Los Angeles crowds are notorious for making early exits. But no one seemed to care about traffic jams June 13 during the Playboy Jazz Festival. After nine hours of music from 11 bands in the Hollywood Bowl, nearly all 17,000 fans stayed to dance to the “First Family of Funk.”

The Neville Brothers play a much more intimate venue, the Crystal Bay Casino, on Friday, June 26. Concertgoers can expect a memorable show.

“We’re going to be there in full force, and we’ll be ready,” said Art “Poppa Funk” Neville. “We got a little bit of music for everybody. It’s real great stuff.”

The New Orleans band members have influenced soul, gospel, R&B and, with the Meters, Art’s band in the late 1960s and ’70s, funk.

Art plays keyboards, Cyril percussion and Charles the saxophone. Aaron also is a percussionist, but he’s best-known for a vocal range wider than his shoulders. He sang the 1966 No. 1 hit “Tell It Like It Is,” had three popular duets with Linda Ronstadt and is the falsetto on the Neville Brothers’ ballads including the haunting classic “Yellow Moon.”

Art Neville is the eldest brother, 71, a year older than Charles. He was the band leader of the Hawkettes. He sang that band’s biggest hit, “Mardi Gras Mambo,” one of the most-played songs in the city that invented jazz.
Cyril, the youngest brother, remembers watching the Hawkettes rehearse.

“There was a crack in the door we used to peek through,” he said. “Growing up anywhere in New Orleans, you are going to hear music all the time. The city is full of musical families that have been passing the stuff down from generation to generation.”

Some of New Orleans’ greatest musicians, including bassist George Porter, spent time as Hawkettes.
“I used to have to ask these guys’ mothers, could they go play on a gig,” Art Neville said. “That’s how young they were. Porter had three strings on his bass for a long time.”

After the Hawkettes, there was Art Neville and the Neville Sounds, with Cyril, Aaron, Porter, saxophonist Gary Brown, guitarist Leo Nocentelli and drummer Zig Modeliste.

A job offer to play at a well-known Bourbon Street club forced Neville to streamline the band. The club owner didn’t want vocalists. The band that was later named the Meters was Art Neville, Porter, Nocentelli and Modeliste.

“The Meters is right at the top of the list as far as innovators and people who changed things and influenced a whole lot of other people,” Cyril Neville said.
George Clinton agrees. When he spoke with Lake Tahoe Action in 2007, he credited the Meters with inventing funk.

“My thing was to take any song and do it your own way, and that’s how we came up with the idea of the funk,” Art Neville said. “We were all young guys who were open to everything, and we tried it, and it’s obvious what happened. It was one of the great groups.

“And the influence, from my point, came from Professor Longhair, Fats Domino and Ivory Joe Hunter. It was a whole bunch of different piano players that I listened to.”

Despite the band’s historic influence, the Meters were not a huge commercial success. They were more popular with their peers than record consumers.

“I wish I could tell you why but I don’t know,” Art Neville said. “We played with the Rolling Stones in Europe, and I thought after that everything was going to be great, but it wasn’t.”

The four Nevilles joined their uncle George “Big Chief Jolly” Landry in 1976 to record “The Wild Tchoupitoulas.” Landry told his nephews their parents’ dream.

“(Landry) said, ‘Why don’t you do a family thing?, and I said ‘You’re right,’ and that’s how the Neville Brothers started,” Art Neville said.