Neville Brothers Find Niche With Help From Friends : Music: The New Orleans quartet opens Sunday night for Linda Ronstadt, one of a host of stars who have boosted the group’s career.

Linda Ronstadt is spending a lot of time with the Neville Brothers these days. After teaming up with Aaron Neville in the studio last year for the Grammy-nominated duet, “Don’t Know Much,” Ronstadt teamed up with the whole band on the road.

They are currently in the midst of a five-month U.S. and European tour, which includes an appearance Sunday night at San Diego State University’s Open Air Theatre.

And early next year, there will be a new solo album by Aaron Neville, produced by Ronstadt, who refused to talk about the concert.

Ronstadt is the latest in a series of pop superstars who in some way or another have helped further the New Orleans’ rhythm-and-blues quartet’s career. There’s a good chance their first album, 1978’s “The Neville Brothers,” would have been their only album--it was a commercial flop, having been incorrectly marketed to a disco audience--had Bette Midler not found them a new producer and, indirectly, a new label deal, resulting in 1981’s belated follow up, “Fiyo on the Bayou.”

The Rolling Stones had the Neville Brothers open for them on their 1982 world tour, giving them some badly needed exposure.

Since then, they’ve toured with Santana, the Grateful Dead, Jimmy Buffett, Huey Lewis and the News, Ziggy Marley, and Tina Turner. And they’ve been joined in the studio by an equally formidable cast of guest musicians, including Brian Eno (on last year’s “Yellow Moon”) and Ronstadt and Buffy Sainte Marie (on their new “Brother’s Keeper”).

All of this, along with incessant touring, has helped make the Neville Brothers the Crescent City’s hottest export since gumbo. “Yellow Moon,” produced by Daniel Lanois, best known for his work with U2 and Bob Dylan, was their commercial breakthrough, selling upward of 400,000 copies and winning a Grammy in the best instrumental pop performance category for “Healing Chant.”

Their new album, which includes a tune, “Jah Love,” co-written by Cyril Neville and U2’s Bono, has only been out a month, but has already sold more than 250,000 copies and risen to No. 80 on the national album charts.

And in December, the Neville Brothers fly to New York for that official stamp of success, a performance on television’s “Saturday Night Live.”

‘I guess you can say the word has really spread,’ said saxophonist-percussionist Charles Neville. He also sings, as do his three brothers: Arthur (who also plays keyboards), Aaron (percussion), and Cyril (ditto).

“Things started out kind of slow, but we’ve been traveling around the country over and over again since we started, and that got so many people in the business talking about us, wanting to work with us,” he said. “I mean, we toured with so many high-profile people, and that brought us so much more exposure than we could have gotten on our own--particularly all those dates with the Grateful Dead. The Deadheads got Nevillized, and they’re big and loyal and they come out anywhere and everywhere.”

The gumbo comparison doesn’t just apply to the Neville Brothers’ popularity, it’s a fairly accurate description of their music.

“New Orleans gumbo, that’s what we call it,” Charles Neville said. “It’s a combination of all these different styles of music that come out of New Orleans--Dixieland jazz, second-line, blues, rhythm-and-blues, gospel, soul, doo-wop, African, Caribbean, Mardi Gras.”

It’s also a combination of all the different styles of music the four brothers brought into the band when they first decided to team up in 1977.

In the 1950s, they had briefly played together with Art Neville’s high school band, the Hawketts. They recorded the Carnival classic “Mardi Gras Mambo” in 1954.

But they soon went their separate ways. Aaron scored several solo hits on the Minit label, including “Over You” in 1960 and “Tell It Like It Is” in 1966. Art joined Aaron from time to time for hometown gigs, with a three-piece rhythm section, as the Neville Sounds; Art later fronted the Meters, who periodically opened for the Rolling Stones in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Cyril put together his own band, the Soul Machine, before joining Art in the Meters. And Charles toured with a veritable who’s who of famous jazz and rhythm-and-blues artists, including B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Junior Parker, Jackie Wilson and Johnny Taylor; he also spent two years at Goddard College in Vermont, teaching a course on the history of black music.

The decision to perform together as the Neville Brothers was the result of a 1976 studio collaboration with the Wild Tchoupitoulas, a “tribe” of Mardi Gras “black Indians” led by their uncle, George (Big Chief Jolly) Landry.

“In 1976, we all went back to New Orleans to record the ‘Wild Tchoupitoulas’ album with our uncle, and that was like the first time all four of us had played together in more than 10 years,” Charles Neville recalled.

“And that was the inspiration for getting together as a family group, the ease with which the music was able to happen on the ‘Wild’ recording, the fact that it all felt so good, and also the fact that our uncle reminded us that our parents had always wanted us to work together.

“And although there were no longer around to see it, we decided, let’s do it.”

They’ve been doing it ever since, although they continue to take time off every now and then for individual projects.

Aaron is close to finishing his next solo album, produced by Linda Ronstadt. Cyril has a band called the Uptown All-Stars, who play Mardi Gras street music. Art has reformed the Meters and is talking about a reunion album.

And sometime in October, Laser Light Records will release the debut album by Charles Neville and Diversity.

“It’s a jazz band I put together in New Orleans to play festivals, with members of the New Orleans Symphony and some jazz musicians,” Charles Neville said. “We’ve got some Charlie Parker and Fats Waller, some original kind of jazz-funk things, some reggae, and some instrumentals.

“We’re using a harp, a violin, a cello, two saxes, a trumpet, bass, guitar, drums, and vocalist, so it’s a real different, real diverse sound.”

Real different, real diverse. Somehow, that’s not surprising.