It's incredible that GALACTIC has never made a carnival album yet, but
now it’s here.
To make CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS, the members of GALACTIC (Ben
Ellman, harps and horns; Robert Mercurio, bass; Stanton Moore, drums
and percussion; Jeff Raines, guitar; Rich Vogel, keyboards) draw on the
skills, stamina, and funk they deploy in the all-night party of their
annual Lundi Gras show that goes till sunrise and leads sleeplessly into
Mardi Gras day.
GALACTIC was formed eighteen years ago in New Orleans, and they
cut their teeth playing the biggest party in America: Mardi Gras, when
the town shuts down entirely to celebrate. CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS is
beyond a party record. It’s a carnival record that evokes the electric
atmosphere of a whole city – make that, whole cities – vibrating
together all on the same day, from New Orleans all down the
hemisphere to the mighty megacarnivals of Brazil. Armed with a slew
of carnival-ready guests—including Cyril and Ivan Neville, Mystikal,
Mannie Fresh, Moyseis Marques, Casa Samba, the KIPP Renaissance
High School Marching Band, and Al "Carnival Time" Johnson (who
remakes his all-time hit)—GALACTIC whisks the listener around the
neighborhoods to feel the Mardi Gras moment in all its variety of
flavors.
CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS begins on a spiritual note, the way Mardi Gras
does in the black community of New Orleans. On that morning, the
most exciting experience you can have is to be present when the small
groups of black men called Mardi Gras Indians perform their sacred
street theater. Nobody embodies the spiritual side of Mardi Gras better
than the Indians, whose tambourines and chants provide the
fundament of New Orleans carnival music. These “gangs,” as they call
them, organize around and protect the figure of their chief. The
album’s keynote singer, BIG CHIEF JUAN PARDO, is, says Robert
Mercurio, “one of the younger Chiefs out there, and he’s become one
of the best voices of the new Chiefs. Pardo grew up listening to the
singing of the older generation of Big Chiefs, points out Ben Ellman,
and “he’s got a little Monk [Boudreaux], a little Bo Dollis, he’s neither
uptown nor downtown.”
On “Karate,” says Ellman, the band was aiming to “capture the power”
of one of the fundamental musical experiences of Mardi Gras: “a
marching band passing by you.” The 40-piece KIPP Renaissance High
School Marching Band’s director, Lionel "karate" Williams, arranged up
GALACTIC’s demo, then the band rehearsed it until they had it all
memorized. The kids poured their hearts into a solid performance, and,says Mercurio, “I think they were surprised” to hear how good they
sounded on the playback.
Musical energy is everywhere at carnival time. “You hear the marching
bands go by,” says Mercurio, moving us through a Mardi Gras day,
“and then you hear a lot of hiphop.” There hasn’t been a Mardi Gras for
twenty years that hasn’t had a banging track by beatmaker / rapper
MANNIE FRESH sounding wherever you go. “You can’t talk about New
Orleans hiphop without talking about MANNIE FRESH,” says Ellman. His
beats have powered literally tens of millions of records, and he and
GALACTIC have been talking for years about doing something together.
On “Move Fast,” he’s together with multiplatinum gravel-voiced rapper
MYSTIKAL, who is, says Ellman, “somebody we’ve wanted to
collaborate with forever. It was a coup for us.”
Out in the streets of New Orleans, you might well hear a funky kind of
samba, reaching southward toward the other end of the hemispheric
carnival zone. There has for the last twenty-five years been a smoking
Brazilian drum troupe in town: CASA SAMBA, formed at Mardi Gras in
1986. They’re old friends of GALACTIC’s from their early days at
Frenchmen Street’s Café Brasil, and the two groups joined forces for a
new version of Carlinhos Brown’s “Magalenha,” previously a hit for
Sérgio Mendes.
But the Brazilian influence on CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS goes beyond
one song. “When we started this album, we all immersed ourselves in
Brazilian music and let it get into our souls,” says Mercurio. The group
contributed three Brazilian-flavored instrumentals, including “JuLou,”
which riffs on an old Brazilian tune, though the name refers to the
brass-funk Krewe of Julu, the “walking krewe” that Galactic members
participate in on Mardi Gras morning. After creating the hard-driving
track that became “O Côco da Galinha,” they decided it would be right
for MOYSÉIS MÁRQUEZ, from the São Paulo underground samba scene,
who collaborated with them and composed the lyric.
If you were GALACTIC and you were making a carnival album, wouldn’t
you want to play “Carnival Time,” the irrepressibly happy 1960
perennial from the legendary Cosimo Matassa studio? Nobody in New
Orleans doesn’t know this song. The remake features a new
performance in the unmistakable voice of the original singer, AL
“CARNIVAL TIME” JOHNSON, who’s still active around town more than
fifty years after he first gained Mardi Gras immortality.
The closing instrumental, ,“Ash Wednesday Sunrise,” evokes the
edginess of the post-party feeling. The group writes, “There is the
tension you feel on that morning -- one of being worn out from all of the festivities and one of elation that you made it through another
year.”
But, as New Orleanians know, there’s always another carnival to look
forward to, and GALACTIC will be there, playing till dawn and then
going to breakfast before parading.
GALACTIC is a collaborative band with a unique format. It’s a stable
quintet that plays together with high musicianship. They’ve been
together so long they’re telepathic. But though the band hasn’t had a
lead singer for years, neither is it purely an instrumental group.
GALACTIC is part of a diverse community of musicians, and in their
own studio, with Mercurio and Ellman producing, they have the luxury
of experimenting. So on their albums, they do something that’s
unusual in rock but not so controversial an idea in, say, hiphop: they
create something that’s a little like a revue, a virtual show featuring
different vocalists (mostly from New Orleans) and instrumental soloists
each taking their turn on stage in the GALACTIC sound universe.
Mostly the band creates new material in collaboration with its many
guests, though they occasionally rework a classic. Despite the
appearance of various platinum names on GALACTIC albums, they
especially like to work with artists who are still underground. If you
listen to CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS together with the two previous studio
albums (YA-KA-MAY and FROM THE CORNER TO THE BLOCK), you’ll
hear the most complete cross-section of what’s happening in
contemporary New Orleans anywhere – all of it tight and radio-ready.
Despite the electronics and studio technology, GALACTIC’s albums are
very much band records. Mercurio explained the GALACTIC process,
which starts out with the beat: “The way we write music,” he says, “we
come up with a demo, or a basic track, and then we collectively decide
how we’re gonna finish it.” The result is a hard-grooving sequence of
tight beats across a range of styles that glides from one surprise to the
next.
What pulls all the diverse artists on CARNIVALE ELECTRICOS together
into a coherent album is that one way or another, it’s all funk.
GALACTIC is, always was, and always will be a funk band. Whatever
genre of music anyone in New Orleans is doing, from Mardi Gras
Indians to rock bands to hardcore rappers, it’s all funk at the bottom,
because funk is the common musical language, the lingua franca of
New Orleans music. Even zydeco can be funky -- and if you don’t
believe it, check out “Voyage Ton Flag,” the album’s evocation of Cajun
Mardi Gras, in which Mamou Playboy STEVE RILEY meets up with a
sampled Clifton Chenier inside the GALACTIC funk machine.
$25 general admission advance $27.00 general admission day of show
* prices may be subject to service fees
|