The Legendary Leo Nocentelli

Le Leo N o Noc oc other SIDE entelli’s

PHOTO BY MAT THEW HINTON / THE TIME S-PICAYUNE Leo Nocentelliperformsat the 2016 NewOrleans Jazz & HeritageFestival.

ORIGINA L MET ER LEO NOCEN TELLI WIL L PLAY T HE MU SIC OF HIS REDISC OV ER ED ‘ANOT HER SIDE’ AL BUM LIV E AT JAZZ FES T

BY JENNIFER ODELL

“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 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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unexpected ways while eking the deepest grooves out of even the smallest pick attacks.

When Art Neville hired Nocentelli for his first band, the Hawketts, the guitarist had already worked with Matassa and Toussaint for some time, having played as a teen on seminal recordings by Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Otis Redding and others. The Hawketts eventually morphed into Art Neville and the Sounds, scoring gigs at the Nite Cap on Louisiana Avenue and Carondelet Street. Drummer Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste was recruited from Deacon John’s group, Nocentelli recalls, before Porter joined the crew on bass in what would become The Meters.

“Art was such a balladeer, man,” Nocentelli says. “A lot of what I wrote for The Meters, I wrote with Art in mind. I loved the texture of his voice.”

While performing locally as The Meters, the foursome landed a deal with Josie Records. Though the relationship and label both went under, it was their debut, self-titled album for Josie that garnered the band’s first two big hits, 1969’s “Cissy Strut” and “Sophisticated Cissy.”

Two album releases later, however, Josie Records failed, leaving Nocentelli and his bandmates burned. By 1971, The Meters had gone their separate ways. Neville headed off to explore new projects, and Nocentelli, an “admirer of James Taylor,” picked up his albums “Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon” and “Sweet Baby James.”

“His acoustic playing on those records inspired me and prompted me to go buy a classical guitar because I wanted to sound like that,” Nocentelli says.

“I started looking at the chord progression of songs he wrote, like ‘I Was a Fool to Care’ and ‘Sweet Baby James,’ and … whoa. As a funk player I’ve never played those chord progressions, so I started creating my own and incorporating some lyrics and developed them into songs.”

Over the course of about two months, Nocentelli recorded those tunes, plus a cover of Elton John’s “Your Song” at Matassa’s studio, with help from Porter on bass, Modeliste and James Black splitting drum duties and Allen Toussaint pitching in on a handful of tracks.

Matassa’s Jazz City on Camp Street was for many years the cornerstone of New Orleans’ recording industry. In the early 1970s, the Warehouse District was a rougher neighborhood.

“I remember always looking for a parking spot on Camp and Julia and it was a big area for winos,” Nocentelli cracks.

“The studio was on the second floor,” he says. “You walk to the back and get on this freight elevator. When you get on it you pull the rope to start the motor going to stop on the second floor. That would be the entrance to the huge room. Then Cos has you walk almost half a block to get to the control room, but a lot of important stuff was recorded at that studio.”

He recorded the demo, but when Warner Bros. signed The Meters to its Reprise imprint, Nocentelli was suddenly due back at Sea-Saint, working on new Meters material.

“It was really rough, embryonic, unfinished stuff,” he says.

“I told Cosimo to make me a rough mix of it and I’ll go and listen at it later,” he adds.

The music’s raw sound is a complement to everything from the unexpectedly folk, country and jazz-inspired chord progressions to the muted intricacies of Nocentelli’s acoustic fingerwork.

His lyrics, meanwhile, play out like delicate stories of lives out of balance — melancholy one mo-

PROVIDED PHOTO TheMeters—fromleft,George PorterJr.,ZigabooModeliste,Art NevilleandLeoNocentelli—ina promotionalimageusedonthe backoftheir1969secondalbum, ‘Look-KaPyPy.’

ment, resisting regret the next; gently haunted by dull heartbreak or pushing through self-doubt, determined to find a better world out there.

The songs likely would have resonated in the ’70s era that inspired them. Today, something about the quiet calm and emotional honesty they convey make the tunes a welcome soundtrack to another pandemicclouded season.

“They’re simple, but there are certain songwriting elements Leo uses that never show up in The Meters,” Marc Stone says. “They’re indicative of someone who knows how to use simple but unexpected devices to create motion and offset motion — to give you musical left turns.

“Then there are these really clever rhythmic and harmonic movements that give the songs their identity.”

A few of the songs also reflect Nocentelli’s proclivity for saying what he feels needs to be said, whether that means calling the local music industry on its long history of exploiting artists — particularly Black musicians — or, in the case of his favorite song on the album, expressing what another person can’t.

Asked about “You’ve Become a Habit,” whose lyrics detail the protagonist’s relationship with a prostitute named Fancy, Nocentelli says he was inspired by the 1963 film “Irma La Douce,” starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine.

“So Shirley MacLaine was a lady of the night and Jack Lemmon was some kind of train conductor,” Nocentelli says. “And they could not … it wasn’t acceptable to really say that in the movie, because back then you couldn’t just say, ‘She was a prostitute.’ But see, he had a relationship with her. And it wasn’t like they could say he fell in love with her back then. But I know what it was, so I wrote lyrics to say exactly what that was.”

Nocentelli bristles when asked about the “bad publishing deals” and other assorted ugliness that drove him to move to Los Angeles on more than one occasion. That also made him lose interest in a career built on gigging, which remains central to New Orleans’ cultural economy.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh these musicians, they’re just guys, they play, then they’re gonna ride off into the sunset,’” he says in a mocking tone. “Well, when they get too old and stop playing, do they go to the musicians’ graveyard? That’s not me. I paid my dues to learn my craft, and it’s a job.”

“When I was young I got trapped up in the music and not worried about the peripherals that accompanied it,” he adds. “And I’m still going through that but I’m aware of it now, so I could stop it in its tracks, cause it still exists.”

He says he sticks to performing when the circumstances make sense.

“I prefer to just lay low and get it right from A to Z with the right personnel and present it in the right way,” he says.

At Jazz Fest on May 5, he’ll be joined by Stone, Lo Faber and a third guitarist from Italy, helping to cover the overdubs he used on the original recording of “Another Side.” He’s also adding three backup singers, Margie Perez, Earl Smith and Jason Neville.

After the festival, he’ll return to working on some songs he wrote for Bruno Mars and Bonnie Raitt, plus a posthumous Bernie Worrell album he’s been working on in the studio since April, he says, ticking off plans.

“Anyway, that’s why I called it another side,” Nocentelli says. “Because it was really another side of me.”

PROVIDED PHOTO ThecoverofNewOrleansguitarist LeoNocentelli’s2021album ‘AnotherSide,’releasedbyLightIn theAtticRecords.Nocentelli,best knownasamemberofinfluential funkbandTheMeters,recorded thesongsintheearly1970s, butthemastertapeswerelost fordecades.

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