Meters Zony

Rhino's Funkify Your Life: The Meters Anthology was the first truly comprehensive and widely available CD retrospective of the groundbreaking New Orleans funk band's work. These two chronologically arranged discs run down virtually every important track the band recorded under its own name, finally allowing a more general audience to hear why the Meters had earned such a stellar reputation among die-hard funk collectors and sample-minded hip-hoppers. Disc one, subtitled "The Josie Years," traces the group's 1969-1971 beginnings as a Booker T. & the MG's-like outfit, cutting brief instrumentals with a similar guitar/organ/bass/drums lineup.

Organist Art Neville formed a band in 1966 in New Orleans with his brothers Aaron and Charles on vocals, Leo Nocentelli on guitar, George Porter on bass, and Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on drums. Billing themselves as Art Neville & the Sounds, they signed to Sansu Enterprises, a label founded by Marshall Sehorn and writer, producer, arranger, and recording artist Allen Toussaint, and minus the vocalists, and now called the Meters, they became the house band for the label, providing backing tracks for releases by Lee Dorsey, Earl King, Betty Harris, and many others, including many cuts by Toussaint himself. The Meters would also track instrumentals that were used as filler tracks on LP releases by Sansu artists, and in time, there were enough of these instrumentals to release an LP in 1969 called the Meters, which Sehorn shrewdly placed with Josie Records because of that label’s connection to its parent company, Cosnat Distributors, at that time the largest East Coast music distributor. The Meters were something special, and their swampy precision practically defined the meaning and template of funk. Two more LPs, Look-Ka Py Py and Struttin’, appeared a year later in 1970 on the Josie imprint. When Josie went bankrupt in 1971, the Meters moved on to sign with Reprise Records and continued to release thundering funk records through the decade before gradually morphing into the more vocal-oriented group the Neville Brothers. This two-disc set collects the Meters' entire Josie catalog, including all three LPs, the A- and B-sides of four singles, four tracks billed to Art Neville & the Meters, and two tracks attributed to Cyril Neville & the Meters. The end result is a joyous and impressively funky survey of this stellar and professional band’s earliest recordings.

How would you like to hear a new side or should we say sides of the world's greatest funk band? This 40-track set presents the A and B-side of every single that organist Art Neville, guitarist Leo Nocentelli, bassist George Porter, Jr., and drummer Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste cut for the Josie, Reprise & Warner Bros. label, virtually their entire singles output save for a few odds 'n' ends issued mostly overseas. That means that you not only get every hit along with its hard-to-find B-side but also the rare single mixes, including the especially rare original mono single mixes of the 1968-1971 Josie sides, very few of which have appeared on CD (the first CD is all mono; the second, featuring the later Reprise and Warner Bros. singles, presents all stereo single mixes).

Among the most sampled groups of the 60s and 70s by a slew of top rap and hip-hop artists of the 90s and beyond (including 2 Pac, Ice-T, A Tribe Called Quest, Public Enemy and Beastie Boys among others), the legendary New Orleans band and Grammy Lifetime Achievement awardees The Meters created an instantly recognizable sound through almost a decade of recording, initially for the Josie label and then for Reprise and Warner Brothers. Group members guitarist Leo Nocentelli, bassist George Porter Jr., drummer Joseph ‘Zigaboo’ Modeliste and keyboardist/singer Art Neville formed the core of the band, later augmented by Art’s younger brother, percussionist/singer Cyril who joined The Meters in 1975.

Upper Egypt is the third recording from Wayne Horvitz and Zony Mash, and it shows the band growing tighter and tighter as time goes by. They've really become a band, as opposed to another project headed by Horvitz, even with Keith Lowe replacing Fred Chalenor on bass. Although the band was started as an excuse for Horvitz to play his Hammond B-3, Upper Egypt incorporates more of his other keyboard sounds than their previous recordings.