Oh, Down In The Big Easy, Oh-The Best
Of The Neville Brothers (2004)
CD Review
By Zack James
The Best Of The Neville Brothers: The
Millennium Collection, the Neville Brothers, 2004
Sure, sure everybody who has been down
in the mouth of the Delta, Mississippi Delta in case your geography is a little
suspect knows that the silt and sand just didn’t sit there and fester but
accumulated, accumulated and gave us, at least in pre-Katrina days the “Big
Easy”. And that designation, that Big Easy for New Orleans is just about right
for a town where among others things a hell of a lot of music came into being,
came in and gave popular music a shot in the arm. Think jazz, think jazz big
time in the Big Easy where it wasn’t born just to entertain the vagrant
tourists on Bourbon Street who needed to nurse their miseries with expensive
beers and be-bop expressions but to express sorrows and joys that got people
through their tiny lives. Think jazz’s half- brother (half-sister if you like
but some kind of sibling) the blues as it came out of the Gulf ports as
sweating away in Mister’s cotton planation crop played on old time National
steel guitars (or maybe even some Sears & Roebuck’s catalogue offering).
Think about those cousins from down in Lake Charles and Lafayette. White
cousins originally from France via long lost Arcadia up in frigid Nova Scotia
once some king’s redcoat Johnnies pulled them south on their “trail of sorrow.”
(Check old Brahmin Brattle Street three name Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his
Evangeline saga poem of loves lost if
you want the sad side to that story). Black cousins escaped from all the West
Indies slave quarters with the tinny washboard mix and match instruments.
Put all that together, jazz, blues,
Cajun, zydeco and then add the elixir of the sweated New Orleans nights, those
Big Easy cabarets and you have just the right background to appreciate the
various tunes, songs on this CD which features the vocals of probably the most
known of the Neville Brothers, Aaron. Certainly if you want to spend a pleasant
evening thinking about that last trip down to that part of the Delta when you
are fighting some raging snow storm check this nice little mix.
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