Spencer Williams and others. Jelly Roll Morton perfected the jazz composition, and Louis Armstrong shaped the jazz performance into a showcase for the individual genius of the virtuoso improviser.
In the years following World War II, New Orleans put its stamp on the second half of the 20th century through the rhythmic creations of Roy Brown, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Lloyd Price and their producers, Dave Bartholomew and Paul Gayten, who developed the studio band into an essential ingredient in the making of records long before the ascendancy of Motown and Stax a decade later.
Utilizing the quick minds and instrumental proficiency of a core group of master musicians led by drummer Earl Palmer, bassist Frank Fields, saxophonists Lee Allen, Alvin Red Tyler and Herb Hardesty, pianists Edward Frank and Salvador Doucette and guitarists Justin Adams and Ernest McLean Bartholomew and Gayten forged the studio band into a tight, nimble unit that could, day after day and year after year, provide perfectly appropriate backing for any sort of singer to produce recordings of great immediate import and lasting value.
Bartholomew and Gayten ruled from the late 40s through the end of the 1950s, cutting hit after hit on artists like Larry Darnell, Annie Laurie, Fats Domino, Smiley Lewis, Shirley & Lee, Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Clarence Frogman Henry, Bobby Charles, Clifton Chenier and Sugarboy Crawford for the DeLuxe, Regal, King, Imperial, Aladdin, Specialty, Chess, Checker and Argo labels. Other prolific producers sprang up in their wake: Johnny Vincent at Specialty and Ace, Harold Battiste, Eddie Bo and young marvels Mac Rebennack (later to be known as Dr. John) and Allen Toussaint.
Toward the end of the decade saxophonist and composer Harold Battiste left his job as New Orleans staff producer for Specialty Records, where he had recorded Art Neville's classic Cha-Dooky-Doo in 1958, and organized a musicians collective known as AFO (All For One) Records, making the members of his studio band Red Tyler, Nat Perillat, Melvin Lastie, Peter Chuck Badie and John Boudreaux full partners in the enterprise. AFO and its house band, known as the Executives, brought a fresh sound and hit at once with I Know by Barbara George. Battiste followed with Lee Dorsey's Ya Ya and cut a series of great singles by Eddie Bo, Mac Rebennack, Prince La La, Johnny Adams, Tammy Lynn, Wallace Johnson and other still-obscure New Orleans singers.
The shape of black popular music began to change as the 60s opened, and a young pianist and composer from the Gerttown neighborhood named Allen Toussaint began his ascendary as the Crescent City's pre-eminent producer. Toussaint checked in with productions for Minit and Instant Records featuring an up-dated version of the New Orleans R&B sound centered on his own piano and the impeccable support of a new core group of studio players led by guitarist Deacon John Moore. The young producer redefined the sound of popular music in the city during the first half of the 60s and scored a string of national chart hits with his brilliant productions on Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas, Chris Kenner, Jessie Hill, Ernie K-Doe, Benny Spellman, Aaron and Art Neville and a host of others.
One night in 1968 Toussaint and his partner, Marshall Sehorn, strolled into the Ivanhoe Club in the French Quarter to hear a highly-touted quartet called Art Neville & the Neville Sounds. They knew Art, liked what they heard and recruited the Sounds Neville, guitarist Leo Nocentelli, bassist George Porter, Jr. and drummer Zigaboo Modeliste for regular work as the new house band at SeaSaint Studios. The band recorded behind Lee Dorsey and then cut a few instrumental numbers of their own, which Sehorn packaged into a deal with Josie Records in New York City. When Josie got ready to release the band's first single, Sophisticated Cissy, they wanted a more marketable name for the act, and the Neville Sounds became The Meters.
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New Orleans has been an endless font of musical talent ever since Emancipation, when more than a score of black marching bands were formed to provide music for the parades, picnics, dances and other functions of the newly-organized African-American benevolent societies and Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs. Since 1865 the city's diverse neighborhoods have generated wave after wave of skilled, inventive, fiercely imaginative musicians of every stripe, each generation absorbing and extending in turn the musical legacy of their forebears unto the present day.
The music eventually known as jazz evolved from the confluence of the brass bands with spirituals, ragtime and the blues. It was music for dancing and having fun, and it flowered in the corner bars and down-home dancehalls where people gathered to get their kicks. It was music literally rooted in the streets, where the brass bands would play their funked-up arrangements of marches and spirituals for Social Aid & Pleasure Club parades and funeral processions, and it incorporated all the rhythms of everyday life in the city's uptown and downtown African-American neighborhoods where the musicians had their own deep, deep roots in the community.
In New Orleans, there is no separating the music from the life of the people. It's there in the home, in the streets, in the neighborhood churches and funky corner bars, in the projects and shotgun houses and rough wood dwellings populated by people eking out a meager living working for the white folks or making their way by their wits in the underground economy of the ghetto. But there's no escaping the music it provides a throbbing soundtrack for the activities of everyday life and of every special occasion from birth to death, and it's a constant factor in the lives of everyone in the community.
Young people are inspired to become aspiring musicians from the first time as mere babes in arms they hear a brass band or a gang of Mardi Gras Indians marching down the street. They hear the choirs and the soloists and the backing musicians at church and the sounds of the blues and R&B and frantic dance music pumping out of the neighborhood nightspots, and they are moved to take up an instrument or to start to sing themselves. Soon they fall in with other youngsters in the hood who share their aspirations to make music of their own, teen-aged bands are formed and life-long careers in music have begun.
Some youths are even more blessed to have musicians in the family they can learn from, or close neighbors who are members of established musical organizations the youngsters have heard on the radio or blasting out of the omnipresent jukeboxes in the rude bars and taverns that serve as the neighborhoods social centers. And once they pick out an instrument for themselves and begin to play, it isn t long before they find their mentors and musical associates in the places where players gather in the immediate vicinity.
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The four young men of New Orleans who became The Meters enjoyed all the benefits of growing up in the highly evolved musical community centered in the city's African-American working-class neighborhoods. Their parents played music for fun and listened to the records of the day, and once the youngsters developed a rudimentary proficiency on their instruments of choice, they were quickly accepted into the inner circles of the local musical fraternity and schooled by wily veterans in the ways and means of their chosen profession.
The oldest Meter, Art Neville, was born December 17, 1937 into what would soon become an extraordinarily musical family. The Nevilles lived uptown on Valence Street in the 13th Ward, moved into the Calliope projects for several years, and returned to Valence Street where Art still resides when he was a teen. By this time the Neville family included Art's younger brothers Charles, Aaron and Cyril, and Art had begun to master the piano under the formidable influence of the great Professor Longhair, Henry Roeland Byrd, then in his early prime as a masterful pianist and rhythmic innovator described by another acolyte, Allen Toussaint, as the Bach of Rock.
As a high school student Art and his brother Charles, an aspiring saxophonist, teamed up with the French brothers, bassist George and drummer Bob, to form a little R&B group they called the Turquoise. Charles would go on to tour with B.B. King and other popular bands at the outset of his brilliant career, and Bob and George French would establish themselves as two of the city's most popular and influential musicians. But Art Neville went on, at age 16, to join another local R&B band, the Hawketts, whose members included drummer John Boudreaux (later one of the AFO Executives) and saxophonist George Davis, who became noted as a guitarist and composer of the classic Aaron Neville recording of the mid- 60s, Tell It Like It Is.
The Hawketts became a favorite with R&B disc jockey Ken Jack the Cat Elliott, who took the band over to WWEZ Radio and cut a pulsating version of a country & western tune, Mardi Gras Mambo, recorded the previous year by Jody Leviens The Hawketts recording of Mardi Gras Mambo was released in time for the 1955 Carnival season and became an immediate local smash, and then an all-time New Orleans classic the record is still heard on radios and jukeboxes all over town every year at Mardi Gras time. Elliott placed the recording with Chess Records in Chicago for national distribution, but the 45 would prove to be the Hawketts only recorded claim to fame.
In New Orleans, though, the impact of their big single opened up new territory for the Hawketts beyond the school dances and teen spots they d been playing. Now they were featured at the Dew Drop Inn, college frat parties and on major shows with Roy Brown, Ray Charles and other national acts. They hooked up with Specialty Records star Larry Williams in 1957 and backed him as he toured behind his current chart hits, Bonie Maronie and Short Fat Fannie.
Home from the Larry Williams tour, Art signed with Specialty and cut a series of singles with house producer Harold Battiste, including the timeless Cha-Dooky-Doo. He entered the U.S. Navy in 1958 before the record was released, sat in with groups around the base and returned to New Orleans two years later to re-join the Hawketts, whose members now included guitarist Snooks Eaglin and the Lastie brothers, David and Melvin. Specialty had faded from the New Orleans scene after Battiste left the Los Angeles-based organization to start up the cooperative AFO label, so Art looked around for recording opportunities and ended up in 1961 signed to the local Instant label, with his career as a recording artist now in the capable hands of staff producer Allen Toussaint.
Art attracted some attention with his great 1961 single, All These Things, written and produced by Toussaint, but none of their other collaborations for Instant seemed to want to hit, and Art turned his attention to organizing his own group, Art Neville & the Neville Sounds, with his brothers Aaron and Cyril and saxophonist Gary Brown. Using a variety of rhythm players on guitar, bass and drums, the Neville Sounds established themselves as a popular local attraction with a regular engagement at the Nite Cap Lounge at Napoleon and Carondelet, where Art inspired by the example of his keyboard hero, James Booker convinced the clubowner to install a Hammond B-3 organ and switched from piano to the bigger, more powerful sound afforded by the electric instrument.
The Neville Sounds rhythm section began to jell when bassist George Porter, Jr. joined the group, followed by guitarist Leo Nocentelli in 1966 and drummer Zigaboo Modeliste shortly thereafter. Word of the Neville Sounds spread around town, and before long Art was offered a nightly gig in the French Quarter at the Ivanhoe Bar on Bourbon Street & but the club would authorize only four pieces. Art reluctantly dropped his brothers and Gary Brown from the line-up and took the job in June of 1968 with his stripped-down quartet.
* * * * *
Art, now 30, had about ten years on his new rhythm section. Leo Nocentelli, just turning 22, was born June 15, 1946, grew up in the downtown 7th Ward and moved as a youth with his family to the Irish Channel uptown. Somewhat of a child prodigy, Leo started on piano at 8, moved to ukelele at 10 and got his first guitar at age 12. Within a year he was playing with a band led by drummer Charles Honey Boy Otis and trumpet man Melvin Lastie, but he felt like he was over his head and retreated into the woodshed for a year. When he emerged from his period of study, Leo joined a touring band backing Clyde McPhatter, Otis Redding and Clarence Frogman Henry.
Back in New Orleans, Leo played with the Hawketts before heading north to Detroit at 17 to work in the house band at Motown Records, cutting sides with the Supremes ( Where Did Our Love Go ), the Temptations, the Spinners and Martha & the Vandellas. Military service intervened in his budding career between 1964-66, and upon his discharge he joined the Neville Sounds.
George Porter, Jr. and Joseph Zigaboo Modeliste are second cousins born a year apart. George, born December 26, 1947, into a downtown family, grew up in the 13rd Ward not far from the Neville homestead. Zigaboo, born December 28, 1948, first lived near his cousin downtown before his family also moved upriver to the 13th Ward and settled near the Porters. There the cousins met the Nevilles and began hanging out with Cyril, the youngest of the musical brothers, jamming together on makeshift instruments in Zig's back yard.
Modeliste, inspired by drummer Joe Smokey Johnson of the Dave Bartholomew band, graduated to the professional ranks when Art Neville asked him to fill in for the Hawketts regular drummer on a few dates. He kept practicing and began getting calls to play local shows behind Irma Thomas, Tommy Ridgley and Benny Spellman before enlisting in the popular New Orleans outfit, Deacon John & the Ivories. Porter was influenced by a neighborhood bassist, Benjamin Poppy Francis, and played gigs with guitarists Earl King and Irving Bannister before Art Neville drafted him into the Neville Sounds.
* * * * *
Art Neville, Leo Nocentelli, George Porter, Zigaboo Modeliste: Now the die was cast, and the four men would work together as The Meters for almost ten years until Art left the band to join Aaron, Charles and Cyril as The Neville Brothers. Together these four native sons of New Orleans, deeply steeped in the city's simmering musical culture, would advance the rhythmic frontiers of New Orleans R&B and develop a fresh, idiosyncratic approach to the organ-guitar quartet format pioneered in modern popular music by the Memphis Group, Booker T & the MGs, several years before.
Although their instrumentation and commitment to the funky sound were identical, the difference between the MGs and The Meters is as simple as the contrast between the tight, straight-ahead drumming of Al Jackson, Jr. and the loose, polyrhythmic, second-line street sound of Zigaboo Modeliste. And there's the geo-political factor as well, since Memphis and New Orleans are two whole different places, and The Meters are nothing if not incredibly skillful interpreters of the funky sound of the Crescent City.
Funk is endemic to New Orleans and long established as an essential ingredient in the city's several musical idioms. Buddy Bolden, the turn-of-the-20th-Century trumpet sensation known as the First Man of Jazz, had such a low-down sound that they called the Odd Fellows Hall where he played at Rampart and Perdido Funky Butt Hall. Louis Armstrong and his compatriots could take the music way down in the alley while they watched the dancers rub their bellies together and shout with glee. New Orleans pianists Champion Jack Dupree and Professor Longhair dealt heavily in the funk, and the Dave Bartholomew studio crew anchored by Earl Palmer called themselves the Funk Brothers a decade before the Motown house band would adapt the same moniker.
Now regarded as an attitude and a particular approach to playing music, funk was initially used as a way to say that something smelled bad a funky butt was a human behind that hadn t been properly washed, funky drawers a set of dirty underwear stuffed with genitalia which had not been cleansed after sexual intercourse. A funky joint was a crude street-corner bar that smelled of spilled beer, unflushed toilets, the sweat and stink of hard-working humans on a hot, steamy New Orleans summer night, packed together on the tiny dancefloor and grooving to the intense sounds produced by the band playing for their pleasure from a spot in the corner of the room. If their music could move the dancers and inflame their lustful passions, the band would be identified by the ambience of the workplace as a funky outfit.
In the 1950s, funk was advanced by jazz players like Horace Silver and Art Blakey as a concept which embodied the entire African-American esthetic that ineluctable mixture of deep-South post-slavery culture, extreme poverty, run-down jukehouses, unpainted clapboard churches, over-stuffed urban ghettos and the street life that abounded there. They mixed gospel music with blues and bebop and called it funk. Ray Charles and James Brown mixed gospel with rhythm & blues and produced a new strain that would be called soul music, which is another way of saying the same thing. And Allen Toussaint added a distinctly New Orleans beat to his productions with Lee Dorsey and others that brought the funk to a new level.
This writer once had occasion to ask George Clinton what first turned him on to the funk. He grinned and said, Yeah! Lee Dorsey, Get Out of My Life, Woman. That was the shit! That places Allen Toussaint in the very avant garde of the funk movement, and although it was the Deacon John crew that backed Lee Dorsey on his great early recordings, and Walter Wolfman Washington who supported him on tour it was The Meters who brought Toussaint's musical vision to its fullest fruition.
* * * * *
Today, fully a quarter of a century after the group's demise, The Meters are almost synonymous with funk. Their contribution to the development of this irresistible African-American idiom is widely recognized by the band's vast legion of fans, which includes young musicians from all over the world who are now exploring the musical pathways blazed by The Meters those many years ago. A popular young New Orleans group called Galactic, for instance, once told an interviewer that they d begun their musical life by learning about 34 Meters tunes. Jimmy Cliff has spoken of the impact of The Meters on Jamaican musicians who heard them over the radio from New Orleans. And Meters samples have provided music tracks for a whole generation of rap and hip-hop performers like Public Enemy, L.L. Cool J, Ice Cube, NWA and Salt-N-Pepa.
The Meters Warner/Reprise albums, long out of print, have recently been reissued on CD by Sundazed Records, and Rhino has compiled Funkify Your Life: The Meters Anthology, which offers one disc of their Josie singles and album cuts and one disc drawn from the Warner/Reprise sessions. The original members of the Meters have remained active in music ever since the band broke up, playing with many of the industry's top performers and issuing records of their own creations.
Art Neville and George Porter revived the group in the 80s as the funky Meters with Russell Batiste on drums and a succession of guitar players, but it wasn t until last November that the original band was finally reunited to play a wildly-acclaimed concert in San Francisco for an audience of Meters fanatics from all over the country. The cries for a full-scale Meters reunion tour have been echoing ever since.
It is fitting today that The Meters have been selected to represent New Orleans as recipients of the Governor's Award for lifetime achievement in music. Twenty-five years have passed since they made their last recording together, but their music has reached out far beyond its humble origins in the 13th Ward to touch and move people all over the world. They will always remain the Mighty Meters of New Orleans, and their music will be heard as long as there are records.
New Orleans
Ash Wednesday
February 28, 2001
The author would like to thank Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones, authors of Up from the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II (University of Georgia Press, 1986) for the information provided in their Chapter 16, Allen Toussaint and the Meters, and my friend Don Snowden for the information and insights provided by his liner notes for Funkify Your Life: The Meters Anthology (Rhino Records, 1995)
(c) 2001, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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