50 years later, Leo Nocentelli’s long-lost album drops
“IT’s incredible, I’m pinching myself,” Leo Nocentelli, the consummate funk guitarist, explains by phone from his New Orleans home.
He’s talking about the release of ‘Another Side’, his first solo album, and he can’t help but sense divine intervention.
“It has to come from a blessing, from the creator,” Nocentelli says.
“I don’t know that this has ever eventuated in the history of the music industry. You have a 50-year-old record that looks like it’s just being released.”
Through his work in the 1960s and ‘70s as a member of the Meters and regular studio guitarist for Allen Toussaint, Nocentelli helped build the Crescent City’s modern R&B sound and bring it to the world.
He held down classic singles by local legends like Lee Dorsey, wrote the Meters’ best-known riffs including ‘Cissy Strut’, and went on to record with the likes of Paul McCartney, Pa i LaBelle and Stevie Wonder.
Nocentelli’s songs have been sung by E a James and the Neville Brothers and sampled by hundreds of hip-hop artists. Yet the fact that we’re discussing ‘Another Side’ is even more unbelievable to him.
Nocentelli recorded the album almost as a lark in 1971 at Cosimo Matassa’s Jazz City Studio, the city’s great musicmaking room at the time.
With Toussaint on piano, the Meters’ George Porter
Jr. on bass, and drum duties split between their bandmate Zigaboo Modeliste and local legend James N. Black, he recorded what he now says were meant to be demos.
Nocentelli played acoustic guitar with this band during occasional sessions over two months, and then his regular work picked back up.
Forever a sideman in the great New Orleans tradition, Nocentelli forgot all about his unfinished solo project for almost a half-century.
“I didn’t give it any mind,” he says.
“I assumed it got swallowed by 10 or 12 feet of water in SeaSaint,” Toussaint’s own famed studio, which was opened in 1973 and lost to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But then the calls and emails started coming in summer 2019.
The Los Angeles Times broke the news about an improbable find at a swap meet in Torrance, California: multiple boxes full of tape reels, all from Jazz City and Sea-Saint, apparently saved from the storm and le in an Los Angeles storage unit.
All told it came to about 3,000 hours of music by the Meters and many other artists, almost all of it unreleased.
Nocentelli only learned of the discovery when contacted for the article, and the news got be er from there.
His demo tapes were in good condition and the tracks legally belonged to him, so there wasn’t any such obstacle to releasing the music.
Out now on Light in the A ic Records, ‘Another Side’ is now the first public product of that incredible flea market find.
It’s a warm, youthful, openhearted album full of character songs about work and love, and on top of that, it’s a fascinating bit of alternate history.
Turns out that one of the most influential and recognizable guitarists of his era could have also been another Bill Withers or Bobbie Gentry, mixing Southern storytelling with indelible hooks and rich musicianship.
It took a disaster in his hometown for this music to ever see the light of day, and now there’s a whole new side street in Nocentelli’s already winding, fascinating career.
“The only way I can think of it is spiritual,” Nocentelli says.
“Good things can come out of tragedy.”
It’s not entirely surprising that the tapes wound up at the Roadium Open-Air Market, a massive and long-standing institution in L.A.’s South Bay neighborhood near Redondo Beach.
The Roadium is a typical endpoint for the city’s abandoned storage unit hauls, so a lot of film and music industry gems end up among its vendor booths.
It’s a natural destination for crate diggers and audiophiles, guys like Mike Nishita, who is nearly 60 and has been prowling the Roadium since childhood, when he bought hip-hop vinyl at a booth that was the first to sell Dr Dre’s mix tapes.
He found the mystery New Orleans stash in January 2018 and barely believed it.
He started texting pictures to Mario Caldato Jr., a lifelong friend who, like Mike’s brother ‘Money Mark’ Nishita, worked early and o en with the Beastie Boys and continues to produce artists from all over the world. Caldato saw ‘Sea-Saint’ and texted back: ‘Buy it all’.
Once they combed through the goods in Nishita’s garage, they took the most interesting tapes to Caldato’s studio to listen back on his machines.
“We pinpointed Leo because it looked like a complete album,” Nishita says.
“I couldn’t believe how good it was. It’s very organic. There’s mistakes, there’s human nature. It’s an honest record, and for the age he was, it’s a pre y heavy record.”
By this point they had involved Ma Sullivan, the founder and owner of Light in the A ic, a label that specialises in vinyl reissues of rare albums.
Sullivan and his company have a way of making record-collector hits out of rediscovered artists such as Donnie and Joe Emerson and Rodriguez, who became the subject of ‘Searching for Sugarman’ a er Light in the A ic’s reissue of his music.
Other times the label will lavish a ention on underappreciated legends like Be y Davis or Karen Dalton, but Leo Nocentelli presents a different kind of project: a completely unheard record by an artist that had a long, fortunate career.
“It’s really unique in the reissue world,” Sullivan says.
“That’s my favorite kind of project, something that’s new, something that’s a discovery.”
For Nishita, Caldato and Sullivan, this is an unforeseen opportunity to pay back an artist they have all admired for years.
As early hip-hop heads, they heard Nocentelli’s unmistakable, down-home feel all the time on records by N.W.A and A Tribe Called Quest, then grew to love his music on its own terms as soul and funk aficionados.
There’s even a sample of the Meters’ ‘Hey Pocky A-Way’ on ‘Paul’s Boutique’, the epochal Beastie Boys album that Caldato engineered.
And they all appreciate how hard ‘Another Side’ is to classify, how rich it is with ideas. Caldato calls it ‘a funky folk record’.
Sullivan hears “Bobby Charles, that swampy New Orleans singer-songwriter music. Maybe a li le Leon Russell, Southern soul. It’s hard to blend styles like that, and he makes it sound totally natural.”
For his part, Nocentelli says it’s ‘country-western’, noting his love for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s ‘Reuben James’. But he points to a sole inspiration for ‘Another Side’, one that’s surprising coming from the king of tight funk riffs: James Taylor. — The Washington Post