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PLAYERS:
New
Orleans Updated Tradition
At the rear of the stage, Stanton Moore appears at the drum kit in a pin- stripe costume suit and his ever-present black rimmed retro glasses. His brow furrows with feeling as he segues into a solo while the rest of the band members scramble for their regular instruments. He adds off-kilter funky accents and fancy snare rolls to intermittent howls from the crowd, while the same tribal drone rolls underneath. Gradually, the solo's disparate components intensify, and at the height of a roaring climax, Moore delivers a single cymbal crash as the rest of the band breaks into "Baker's Dozen." The crowd roars. The funky drummer sets the pace of life in New Orleans-a slightly swung swagger resulting from an unforeseen cultural fusion. "New Orleans was the only city in America to allow slaves from Africa-and some of those African slaves spent time in the Caribbean-to play their music," Moore says. "That was Congo Square. They picked up snare drums or bass drums, European instru- ments, and they immediately had the clave. They started mixing that with buzz rolls from the European marches. Mixing elements of the two musical sys- tems embedded a peculiar rhythmic ten- sion in New Orleans street beat, a twist that makes it funky. "In modern music," Moore says, "you have straight eighth notes and swung eighth notes. In New Orleans, the cats play that stuff in between the two. Too straight is not right Too swung is not right It has to be just in between." Moore's affinity for raw rhythm and funky drum gymnastics is deeply rooted. A native of the New Orleans area, he grew up surrounded by the traditional street beat sounds of Mardi Gras parades and Sunday second lines. Galactic is just one outlet for his collective knowledge of generations of New Orleans rhythm. Off the road, Moore plays frequent gigs with his hometown jazz-funk side project, Moore & More, and club jam sessions with other local funk and jazz musicians. He brings his hometown flair to the national jazz-funk circuit with all-star jams and pick-up bands like Garage a Trois, his trio with West Coast sax man Skerik and eight-string guitarist Charlie Hunter. He teaches master classes, par- ticipates in drum clinics and is writing a book about New Orleans drum tech- niques. An heir to the New Orleans drum legacy, he seizes influences from its rich past while helping to shape its future. Johnny Vidacovich is Moore's strongest New Orleans-style drumming influence. Esteemed occupant of the Astral Project drum chair, Vidacovich stands as a New Orleans drum patriarch. Moore studied with Vidacovich for five years when he was young, and recently rekindled their musical alliance through weeknight jam sessions at the Old Point Bar in Algiers Point "We've known each other for 12 years," Moore says. "Johnny is my main teacher and mentor, so I really have a lot of fun playing with him." The double drum power of Moore and Vidacovich is a thrill for the audi- ence, too. "For a long time, I sounded just like him," Moore says. "Now, espe- cially when I'm playing with him, I'll pull out stuff I got straight from him, just for kicks. But I usually put my own spin on it." If Vidacovich used to see a spitting image of himself in Moore's drumming, the resemblance faded as Moore developed his own style. Vidacovich first introduced Moore to Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste. The origi- nal drummer for the Meters, Zigaboo is Moore's old-school New Orleans funk counterpart and one of Moore's more obvious influences. Zigaboo's stripped- down style often finds its way into Galactic's retrospective repertoire, and into the material of hundreds of dance music tracks from '70s funk to 'gas hip- hop. "He's one of the most influential drummers of all time," Moore says. "You listen to Zig, and he's playing swing on top of George [Porter Jr.] playing straight. It's really subtle." He's also learned a lot from funk drummer friends of his such as Russell Batiste, Zigaboo's replacement in the Funky Meters, and Neville Brothers' drummer "Mean" Willie Green, who preceded Moore in the New Orleans Klezmer A11stars. That funky old school street beat feel makes Moore a favorite on the current jazz-funk circuit. He's not afraid to try unorthodox techniques and novelty antics. With Moore & More, he1l pull out a rubber hose apparatus and blow air into the drum. With veins popping out of his neck and forehead~ a red-faced Moore holds his breath and pounds the drum while the crowd cheers at the thrill of his wacky, pitch-bending solo. At Galactic's 2000 Lundi Gras show at Tipitina's, Moore kept a bulk-sized bag of glow-in- the-dark super balls hidden until 4 a.m., when he stood up on his stool and unleashed the balls on the drums yield- ing hundreds of bubbly popping sounds and a chaotic explosion of florescence. And at Galactic's 2001 Halloween show, he debuted the "never before seen drum- stick cam." The audience could see his solo from the stick's point of view, pro- jected on an enormous screen. Moore's forward-thinking approach and experimental itch are inherent in his background. His pre-funk era idols are r&b innovators Idris Muhammad and Earl Palmer, drummers who brought the New Orleans feel to the forefront of the national jazz scene in the '50s and '60s. Moore describes Palmer's flair as New Orleans jazz swing fused with early rock 'n' roll. "Coming from a swing back- ground, playing on Uttle Richard stuff, the other guys were playing straight," he says. "But Earl was playing swing, meet- ing them in the middle. He just had such great feeling, and even though he wasn't phrasing everything exactly the same, he knew how to make that tension work." A copy of Palmer's biography, Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story by Tony Scherman, sits on Moore's bookshelf, signed by nearly every living New Orleans drummer. Muhammad, the drummer on the original "Mardi Gras Mambo" by Art Neville and the Hawkettes, was the first- call session drummer for the funkier '60s Blue Note albums by players like Lou Donaldson and Grant Green. "He went to New York and played that New Orleans stuff there," Moore says. "So everything he did had that New Orleans flair." Much like Palmer and Muhammad did in the '50s and '60s, and the Meters did in the '70s, Moore brings the New Orleans rhythm to the national jazz scene. His second solo record, Flyin' The Koop (his Verve debut), combines his funky New Orleans influence with modern studio techniques and artistic contributions from a high-powered group of national avant-jazz-funk players: Karl Denson on flute and tenor sax, Skerik on tenor, bari- tone and electro sax, Chris Wood on bass and Brian Seeger on guitar. It's a depar- ture from his first album, All Kooked Out (Fog City, 1998) .Recorded on an isolated chicken ranch in Northern California, Flyin' The Koop emerged as the musi- cians composed most of the material in the studio to drum loops that Moore had created beforehand. "Fallin' Off The Floor" samples vocals from the Wild Magnolias Mardi Gras Indians. "Amy's Lament," a slow, sad track named for Moore's wife, utilizes a minor melody that throws back to his mid-'90s stint with the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars. Brilliant jazz-funk compositions meld with improvisational anarchy. And the closing track, "Organized Chaos," sounds like something from a Beck record-an indication that Moore and his cronies fear no musical boundaries. Conscious of the tradition he repre- sents, Moore's eager to turn the rest of the world on to it "Whenever I get in a situation with other drummers," he says, "I feel like I have something unique from what they have going on. Everybody wants to learn the New Orleans stuff."
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