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Biography |
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| "Success to me is being together as brothers and still looking out for each other. We lived together as kids, and now we're taking care of each other as men." --Aaron Neville "Whether as solo artists or, since 1977, as bandmates," Newsweek has observed, they've " poured out a stream of syncopated, funky, riveting music that makes you dance and ache and cry inside." To say that the NEVILLE BROTHERS' latest album, FAMILY GROOVE, contains some of the most compelling music Art, Charles, and Cyril Neville have made either collectively or individually in their combined century-plus of music-making is to say a great, great deal indeed. "We were trying to do something different," confides keyboardist Art, the eldest of the brothers. "We're singing about what we've always sung about--love, justice, and waking up to the fact that we're all human beings on the same planet. But on this album we've got a state-of-the-art sound." With the help of new co-producers Hawk Wolinski (heretofore best known for his collaborations with Chaka Khan, the Commodores, and Jermaine Jackson) and Dave Leonard (who engineered for Prince, Indigo Girls, John Mellencamp, Sheena Eston and Oingo Boingo, among others) the Nevilles have packed their latest album with some of the most propulsive grooves in their illustrious history. Where their previous couple of albums often seemed aimed at the cerebrum or heart, FAMILY GROOVE resonates primarily in the listener's solar plexus. Hawk encouraged the brothers to record Steve Miller's remarkably prescient Fly Like An Eagle, the first single from the LP, after hearing it on a live recording the band made a decade earlier. Just as they convincingly Nevillized With God On Their Side that you'd have thought Bob Dylan had written it just for Aaron to sing, so do they make Eagle theirs too. "It was a challenge for all of us to do that song," says Cyril, "since it had already been a hit. For a little something extra, what we call "lagniappe" down here, we got Steve Miller playing and singing on it. When he heard what we had done with it, he said he was changing his version." (laughs) You probably haven't heard as funky a track in the '90s, but you'll hear an even funkier one on Side 2--the title track. In reference to which Cyril asserts, "The family is the basis of civilization, and our connection to God." FAMILY GROOVE features the contributions of several Nevilles other than the four brothers. One More Day, a consideration of the tragedy of homelessness showcases a rap written and performed by two of Aaron's sons and betrays the influence of such young black superstars as Bobby Brown as vividly as Day To Day Thing evokes the Ball of Confusion-era Temptations. And it was Cyril's wife Gaynielle who wrote the song's single most poignant line, that about children who live in the very streets in which they play. "She wonders, " Cyril relates gravely, "if people realize how many of the homeless are children." In Line Of Fire, Art takes up the subject of another Neville concern, violence in our cities, admonishing the young inner city resident whom the song addresses to "put down that gun, boy." The Nevilles have occasionally been criticized for their preoccupation with injustice and racial intolerance. But any notion that they spend the whole of FAMILY GROOVE atop a soapbox will be quickly dispelled by the exultant, calypso-flavored On The Other Side Of Paradise, which finds them crooning delightful choral "show-wadda-waddies" behind Art's joyous lead, while True Love, the samba-inflected Take Me To Heart , and I Can See It In Your Eyes feature Aaron singing about romantic love as only Aaron can. Thanks to its Hi Records-like rhythm track, incidentally, some are apt to hear the latter song as a tip of the Nevilles' caps to the Rev. Al Green. Recorded live during the heroes' welcome the indigenous residents of New Zealand accorded the Nevilles at the end of their tour of the Pacific last fall, Maori Interlude is surely the album's most unusual track. "The feeling is indescribable," remembers Cyril Neville. "It was like meeting the long-lost members of our own families. I think the reason they identify so strongly with us as African Americans is that they're involved in a civil rights movement of their own." No group in America can claim a more illustrious history than the Nevilles'. Art first came to note well before Elvis, having written Mardi Gras Mambo, still a staple of the festival, for his band The Hawkettes in 1954. While Art was backing Little Richard in the studio and Larry Williams on stage, saxophonist Charles left New Orleans for Memphis, where he played with...well, everyone--Big Joe Turner, Wilson Pickett, Bobby Bland, B.B. King, you name them. And Aaron, who'd developed his heart-breaking falsetto after falling in love as a child with the yodeling of the singing cowboys of the silver screen, had a No. 2 smash with Tell It Like It Is the winter preceding The Summer Of Love. After Art, Cyril, and Aaron failed to attract comparable collective attention as The Neville Sounds, Art (who was joined later by Cyril) formed The Meters, who were acclaimed the world over as the grand masters of New Orleans' Caribbean-influenced "second line" funk style. While The Meters ruled New Orleans' Latin Quarter, Cyril and Aaron played on Claiborne Avenue with The Soul Machine, and Charles found himself teaching at Goddard College in Vermont, a very long way from home. Finally, after not having played together for 12 years, the brothers reunited to help record the universally acclaimed The Wild Tchoupitoulas a year after their mother's death in 1975. They credit their uncle, the flamboyant Mardi Gras "Indian" George (Chief Jolly) Landry, with getting them to join forces. "He told us that our mother and father had always wanted to see us work together as a band," Charles recalls. "He knew that if we got together as a family, it would happen," It happened, all right, but slowly. None of their first recordings as The Neville Brothers sold spectacularly, though no less than Keith Richards called FIYO ON THE BAYOU the best album of 1981. The brothers nonetheless became their hometown's best-loved local attraction. In 1987, they returned to A&M and won a Grammy with the sublime Daniel Lanois-produced YELLOW MOON. 1990's BROTHER'S KEEPER cemented their status as one of the most fervently acclaimed groups in American pop. The Neville Brothers have sold millions of records worldwide and have had gold and platinum records in six different countries. In the U.S., they have been the featured performers on television from the early morning on Good Morning America and Today shows to midday on Oprah to late night on Saturday Night Live, Arsenio, Letterman and the Tonight Show. They were the stars of their own Cinemax/HBO special hosted by 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley. The Nevilles' music has been hailed by music writers in nearly every major periodical in the country and their live performances are legendary, moving one of America's most acclaimed young novelists, John Ed Bradley, to note in G.Q., "The Nevilles play Tip[itina]'s, and a spooky magic happens. Fruit juice becomes a Hurricane cocktail, the fat of foot can suddenly hoof it, the blind, by God, can see." |