O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Nevilles Just Take It Higher : The brothers tear up the Coach House with their affecting singing and richly textured rhythms.

If New Orleans ever were to sink into the sea--a likelihood if its residents don’t stop eating so much--scientists probably could re-create the whole place by cloning a DNA sample scraped off the Neville Brothers.

The Crescent City has had many fine musical emissaries, from Louis Armstrong up through little Harry Connick Jr., but no one so embodies its qualities as the Nevilles do.

Pick nearly any song in their catalogue and you’ll hear New Orleans’ hospitality, openness and humanity, along with a balmy sensuality and a hint of danger. There are restaurant smells, graveyard fog, voodoo chants, costume jewelry, wisteria and carnival parades all rolling about in their thick rhythmic stew.

The Nevilles carted their caldron to the Coach House Sunday evening for a typically superlative show. Singer Aaron Neville may be more of a household name now, thanks to his hit collaboration with Linda Ronstadt, and he and sax-playing brother Charles both now have Grammys. But the group is still slugging it out on the same club and small hall circuit that it has been on forever.

Understandably, that could be disheartening. Keyboardist-singer Art Neville has been on the road since 1955, his brothers following not long after (the youngest is singer-percussionist Cyril). In that time they’ve seen hundreds of less talented acts--many of whom have borrowed heavily from the Nevilles--become major successes, while the brothers often couldn’t even land a recording contract.

But then, when one is in the midst of something as rich and engaging as the Neville Brothers’ music, who has time to be bitter? Sunday, the brothers and their band--drummer Mean Willie Green, bassist Tony Hall and guitarist Eric Struthers--tore up the place with a 2-hour, 20-song set that ranged from Aaron’s breathtakingly romantic ballad vocals to a stampede of Mardi Gras groove burners.

(It’s nothing less than a form of torture to see the group in a club without a dance floor. In the Coach House’s dinner-club setting, folks could only chew to the beat, although near the end of the show, people finally did start dancing between the crowded tables.)

The set opened with the Meters standard “Hey Pocky Way.” (Before the four brothers pooled their talents in 1977, Art headed the Meters, the primo studio band that was New Orleans’ answer to Memphis’ Booker T and the MGs.) The song laid out the formula for the Nevilles’ main modus operandi: They take a New Orleans backbeat and embellish it with interlocking rhythms and melodic figures that seem straight out of Africa in their complexity.

Along with the family front-line, the group has a tremendous asset in drummer Green. Like the Stones’ Charlie Watts and the late MGs’ drummer Al Jackson, Green locks in on a rhythm with a vengeance, but he also kicks in remarkable accents and cross-rhythms, essentially being both drummer and star percussionist at once. Even his kick drum work--usually just a group’s clock--lent an expressive underpinning to Aaron’s vocal on “Tell It Like It Is.”

With Cyril’s added percussion melange and Aaron and Charles’ cowbells, the rhythms really roiled on such numbers as the Meters’ “Africa,” Art’s way-funky “Mojo Hannah,” and the Mardi Gras medley of “Brother John,” “Iko-Iko” and “Jambalaya.” Even the curious choices of oldies--running from Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle” to the Blue-Belles’ 1962 “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman”--were doused in Tabasco.

Both Art and Cyril are great soulful shouters, and Aaron--who looks every bit the waterfront thug--has one of the most angelic high tenor voices on Earth, with a distinctive melisma. Like Olympic relay racers, each one kicks a song’s verses a step higher before passing it along to a brother.

Along with the immortal “Tell It Like It Is,” Aaron’s solo vocal outings included the hauntingly beautiful ballad “Arianne” (from the hard-to-find 1978 “The Neville Brothers” album on Capitol) and his usual encore rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Given the feeling he put into those tunes, his voice seemed wasted on the lightweight pop fare of his recent hit “Everybody Plays the Fool,” a remake of the 1972 Main Ingredient song.

A more satisfying selection from Aaron’s “Warm Your Heart” album was “Angola Bound,” which the group stripped of most of its instrumentation, making it seem like a true prison chant. That and the encore-closing medley of Bob Marley’s “One Love” and Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” were grand showcases for the brothers’ close harmony singing.

The only debit to the show was that the Nevilles all but ignored their most recent album, “Brother’s Keeper,” which happens to be one of the best albums of the last several years. As fascinating an exercise as it may be to hear the brothers revivify Steve Miller or Stephen Stills tunes (they did his “Love the One You’re With”), the heart and vision of their own songs from “Brother’s Keeper” could have elevated the show from excellent to unforgettable.