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.