JAZZ REVIEW : Neville an Unlucky Choice for Lazben Opener

Friday the 13th was about as good a day for the Compton Lazben Hotel as it was for the stock market. It would have been hard to find a more inept choice for an opening attraction at the hotel’s Indigo Jazz Club, which opened its doors on that fateful date, than Charmaine Neville and her four backup musicians.

The fault wasn’t simply that this is not a jazz act. By any standards, this group lacks the basic necessities on any level. The singer is the daughter of Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers; she and her accompanists all hail from New Orleans. But the Neville Brothers are not the Marsalis Brothers, and being from New Orleans is no automatic guarantee of musical quality.

An eager young woman who tried her best to display some sort of personality, Neville strutted around the stage, banged a cow bell and ran through a series of novelty songs, most of them decades-old and none the better for age. One was “The Right Key But The Wrong Keyhole,” which was considered risque when it was published in 1923.

On most numbers, Neville was teamed with Reggie Houston, who played saxophone and joined in the vocals. He didn’t help. Meanwhile, the pianist and drummer kept jumping up and down on cue as if on pogo sticks. To say that this might have gotten by as a Las Vegas lounge act would be an insult to Las Vegas lounge acts.

Ironically, when Neville sang a superior song, “Lush Life,” the crowd noise level had grown so high that the song went by almost unnoticed. In fairness to the Compton Lazben, it should be pointed out that the veteran tenor-saxophonist Teddy Edwards, playing happy-hour warm-up sets, provided a genuinely satisfying jazz element.

Neville & Co. close Tuesday, to be followed Thursday by a real jazz show featuring the guitarist Kenny Burrell and singer Clea Bradford.