Moving on to the present, what are your plans for this upcoming run at the Blue Note?
I’m looking forward to it. I got Tony Hall playing with me, and Raymond Weber playing drums. My friend Nick’s gonna help sing some background vocals with us. It’s a different kind of set than people normally see me do. It’s not the Dumpstaphunk thing. It’s a more low-key thing. It’s me playing piano and me doing a lot of songs I wrote over my years in this music thing. I’ve written a lot of songs. Most of them have been on records. I don’t get to do this very often, so it’s very special to me. I get to do it at the Blue Note in New York, which is a great place, amazing place—a legendary place. A lot of great, amazing musicians have played there, and I’m honored to get to play there. It’s going to be really special. I get to do what I don’t normally do all the time. I get to play songs that I’ve written in a more intimate setting. I can probably tell a few stories, as well, about some of the songs. It’ll be a fun time. I’m really looking forward to it.
Was this your idea to do more of a low-key thing?
What happened was, I did a piano set on Jam Cruise a few years back. I ended up doing another one the following year, and I’ve been doing them ever since. I think I’ve done them four times. I’ve also started doing a local gig in New Orleans during the weeks in the middle of the weekends of Jazz Fest. On the Wednesday I’ve been doing one of piano sessions, gigs at this place called the Blue Nile in New Orleans, and it’s been going over pretty good. So I got to talking to someone about how they wanted to bring me to New York to do this particular thing at the Blue Note. We figured out a way to make it work.
For your other projects, what’s going on with Dumpstaphunk?
Dumpster has been working on some new records, some new material. We’ve been in the studio as well, here and there. I have another side project that I’ve been developing for a while. It’s with a guy by the name of Cris Jacobs from Baltimore. He has a band called The Bridge. He and I started working on a project a few years ago, and we have a record that we recently completed. We’ve done one or two shows with that group. I think one of the nights he’s coming out and we’re going Neville/Jacobs, a little preview of some of that music that’s more singer-songwriter kind of stuff. That’s what I got going on these days.
Do you think a Dumpstaphunk record is forthcoming any time soon?
A Dumpstaphunk record is definitely forthcoming. I don’t know when it’s gonna happen. We may release a single or something, put something out there to whet the appetite a little bit, sooner rather than later. We’re gonna be working maybe on getting a video or something together with that. We got a probably albums-worth of material in the can, and we’re still finishing up. But we’ve got a few things that are closer to being finished than others. We’ve got some live stuff in the can that we’re talking about releasing as well. We’re looking forward to putting some fresh music out there for the ears.
Obviously you’re very steeped in the New Orleans music tradition, and New Orleans is such a unique place, musically and culturally. What do you think New Orleans music brings to American music at large?
Oh man. Well that’s a fucking loaded question. New Orleans is like the gumbo. Gumbo is a signature New Orleans dish, and the gumbo is basically—you take all your ingredients. You take a bunch of different stuff and you put it all together, and it makes this amazing dish. You got your seafood, you got your chicken, you got your sausages, you got your vegetables, your seasonings and all that stuff, and it makes this great stew, this great soup. That’s what New Orleans’s music is. It’s a mixture of everything. You got the uptown funk, you got the brass band, 6th Ward, Treme styles of music. You got the jazz. You got the Caribbean influences. You got the African influences. You got all this shit mixed up, and it creates this syncopated thing. Like when you hear The Meters, you hear this syncopation that’s not like a lot of other funk music you hear. And when you hear bands like the Rebirth Brass Band or the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, you hear that shit and you’re like, “That sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard.” And then you take a band like The Neville Brothers. It’s a mixture of the soul, the funk, the Caribbean, and that’s what New Orleans brings to the rest of the world. It brings this mixture of all of these different genres and styles of music that just come out as this one sound, you know? There’s nothing like it in the entire world. It’s nothing— Everybody loves it. Everybody wants a piece of it. Everybody’s influenced by it in some way or another. We just try to bring it everywhere we go, and New Orleans is a place where, if you love music and you love culture, you love food, you love people, you need to go there. You need to come to the Jazz and Heritage Festival. You need to soak up some of this shit. There’s nothing like it.
What is it about New Orleans that makes it such a breeding ground for this kind of music?
I don’t know, maybe it’s something in the water. I don’t know. You got the Mardi Gras spirit, the Mardi Gras Indians. You got the spirit of the second line and just how we celebrate everything—we celebrate life. When somebody dies, we celebrate that with a second line. It’s all about enjoying life and enjoying life to the fullest, and you hear that when we play the music. That’s what it’s about.
As someone who is so close to The Meters and the guys in that band, what do you think of the current landscape of funk music that is so influenced by that? Especially coming from other places like Lettuce and New Mastersounds and new guys like Vulfpeck?
Everybody’s borrowing a little bit from back in the day. All this shit comes from somewhere. I grew up listening to music on the radio in the ‘70s, and that’s what all this shit comes from. And that stuff comes from somewhere else, as well. We think James Brown is the one who kind of started this shit. And then The Meters took it and picked it up and took the New Orleans flavor and their brand of funk and brought it out there. And George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic put their thing out there. So you get all this shit and it’s all based on something else. You got the blues that came before it, and you got the rock-and-roll music that was growing out of that. Everything comes from this other stuff. Basically, we’re all just following. We’re borrowing the little pieces from here or there, trying to keep this shit alive. All the other bands who are out there doing it, like Lettuce and Dumpstaphunk, we’re all just trying to keep this thing going.
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