Jazz Fest 2022
r e h ot E D I S
P H O T O B Y M AT T H E W H I N T O N / T H E T I M E S - P I C AY U N E
Leo Nocentelli performs at the 2016 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
“SEE, THERE’S TWO SIDES to
every story.” Guitarist Leo Nocentelli adjusts the ever-present shades below his ever-present cap — a gray and suede one balancing itself atop his thick, dark hair. Outside in the backyard sunshine, one of the funk icon’s granddaughters shrieks the way only a delighted 6-year-old can. Nocentelli is seated at the kitchen table in his daughter Toi’s home in Treme, not far from the 7th Ward neighborhood where he spent much of his own childhood. A painting Toi identifies as an original Basquiat adorns a wall in the corner of the open space, its earth tones and layers leading the eye to the artist’s familiar black crown near the center of the piece. “I wish there was an 8-track, 2-inch master that I could have fixed all the flaws that I thought was on there,” Nocentelli says. “However, there’s another side to that: Had I fixed all the flaws, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking like this.” Now 75 years old, The Meters cofounder is referring to his stunning old-but-brand-new solo debut, “Another Side.” Nocentelli and Light in the Attic Records released the now critically acclaimed album on Nov. 19, 2021, nearly half a century after Nocentelli recorded it at Cosimo Matassa’s Jazz City Studio in the early 1970s. The Meters had briefly split up at the time, but when they
reconvened for a new label deal, Nocentelli says the master “went on a shelf” at Allen Toussaint’s Sea-Saint studio. It was presumably still on that shelf on Aug. 29, 2005, when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina, flooding Toussaint’s historic Gentilly recording space and destroying it beyond repair. The story picks up in January 2018 when, the Los Angeles Times reported, 16 boxes of master recordings labeled with names like “Irma Thomas” and “The Meters” had surfaced at a flea market in Torrance, California. A vendor had purchased the boxes of tapes from a foreclosed unit in Hollywood and was showing them to Mike Nishita, a DJ and regular at the market. Nishita recognized Toussaint’s name and address and the names of the artists and purchased every single box. On his way home, the LA Times wrote, Nishita called up his friend Mario Caldato, the Beastie Boys’ in-house audio engineer and co-producer for more than a decade, to show him what he’d found. They also called Nishita’s brother, who’d played keys for the hip-hop trio. Eschewing music industry tradition, they then proceeded to do the right thing — twice. First, Nishita got in touch with Nocentelli and sent him the quarter-inch master. Though he remembered the songs when Nishita began rattling off their titles over the
ORIGINAL METER LEO NOCENTELLI WILL PLAY THE MUSIC OF HIS REDISCOVERED ‘ANOTHER SIDE’ ALBUM LIVE AT JAZZ FEST BY JENNIFER ODELL
phone and says he’s recorded a few of the tunes as funk songs over the years, Nocentelli was amazed. “I was shocked it was me at first,” Nocentelli says. Next, Nishita and a mutual friend of Light in the Attic founder Matt Sullivan played the demo for him. Sullivan told Gambit he immediately fell in love with the strippeddown sound and moving original lyrics, setting in motion a chain of equally unlikely events that led to the release of “Another Side” last fall. Meanwhile, Nocentelli says listening to and eventually playing the music brought that former version of his artistic self into view in a new way. “I became a part of that time [in my life] automatically,” he says. “It never left for me. While I thought [the recording] didn’t exist, it was gone. But once I found out it existed, it just became a part of me. I knew the lyrics; I didn’t have to study them. When I’m rehearsing, it just pops in my head like it’s fresh-baked.” Now, Nocentelli is ready to perform the music from “Another Side” live for the first time, at Jazz Fest’s Gentilly Stage on Thursday, May 5. Whether or not he opts to move forward with the project by touring or adding new, similar tunes to match the “Another Side” repertoire, Nocentelli’s Jazz Fest performance is poised to be among the most significant
sets of his latter career, which has been characterized more by songwriting and recording work than playing live. Nocentelli also returns to the Fair Grounds on Friday, May 6, for a funk set, followed by a tribute to his late bandmates and friends, Art and Charles Neville. Fellow Meter and longtime collaborator George Porter Jr. joins Nocentelli for all three shows — their shared decades of musical conversation and experience adding more layers of history to the mix. Together, the performances offer a rare window onto a more complete picture of Nocentelli’s evolution as an artist and his rich contributions to New Orleans music. Marc Stone, who’s due to join the “Another Side” set on 12-string guitar, points out that it’s also rare for a musician at an advanced career stage “to have a completely new run as a different kind of artist than what you’re known for.” As both a guitarist and a songwriter, Nocentelli has long been a centrifugal force in the development of the funk, rock and hip-hop that drew inspiration from The Meters. Almost from their start in the late ’60s, the pioneering fourpiece was creative and flexible with their use of rhythm in ways other early funk acts were not. Nocentelli often took cues from the jazz guitarists he was drawn to as a kid, writing lines for guitar and bass to play simultaneously, and he used time and space in
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Leo Nocentelli’s
WEEK 2 17
