How often do we spread out our prayer mats and turn toward New Orleans, the city whose rhythms are in a sense the mother of us all? From the street parades and the drum rituals of Congo Square came jazz; from the jump blues of pianists like Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, and Huey Smith came the vitality of rock and roll; from the all-night New Orleans R&B; radio shows, which were picked up in Jamaica and the Islands, came reggae. It's no accident that the Crescent City's number one instrumental group is called the Meters: New Orleans music has always been about time.

The Meters have had considerable success in the R&B; singles charts with hits like "Sophisticated Cissy" and "Chicken Strut," and they've been backing up New Orleans singers like Lee Dorsey and Ernie K-Doe for some time. They call the particular New Orleans rhythmic feeling "second line," which places it in the perspective of the second line of drummers and horn players who marched behind the mourners/celebrants in the city's traditional funeral parades. Metrically (no pun intended) second line consists of a pattern of 16 notes with unequal stresses, and it seems to have re-emerged only recently, after a long period of rhythms based on accented triplets. Maybe it's the difference between a slow song, say Fats' "Blueberry Hill" with its distinct three-against-four tensions, and a fast one like "When My Dreamboat Comes Home," which with its syncopated-16th accents is much closer to second line as the Meters play it today. At any rate, the uniqueness of the rhythm is not the number of notes per bar, but the emphasis given to certain beats, the added stresses that result in such a funky, slippin' and sliddin' kind of kinetic energy.

The development of reggae out of the collision of Jamaica's lilting calypso and the New Orleans R&B; of the Fifties is well-documented in Trojan records' three-record History of Reggae set, but that story is far from over. There's been some reggae influence in the work of the late King Curtis and of Aretha Franklin (whose "Rock Steady" was inspired by a Jamaican hit of the same name), and now we have Cabbage Alley, which features several distinctly reggae-styled tunes as well as generous helpings of the more fashionable second line and its bastard child boogaloo. "Soul Island" is the most reggae-like Meters tune so far; the chunk-a-chunk bass and guitar unisons and basic organ lead are redolent of the music of the Islands both texturally and melodically, and the beat differs from that of reggae only insofar as it is not so stiff and much more aggressive. "Do the Dirt" has the same type of instrumentation and approach, but when it gets into the bridge the time slides easily into a North American soul groove.

Contrasting with these tunes are the rockish "Lonesome and Unwanted People," which features a fine vocal by organist Art Neville, and instrumentals like "The Flower Song" and "Smilin'." The latter two have the flavor of Booker T. & the MGs, and certainly the career of the Meters, from studio backup men to recording as a group to becoming a real group, with its own music and its own message, parallels that of the MGs. But rhythmically the Memphis Group most often depended on a comparatively strict back-beat, and Meters' drummer Zig Modeliste is able to impart more rhythmic variety to every bar than any American soul group has yet employed. The rest of the band often doubles on auxiliary percussion, resulting in a percussive complexity that is both a new and natural direction.

Cabbage Alley has its bummers; Neil Young's "Birds" is a piece of fluff that might have been palatable as a funky instrumental but gets nowhere with Neville's "serious" vocal. "You've Got to Change" is monotonous even for dance music, and includes an overlong jam that has neither the melodic interest nor the thrust to sustain itself. The tape-delay on "Stay Away" just muddles an otherwise straight-ahead soul saga. But like I said, the Meters are about time, and even the worst cuts on Cabbage Alley have a little of the rhythmic vitality and emerging roots-consciousness that looks like the most important new development in the black popular music of the Seventies. (RS 114)

BOB PALMER