To close out the first day of this week’s NOLA Crawfish Fest during the “daze between” Jazz Fest weekends Dumpstaphunk’s Ivan Neville and singer, guitarist, and former The Bridge member Cris Jacobs came together as Neville Jacobs along with drummer Brady Blade and Dumpstaphunk bassist Tony Hall.
EXCLUSIVE: Cris Jacobs Talks The NOLA Crawfish Fest And His Collaboration With Ivan Neville
Crawfish King Chris “Shaggy” Davis, the host of the party, took great pride in announcing Neville Jacobs, a relatively new ensemble that improves by leaps and bounds with every performance. The interplay between Neville’s dense organs and Jacobs’ crisp, piercing guitar works marvelously, and their combined voices and songwriting talents have led them to cultivate some truly top-notch original material, which they mixed with fun covers for an extremely well-received set.
Below, you can watch full video of Neville Jacobs’ set from NOLA Crawfish Fest 2017 courtesy of videographer John Peckham of ConcertCasters:
In a recent interview with Live For Live Music, Jacobs goes intothe origins of the project: “Ivan and I sort of became friends when I was with The Bridge. We used to cross paths with Dumpstaphunk all the time at festivals and what not. I actually bumped into him at couple Jazz Fest ago. I happened to walk into Harrah’s to play some poker on some idle time and happened to bump right into Ivan, and it was like, “Oh you like to play cards too?” So we sat down and played cards together for a few hours and chatted and realized we had a lot in common, so we sort of became friendly through that. . . . That sort of solidified it. By way of music, we were playing around together one day and decided we should sit down and write some stuff and put something together. You know just came up with the idea and we did! That’s how it all came about.”
As Neville explains in a 2016 interview: “We ended up getting together a couple of times to collaborate at some gigs here and there. That turned into something pretty special—chemistry—and we started doing stuff, pretty much a record’s worth of material that became the album Neville-Jacobs.”
[Cover photo via Rex Thomson]