Leo Nocentelli was born in New Orleans on June 15, 1946, and grew up in the Irish Channel and Seventh Ward. His father encouraged him toward music early, and he developed his ear by listening to Charlie Christian, Kenny Burrell, and Wes Montgomery, becoming a skilled session guitarist in his early teens. By seventeen he was recording for Motown acts including the Supremes, Temptations, and Spinners.
After his discharge from the Army, Nocentelli joined Art Neville and the Neville Sounds. By 1968 that group had crystallized into a quartet: Nocentelli, Art Neville, George Porter Jr., and Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste. They called themselves the Meters. Their debut singles "Sophisticated Cissy" and "Cissy Strut" — both written primarily by Nocentelli — immediately established a new vocabulary for rhythm and blues. His rhythm playing became the signature of the New Orleans funk sound.
From 1969 to 1977 the band released eight studio albums. Nocentelli's original compositions, including "Hey Pocky A-Way" and "People Say," became the foundation of one of the most sampled catalogs in American music. After the Meters' dissolution, he continued extensive session work in Los Angeles, recording with Robert Palmer, Etta James, Patti LaBelle, and others.
Then came one of the most remarkable stories in recent music history: a solo album he had recorded in 1971 at Cosimo Matassa's Jazz City Studio — ten delicate, acoustic, singer-songwriter tracks produced by Allen Toussaint — had been lost for fifty years. The tapes surfaced at a Los Angeles flea market in 2018. Light in the Attic Records released the album, Another Side, in November 2021 to wide critical acclaim, revealing a profoundly personal side of one of New Orleans' greatest musicians.
