Leo Nocentelli's lost album gets a release

Leo Nocentelli is most well known for his work in legendary funk outfit The Meters. But between sessions in the 70s while The Meters were on a break, he recorded a folk album at Cosimo Matassa's Jazz City studios, but it never came out. The tapes, stored at Allen Toussaint's Sea-Saint studios, were thought to have been lost during the flooding in Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The story of how the tapes were rediscovered has a connection to the Beastie Boys. And there's an unreleased Meters album in there too... any sign of those two Stevie Wonder/Meters albums tho?

Light In The Attic have released it  - they describe the sound as 'Bill Withers and James Taylor meeting Allen Toussaint at Link Wray’s Three Track Shack. ... Whenever he had downtime from session work and shows, Nocentelli spent much of 1971 recording his newly-found, reflective, diaristic songs at Matassa’s Jazz City studio. Backed by longtime Meters bandmate George Porter Jr. on bass, Nocentelli crafted the lineups for his sessions to match the tone of the material. When he needed a pianist, he’d call Toussaint. For percussion on the slower songs, he used drummer Zigaboo Modeliste, but many of the tracks featured James Black—a frequent collaborator of Toussaint’s and a member of Ellis Marsalis’ jazz group, whom Nocentelli recalls as an “unbelievable” musician."

Washington Post: "The Los Angeles Times broke the news about an improbable find at a swap meet in Torrance, Calif.: multiple boxes full of tape reels, all from Jazz City and Sea-Saint, apparently saved from the storm and left in an L.A. storage unit. ... Nocentelli only learned of the discovery when contacted for the article, and the news got better from there. His demo tapes were in good condition and the tracks legally belonged to him, so there wasn’t any such obstacle to releasing the music.

It's not entirely surprising that the tapes wound up at the Roadium Open-Air Market, a massive and long-standing institution in L.A.'s South Bay neighborhood near Redondo Beach. The Roadium is a typical endpoint for the city's abandoned storage unit hauls, so a lot of film and music industry gems end up among its vendor booths. It's a natural destination for crate diggers and audiophiles, guys like Mike Nishita, who is nearly 60 and has been prowling the Roadium since childhood, when he bought hip-hop vinyl at a booth that was the first to sell Dr. Dre's mix tapes.

He found the mystery New Orleans stash in January 2018 and barely believed it. He started texting pictures to Mario Caldato Jr., a lifelong friend who, like Mike’s brother “Money Mark” Nishita, worked early and often with the Beastie Boys and continues to produce artists from all over the world. Caldato saw “Sea-Saint” and texted back: “Buy it all.”

Nate Rogers, New York Times: "The quarter-inch master tapes of “Another Side,” out Nov. 19 in various formats after a 50-year delay, sat unreleased in storage for decades at Allen Toussaint’s Sea-Saint Recording Studio in New Orleans. When Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, Sea-Saint — which housed numerous landmark recordings — was destroyed by floodwater, and its archives were reasonably presumed to have perished along with it.

But about a quarter of the tapes at the facility were spared. And eventually the surviving material made its way to Los Angeles, where Bill Valenziano, who bought Sea-Saint in 1995, had it put into storage. After some missed payments and an auction in 2018, 16 boxes of master tapes bearing the Sea-Saint name landed at a swap meet in Torrance, Calif. When they were brought out for sale, a collector and D.J. named Mike Nishita was called over to take a look, and his eyes widened at the sight of the names: the Meters, Dr. John, Irma Thomas.

“I didn’t really know about that studio at all,” Nishita, a soft-spoken dividual known by some as “Hawaiian Mike,” said in a recent interview. (His brother is “Money Mark” Nishita, a keyboardist often referred to as the unofficial fourth member of the Beastie Boys.) “I just Googled ‘Sea-Saint,’ and was like, ‘Holy [expletive].’” He bought the lot for $100 a box, and got out of there before the seller could change his mind. Sifting through the music, he quickly found his favorite reel of the bunch: Nocentelli’s lost solo album, which no one else in the world seemed to know existed.....

Nishita is close friends with Mario Caldato Jr., a producer and engineer who’s worked with the Beastie Boys and knows Matt Sullivan, the founder of Light in the Attic Records. Sullivan was one of the first people invited to check out the collection, and soon set up the Nocentelli release. Right place, right time.

“Every time I listen to this record, it’s like, how was this never released?” Sullivan said, speaking from Austin, Texas. “This should have been on the radio in the ’70s.”

There are still approximately 3,000 more hours of Sea-Saint-related music sitting in Nishita’s garage, which he says includes an unreleased Meters album from their early days. The prospect of that particular one ever being released is far more precarious from a legal perspective than Nocentelli’s solo album, but if all principal parties can get on board, it could happen."