Filial Gumbo : Neville Brothers Are Scions of New Orleans Tradition ... and Spice

The Neville Brothers capture the spirit of Mardi Gras as completely as Bing Crosby or Charles Dickens embody the spirit of Christmas.

So, with Mardi Gras coming next month, it seemed apt to start an interview with Cyril Neville, the youngest of the four New Orleans rhythm and blues brothers, by asking for his most vivid memory of his hometown’s annual celebration.

The 42-year-old singer-percussionist quickly summoned a long-ago moment in which a proud tradition of black New Orleans, the parading of “Mardi Gras Indians,” intersected with a tender display of family love.

“(I remember) watching my mother help my Uncle Jolly put his Indian costume on to go out Mardi Gras day,” Neville said, his voice warmed by the memory as he spoke over the phone recently from San Francisco. “It was 4:30 or 5 a.m. I was a little kid, and it was the first time I ever saw the sun come up. Looking at the joy my mother was taking in helping her brother do what he was doing--it was something very special to me.”

The idea of family members cooperating to keep alive a strong sense of tradition is a big part of what the Neville Brothers (Art, Charles, Aaron and Cyril) have communicated since they formed their band in 1977. So is the flat-out, effervescent fun and uplift of the polyrhythmic party anthems that crop up regularly in the brothers’ repertoire--fierce but buoyant songs including “Big Chief,” “Iko Iko” and “Brother John,” derived from the annual Mardi Gras parades in which competing groups of revelers from New Orleans’ black neighborhoods proclaim their mettle and spirit while donning colorful, feathery American Indian garb.

But a deeper, darker side, full of troubled themes set against simmering rhythms, has entered the brothers’ sound in recent years. It emerged in the haunting quality of the Nevilles’ acclaimed 1989 album, “Yellow Moon,” which included starkly atmospheric renditions of spirituals and protest songs. Social concerns have come even more to the fore on the current “Brother’s Keeper.”

The New Orleans depicted in new songs such as “Brother Jake,” which tells the story of a doomed fugitive, is nothing like the city’s popular image as a frolicsome cradle of jazz and R & B. In the Nevilles’ recent vision, the “Big Easy” is a hard place.

He finally made it back to New Orleans

Man, his hometown was sure ‘nuf mean.

Back in his jungle, where he lived his life,

Where the law of the land, it was a gun and a knife.

Late one night, down on the avenue,

That’s where Brother Jake’s dyin’ breath was drew.

He thought his home was with family and friends

But somebody caught him off guard and brought his life to an end.

Cyril Neville sets aside the mental snapshot of his mother and his Uncle Jolly preparing for the big Mardi Gras parade, and the glow fades from his voice as he brings up another side of Mardi Gras in New Orleans. He wants to make it clear that the festival also evokes bitter images for him--images he says stem from pervasive racism that distorts the celebration and cleaves it in two.

“I was always made aware that there was another part of Mardi Gras that wasn’t for me, and I was told to stay as far away from it as I could, because it was open season on young black people,” Neville said. “It is still two Mardi Gras, man. I tell my children the same thing my mother told me: ‘Stay away from the white folks’ parade. They don’t want you, it’s not for you.’ ”

The youngest Neville brother, with his Rastafarian-style dreadlocks, Afro-Caribbean garb, and fiery stage presence, has long had the reputation of being the most politicized member of the band, the one most deeply involved with issues of black struggle and black heritage. But the social commentary on “Brother’s Keeper” comes from all quarters of the band, Neville said.

“Everybody looks at me like I’m the only person in this group who has any political awareness. That’s not so,” he said. “Maybe I am the most outspoken about it.”

Aaron Neville, the group’s angelic tenor voice (and resident hit-maker in his recent moonlighting appearance as Linda Ronstadt’s duet partner on “Don’t Know Much”), contributed the lyrics for several of the album’s reflections on bitter street life, including “Brother Jake.” Art Neville, the keyboard-playing eldest brother, stepped out of his usual laid-back stance to provide the album’s most confrontational song--”Sons and Daughters,” in which Art’s narration ranges through images of gang warfare, injustice and censorship.

The album oscillates between portrayals of poverty, violence and despair--life as it is in America’s least fortunate precincts--and spiritually informed visions of possible redemption--life as the Nevilles hope it can be. Similar shifting currents flow through Cyril Neville’s conversation.

There is deep bitterness as he talks about manifestations of racism. They range from the personal (Neville says he has been shunned in elevators and parking lots by some of the same people who cheer him in concert) to the electoral. (He excoriated the rise of David Duke, the white-supremacist Louisiana state legislator who represents a suburban district outside New Orleans. The former Klansman’s success--including winning 44% of the vote in a recent U.S. Senate election--”is just a reflection of what the overall situation in the United States is,” Neville said. “It proves there’s still a lot of white people in America who feel the same way (as Duke). It’s pitiful, but it’s the truth.”)

Neville says he feels allied to young rap musicians whose rhymes depict slices of inner-city desperation, or proclaim pride in Africa’s cultural heritage.

“My heart goes out to folks like KRS-One (Kris Parker of Boogie Down Productions), Miss Melodie, Ice-T and Ice Cube,” Neville said. “America is finally getting a whiff of what it’s like to be black in white America. Young white people are getting a look into life in the ghetto.”

What fundamentally separates the Neville Brothers from an angry, hard-core rapper such as Ice Cube is the band’s ability to overlay its accounts of injustices done to blacks with an idealistic, universal vision. But, Neville said, holding onto such ideals is no easy thing in the face of racism.

“Believe me, it’s a fierce struggle that goes on inside of me on a daily, hourly basis. It’s a constant struggle not to succumb to that feeling of not only hating others, but hating yourself,” he said. “And I’m an adult. Can you imagine what that is like for an adolescent?”

“God intended for all of us to see Him in the same light and to see each other in the same light,” Neville added, turning from seething feelings to high ideals. “I pray just to be a positive part of the change that’s going on in my time. All we can do is keep putting together the type of music that crosses color lines.”

While the Neville Brothers are playing a concert, “color and all the rest of that disappear. That happens for a little while, and it’s good. But then I walk out into the parking lot after the show and I’m liable to get arrested,” Neville said with an ironic chuckle. “So there’s some work to do.”

With “Yellow Moon” and “Brother’s Keeper,” he said, the Neville Brothers gained the artistic control to begin working more socially conscious songs onto their records. Before that, fans had to turn to a 1984 live release, “Neville-ization,” to find the band’s political dimension on an album.

“We’ve been doing these protest-type songs on our gigs for a long time, but it just got recorded,” Neville said. “The last two records were the first time in our career that we really had any say-so about what went on it. The next one we hope to produce ourselves totally.”

Despite that increased say, Neville wasn’t pleased with everything that turned up on “Brother’s Keeper.” He was against recording “Mystery Train,” the Elvis Presley rockabilly-blues chestnut that lightens the mood toward the end of the album.

“That was a complete about-face from what we were talking about” on the rest of “Brother’s Keeper,” Neville said. “That was my personal feeling. Malcolm (Malcolm Burn, the album’s co-producer) asked me to do it. I tried to sing that, and I puked. I was trying to do something that wasn’t in my nature to do. It wasn’t suited to me, and it wasn’t suited to the Neville Brothers. After I thought about it, I said, ‘Go ahead, put it on there and let them know we can do anything. We can play anything and do it good.’ ”

The Neville household was conducive to raising a band that could approach varied styles with a confident hand. Neville recalled how his maternal grandmother, Mary Landry, would introduce rhythm into her round of daily chores.

“Everything had a beat to it. If you were washing the clothes, there was a washing-the-clothes song. Washing dishes, shelling peas, cutting okra--there was a song for each one. I loved for my grandmother to sing me to sleep, even though I couldn’t understand a thing because she was singing in Creole.”

His father, Arthur Neville Sr., “had a great voice. He sang like Arthur Prysock, Bill Eckstine and Nat King Cole.” Uncle George Landry, the one known as Uncle Jolly, was a blues piano player, as well as a Mardi Gras Indian chief celebrated in many a Neville Brothers song. Jolly and the Nevilles’ mother, Amelia, had been a highly rated ballroom dancing team as teen-agers, Cyril said. In a pre-television age, such a family didn’t lack for home entertainment. “People would come over to visit, and the entertainment would be playing records and singing along, or playing the piano.”

Art, 52, began his recording career in 1955, and later joined the Meters, regarded as one of the great session bands of the late ‘60s to mid-’70s. Charles, 51, played jazz and blues saxophone, playing behind the likes of Bobby Bland and B.B. King. Aaron, 49, introduced the family name onto the pop charts with his sublime 1966 ballad, “Tell It Like It Is.”

Cyril took in their influences, but also cites Bob Marley as a huge factor in focusing his thinking on black cultural issues.

“What hit me was the song ‘Three o’ Clock Roadblock,’ ” which portrays defiant Jamaicans being rousted by the police. “I was going through the same stuff they were going through. I couldn’t walk two blocks from my house without being harassed by the police,” Neville said. Identifying first with the music, “I started going to libraries, finding books on Caribbean culture,” which led to a continuing interest in a range of black issues.

“That’s when I threw my combs away and took all the (hair-straightening) chemicals out of my head,” Neville said. “I was a lost brother, trying to look like the oppressor.” His reggae-influenced enlightenment also brought an end to a bout of drug abuse. “It opened me up spiritually like I had never been opened before. I realized then the gifts God had given me, and what I was doing with them. I was helping someone destroy me, and when I realized that, I stopped.”

Today, the Neville Brothers have edged into the musical mainstream, after years playing for a cult following. “We’re still struggling,” Neville said, citing the band’s continuing inability to mesh with narrow radio formats. “We don’t get the airplay. We never have, and it doesn’t look like we ever will.”

Still, things have improved. “Brother’s Keeper” reached No. 60 on the Billboard album chart, the band’s best chart showing. After years of hard traveling, Neville said, he was able to enjoy some of the good life: “Last summer, my wife met me in Paris and we spent a week there. If I get a chance to do that every now and then, that’s swingin’. I’m cool, as long as I can send my children to school (he has seven of them, ages 2 to 20) and feed my family. I’m not in this to get rich. If we were just out there for the money, we would’ve quit a long time ago.”

It’s Aaron Neville, familiar now to the broad pop audience from his hits with Ronstadt, who would seem to offer the Nevilles their most likely ticket for a hit of their own. But Cyril said the band isn’t tempted to feature him more at the expense of its longstanding practice of spreading the lead vocals fairly equally among Aaron, Cyril and Art (while remaining in the Neville Brothers, Aaron is working on a solo album, with Ronstadt producing).

If anything, “Brother’s Keeper” features Aaron less than past albums. Putting special emphasis on one member “would be compromising what we do,” Cyril said. “This is not the Aaron Neville band, it’s the Neville Brothers band. Don’t get me wrong, we realize there is no other voice in the entire universe like Aaron’s voice. If people just want to hear Aaron sing, they can buy that (solo) record.”

All four brothers have side projects. Cyril’s main one is the Uptown Allstars, which combines reggae and New Orleans R & B. He also is enthusiastic about a band of younger-generation Nevilles, children and nephews of the four brothers, plus some close friends, all grouped together under Cyril’s direction as the Deff Generation (“Deff” being an acronym for Divinely Inspired Freedom Fighters). “It’s rap, reggae and traditional brass band second-line music,” he said. “This is something that is so unique it could not happen any place else but New Orleans.”

Who: The Neville Brothers.

When: Sunday, Jan. 6, at 8 and 10:30 p.m.

Where: The Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano.

Whereabouts: San Diego Freeway to the San Juan Creek Road exit. Left onto Camino Capistrano. The Coach House is in the Esplanade Center.

Wherewithal: $28.50.

Where to call: (714) 496-8930.