Hail to The New Orleans Chiefs!

By JAY COCKS

You can hear them in the movies. You can even hear them on the radio. And it's about time. The Neville Brothers' new album Brother's Keeper is yet another superb session of musical crossbreeding; nothing unusual there. It also contains a witchy reworking of Leonard Cohen's Bird on a Wire, which haunted the sound track of the Mel Gibson-Goldie Hawn movie and initiated a course of well-deserved popular success for this magical New Orleans group.

Brother Aaron, perhaps their pivotal voice, had his own breakthrough some months back singing a duet with Linda Ronstadt on the No. 2 hit Don't Know Much. Now Aaron and the three other boys are hitting the concert trail, opening for Ronstadt in 48 dates. The Nevilles have always been great, and it seems as if they've been around forever. It's just nice to see and hear them out front now, where they belong. They are proud regents and purveyors of rhythm and blues New Orleans-style, which means the music is a gumbo of rock, jazz, calypso and whatever else comes floating through that sweet Southern air. It's not the most contemporary sound in town, but that doesn't matter. The Nevilles have spent most of their professional lives blithely going their own way and just letting the good times roll around to them.

That was a lesson that Aaron, 49, learned early. He could get in almost anywhere -- movies, basketball games -- and get away with almost anything if he just waited and sang. "My favorite song was a thing called The Wheel of Fortune," he says, "and I used to sing it to whoever was on the door, and they'd let me in." All he had to do was let loose with a sweet sample of what his brother Cyril calls "the only voice like it on the planet." It is a voice with a strong trace of spiritual dignity, cut with a chaser of fine, raunchy soul, and it is just right for the choir, or in the bedroom.

Cyril, 42, youngest of the four brothers, is the feistiest too, and he talks a lot about the power of rap music. "It's a grapevine that stretches all the way from here back to Africa," he says. One of the best cuts on their exquisite 1989 album Yellow Moon is a rap-inspired, soul-inflected tribute to Rosa Parks. Like rap, it's got a strong, simple message. "This ordinary person made all this big stuff happen," says Cyril. "If more kids knew about her, they'd understand they don't have to be no really superperson to create change."

Aaron usually smiles when Cyril sounds off like this. "Cyril tries too hard," he says. "Art's outspoken. We call him the leader. Charles is quiet, always into thoughts, always reading." If Aaron is the linchpin, Art is the band's elder statesman. At 52, he has the strongest grounding in the group's past. "Our music I call voodoo music," he says, "some kind of enchantin' music."

The Nevilles' subtle sorcery comes directly from the lively musical learning that took place in the pre-electronic age in the country's most musical city. "There was no TV like now," says Charles, 51, a grandfather of eight. "We were entertained by our parents and uncles and aunts, told stories and taught songs."

The Nevilles' mother and uncle were a dance team. Their maternal grandmother sang hymns as she ironed, says Charles, and had special songs "that went with shelling peas and others that went with washing clothes." Their father, a cabdriver and merchant seaman, could whistle like a horn player. The boys didn't have to go far to catch a band. "They'd just be marching along, playing," Charles says. "Sometimes they'd be in a funeral procession. And sometimes they'd be playing and marching just because they felt like it."

The boys all jumped into music early, although separately. Charles scored himself a saxophone as a reward for graduating with honors from elementary school, then dropped out of school after the 11th grade to play the chitlin circuit with the Piney Brown Band. "We were playing for the money we made off the door," he says, "and there was just about enough to get us from gig to gig." Art, who first played the organ at age four, joined a rock band called the Hawkettes out of high school. The group had a 1954 million-selling single called Mardi Gras Mambo, on which Art sang lead vocal, but he got burned on the business end and, by his count, earned $12. While Charles played in jazz bands throughout the South, Aaron took over the Hawkettes leadership when Art was drafted. Cyril drifted into the group in the early '60s, and with Aaron's singular triumph on Tell It Like It Is (one of the great R.-and-B. ballads of all time), the Nevilles were primed to coalesce as a family and as a band. Cyril and Aaron formed the Soul Machine, while Art created the Meters, who laid the foundation for '70s funk.

All these various musical and familial directions were finally brought back home, to roots and roost, in 1975, when the brothers got together with their uncle George Landry as the Wild Tchoupitoulas. The Tchoupitoulas appeared on stage in full Mardi Gras regalia, including some dazzling tribal headdresses, and laid down the kind of celebratory music that seems to come from some secret Delta heart -- voodoo music, for sure. The other Meters dropped out, and the brothers stuck together as, simply, the Nevilles.

That's the way you can catch them now, working wonders even on a version of Will the Circle Be Unbroken? That's a worn, old spiritual, to be sure, but when the Nevilles take it on, they also make it over. Step inside their circle, and you can believe they're not only supreme musicians but passing good at magic too.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York