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Music Inside Out: Remembering Charles Neville

Charles Neville
Charles Neville

Within Buddhist traditions, “samsara” refers to the karmic cycle of rebirth that a being must travel through on their journey towards enlightenment. While in some traditions this can take many lifetimes to complete, others maintain that, for certain exceptional people, the transformative process can happen within a single lifetime.

Saxophonist Charles Neville was an exceptional person. His story is a testament to the many lives that a single human can lead. Born into one of New Orleans most famous musical families, Charles has enjoyed a musical career that’s spanned more than 60 years. He’s the second oldest of the legendary Neville Brothers, and earned a Grammy for his work on the album Yellow Moon. Charles, his brothers and their uncle, George “Big Chief Jolly” Landry, were architects of the seminal Mardi Gras Indian funk album The Wild Tchoupitoulas… And in an earlier musical life, he backed up rhythm and blues legends like Johnny Ace, Big Maybelle, and B.B. King.

But along with these more familiar stories, Charles shared some of his other lives with us as well…

Charles Neville passed away on Thursday, April 26, 2018 at 79 years old.

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Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans native, NPR veteran and host of WWNO's Music Inside Out, where she brings to bear the knowledge and experience she amassed as senior editor of Weekend Edition, an East Africa correspondent, the holder of Nieman and Watson Fellowships, and as a longtime student of music from around the world.