the meters reunion, on tour !!..
knewjak
1,231 Posts
Maybe old news. They are being billed as 'the funky meters' now, and are currently on tour. Has anyone seen them lately? Do they still got it?
-k
-k
Comments
NO Jazzfest reunion show available on CD ($24!!) here.
I heard this was filmed and recorded, to be released at a later date. I'm on a few mailing lists where the Jazz Fest was discussed but didn't catch any Meters reviews.
Can someone confirm original 4 reunion. Truth or fiction?
I saw Neville Bros many times in the 80s and every show was great.
I was Etta James with a first class pick up band once that included Necotelli, she killed it.
Dan
Ok I read the whole thread and never saw Modelesto mentioned. It was Necontelli, Neville, Porter and ?
I know that, but this NOJF show was billed and is being hyped as a Meters REUNION, not The Funky Meters. I am still asking the question, who drummed?
Damn Dan, why such a skeptic? Zig was on hand as well...
http://www.nola.com/entertainment/t-p/index.ssf?/base/entertainment-1/1114236371108300.xml
Sorry. Thank you for doing the research for me.
It's just that they hate each other, so I thought perhaps it wasn't going to happen. I didn't know they had gotten together in 2000 for a one off.
MUSIC
The Funk Band That
Time Could Not Forget
By ASHLEY KAHN
May 24, 2005; Page D8
New Orleans
Chances are you've already heard the funky dance tune "1 Thing" -- all pop-and-crackle, voice over a sampled drum loop -- by R&B singer Amerie. It exploded off the soundtrack to the movie "Hitch" into the Top 10. It's one of those instances where the sample is the song, and it turns out the loose-limbed and modern-sounding drum break is actually from a 35-year-old recording by the Meters.
Groundbreaking in their groove-making, this seminal funk band from New Orleans flourished from 1969 to 1977, crafting a timeless and time-bending style of syncopation. Though their music is still in the air 30 years on, the Meters remain more fabled than familiar, more spoken about than seen.
That is until last month, when the Meters managed a rare reappearance at the nation's largest music-food-and-culture celebration -- the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Their headline status was helped at least a little by the hometown connection, and the event was marked by an international circle of fans and critics with the hope that, contrary to rumor, it was not the band's last, historic hurrah.
That the Meters came to be the Lost Tribe of Funk speaks to how music business success can be fleeting, and often band-splintering. In their heyday, they never cracked the charts with the consistency of outfits like Earth, Wind & Fire; their eight-year run was not long enough to earn them the seniority of James Brown or George Clinton. Yet as these more celebrated funk founders attest, the Meters stood out from the rest.
"To us, the only funk band around was the Meters," Mr. Clinton says of his early days in the late '60s, when he was molding the Parliament/Funkadelic family of bands. "Before I got with James Brown, they were like the funkiest cats to ever hit the planet," says bassist Bootsy Collins, whose stints with Messrs. Brown and Clinton preceded his own legendary career. "The Meters were different from other funk groups, because they were more like a band...and the drummer -- good Lord!"
"I first heard the Meters in the early '70s," recalls Earth, Wind & Fire leader Maurice White. "Everybody else was staying right to the beat, but they had a New Orleans flair....They made a really big sound for four guys."
The Meters did what other funk bands of their era could not do: playing a little behind the beat, dropping unexpected spaces into the rhythm that created an altogether surprising, foot-elevating effect. Meters bassist George Porter calls it "our New Orleans 'pocket' -- it was a little more syncopated and probably what made it harder to lock down than [the music of] George Clinton and James and all of those."
Mr. Porter is one of four childhood friends from the same New Orleans neighborhood (keyboardist Art Neville, guitarist Leo Nocentelli and drummer Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste are the others) who banded together in the late '60s, forced to limit the lineup to a simple quartet by the tight confines of the French Quarter bar that hired them. Over a two-year run, the band developed a loose, economic approach that was heavily swayed by the street-parade rhythms peculiar to their hometown, and built from the rhythm up.
Says Mr. Neville, the eldest of the group: "See, when we started out we didn't know anything about music. We just enjoyed playing. But drummers from New Orleans -- there's some kind of little edge there that I can't explain. The drummer was the trick -- Zigaboo."
The drummer prefers to share the credit. "It wasn't really me," says Mr. Modeliste. "The band said 'OK, you lay down this drum thing, and we'll compose the music to fit.' They composed the music to the drumbeats. That was the formula that was successful for us for a long time."
The Meters caught the ears of funk's first generation in '69, with soul-charting organ-guitar-bass-drum tracks like "Cissy Strut" and "Look-Ka Py Py." They rapidly became their city's premier studio band, playing on a wide range of '70s hits by the likes of Dr. John ("Right Place, Wrong Time"), Patti Labelle ("Lady Marmalade") and Robert Palmer ("Sneakin' Sally Through the Alley"). But it's the Meters' eight albums that best preserve the group's progress from short instrumentals to songs of more expansive form and focus. They added Art's brother Cyril Neville on vocals and percussion. They delivered tunes that reflected black pride ("Africa") and adapted the chants of New Orleans's Mardi Gras Indians ("Hey Pocky A-Way").
In 1977, a year after playing to stadium-size crowds as the hand-picked opener for the Rolling Stones, the Meters came to an end, torn apart by business squabbles. "People who needed other people's money," Art Neville puts it, laying blame on representatives who divided the four friends who first jammed merely for the funk of it. Save for the exceedingly rare reunion gig -- New Orleans in 1980, San Francisco in 2000 -- they never performed together again.
"We started something that we didn't know what we started," Mr. Porter admits. "If we'd knew at that time we'd have took better care of it."
Yet, time could not forget the Meters, and today their musical mark has never been easier to measure. Since their breakup, the original four have helped form more than 25 bands, including New Orleans's best-known group, the Neville Brothers. At Berklee and other higher schools of music, Meters recordings are dissected by students of syncopation. An unbroken string of jam-oriented bands -- from Little Feat to the Radiators to Phish -- have picked up on their rhythms and open-ended song forms. And Amerie's current hit is merely the tip of a sampling iceberg: Not only raps by Run-DMC and LL Kool J in the '80s but even the latest hip-hop hits (Tweet's "Sports, Sex and Food" is another recent example) have relied on "hundreds of Meters samples," notes Mr. Nocentelli.
"The most flattering thing, from a personal level and financial aspect, is the fact that all the young rappers chose the Meters' music. This is 2005 -- they're sampling music that was done 30 years ago!"
Nowhere does the sound of the Meters resonate more enduringly than in their hometown. Forget "The Saints." Tunes like "Hey Pocky A-Way" and "Fire on the Bayou" are what hold the most anthemic weight today in New Orleans. The songs resound in every nightclub and bar, on local radio and TV, and out at the city's Jazz & Heritage Festival, the huge, outdoor party that draws a half-million visitors to the city.
Jazzfest -- as it is commonly called -- kicked off its 36th year on April 22 with a packed, seven-day, 12-stage schedule offering performances by blues, jazz, zydeco and rap bands: local legends like Irma Thomas, renowned headliners like Elvis Costello. But the main event on everyone's lips: After 25 years, the Meters had come home.
"It's different this time," Mr. Nocentelli said of the group's reunion. "Everyone's here for the music." "I told them don't even rehearse -- let's just come up there and play, man," Mr. Neville added. "I mean these guys are the best musicians that I've played with in my lifetime."
The historic event could not have met more support or found a better venue. Family, friends and a few celebrities flanked the stage. A colorful and boisterous crowd of 30,000 filled the field out front. A breeze carried the scents of Jazzfest -- beer, spicy seafood -- over the scene, as the original four Meters played their funky music together again: slightly unraveled at the start, then falling into their slinky, signature pocket.
In the middle of the third tune, Mr. Porter swung around to face the drumm er, locking into Mr. Modeliste's beats: old friends picking up an unfinished conversation. If this show was to be the Meters' farewell, the ear-to-ear smile on the bassist's face contradicted that with the promise of future jams.
Midway through the band's 90-minute set -- after delivering well-known favorites like "People Say," "The Hand-Clapping Song," a medley of early instrumentals -- Art Neville wryly chuckled into the mike. "We may be a little older and a little fatter, but we're still black and we're still funky!"
Mr. Kahn is a music journalist and author of "A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album" (Viking, 2002).
When they began, the Meters were influencing the likes of George Clinton and Earth, Wind & Fire. Decades later, the whole city of New Orleans seems to pay homage to the fathers of funk.