Nola Music: Then & Now.

Collaborators help galactic write city’s musical history.

Galactic’s latest album is a tribute to home. The group — a band that’s moved from funk to R&B to rap and back again — searched for inspiration in the neighborhoods of New Orleans, its adopted home base, tapping into new trends like bounce music, a hybrid of rap spiced with punk sensibilities. By capturing the Crescent City’s changing scene in Ya-Ka-May, Galactic has written a history of New Orleans music.

The disc features appearances by fabled names etched in the city’s musical memory, but also includes lesser-known artists currently helping create alternative cultures in the area. Rappers and hip-hop artists are lined up next to brass band pioneers on the album. Even when faced with so many fresh, intriguing musical ideas coming from the Big Easy, organist Rich Vogel says the group never proposed discarding the city’s musical heritage.

“Those things will always be here and will always be a part of New Orleans,” he says. “They’re part of the fabric of life, when you think about brass band music and second lines, and we wouldn’t want it any other way. But there is other stuff.”

This new music may be a little harder to access than the omnipresent brass ensembles. While the scene is not entirely underground, tourists will have trouble finding bounce and rap artists like Sissy Nobby and Big Freedia. In addition to playing a different style of music than the traditional New Orleans tunes, these newer guys can take on personas that are very different from those of brass band musicians. Vogel says many bounce artists are cross dressers. “It’s surprising,” he says. “Hip-hop culture, in a way, seems like it wouldn’t be that friendly to that sort of expression.”

Ya-Ka-May isn’t solely a Galactic record. Out of 15 tracks, only two lack contributors, making for a song list that reads like a mainstream hip-hop disc. The sheer magnitude of different interpretations means each track is different; everyone’s voice is heard, but the guests never stray far from their hosts’ swamp funk backbeat.

The recording process evolved organically. Ya-Ka-May was recorded in the city, and collaborators would swing by the studio and listen to the band lay out the basics for a song. Some artists took these musical ideas home and wrote lyrics or fleshed out the tune, but others simply winged it. “It was fun. It was really one of the most rewarding things about making this record,” Vogel says. “We were working with people that we could actually get together with in a room much more readily and work on something.”

Galactic’s recorded output is hard to define. Ya-Ka-May differs from the band’s previous release, From the Corner to the Block, which is musically light years away from the band’s first offering, 1996’s Coolin’ Off. The group has embraced stylistic changes throughout its career to create a persona that truly embraces the band’s varied influences.

“For many years now, we’ve been messing with that formula,” Vogel says. “We’ve moved into a more modern production world and started messing around with samplers and effects and programmed drum beats.”

These records are separate pieces of Galactic’s DNA; the entire double helix can be heard in live performances. Any given show might draw from a variety of albums, but Vogel insists his task in the studio is to search for innovative, fresh sounds on each new record. Internet availability of the band’s shows is even more reason to experiment with new sounds in the studio, Vogel says. If fans can download multiple live versions of any given horn tune, what’s the point of producing a strictly funk-based instrumental release?

“We’ve been trying now for a while to do something with our records that we think is a little different, something interesting to us, something we feel like we haven’t heard before,” he says. “I doubt very much we’re going to make another Coolin’ Off or Crazyhorse Mongoose.”

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