Galactic: Building blocks with hip-hop

Galactic sax player Ben Ellman laughs at the image of the band’s latest release, From the Corner to the Block, being dismissed by naysayers as a white-boy funk band collaborating with hip-hop MCs in a cynical grab for street cred; or, maybe worse, a resultant “You’ve got chocolate in my peanut butter!” sound that might not mesh.

“In the beginning, it wasn’t a conscious thing about, ‘Hey, let’s make a hip-hop album.’ It was like, ‘Let’s make an album with these MCs,’” says Ellman over the phone about his New Orleans-based band, which has released its sixth and possibly best album. “We’re not trying to reinvent ourselves musically. It’s not so much us trying to be a different band as much as incorporate what these MCs do and what we do.”

Originally inspired by the seminal New Orleans funk outfit the Meters and then, as Ellman notes, lumped in with the pile of jam-band groups, Galactic nevertheless keeps surging forward in broadening its sound, and in that context, From the Corner to the Block is a minor revelation. The series of collaborations with some of the hippest MCs features Lyrics Born, Chali 2na of Jurassic 5, Boots Riley of the Coup, Gift of Gab from Blackilicious, Mr. Lif of the Perceptionists, Ladybug from Digable Planets and New Orleans’ own Juvenile. And while much of the album features lots of prerecorded tracks and plenty of back-and-forthing over the wireless world, the effect is almost seamless.

Not that blending funk and rapping is such a crazy idea; regardless, the tracks feel like one big neighborhood gathering. Lyrics Born kicks things off with perhaps the best track on the album, “I Got It (What You Need),” in which a leering declaration “You want it, baby, I got it,” quickly turns into a street hustler’s pitch to any willing customer – all urged on by Jeffrey Raines’ stinging guitar and drummer Stanton Moore’s clave rhythms.

Each artist was given a broad palette with which to work, the only edict being trying to speak to a street corner that affected him.

“I realized that there’s so much common culture within street-corner culture,” says Ellman, who served as co-producer of the project that started before Hurricane Katrina. “But it’s not just unique to New Orleans; having people write about these corners. Lyrics Born talks about a guy selling all this stuff, everything he has, man – that’s my corner in New Orleans. They sell T-shirts, they sell bootleg ringtones, they sell porn, they sell meat. And LB’s song, that’s exactly what he wrote about. There’s a lot of uniqueness in New Orleans, but in terms of the corner culture, it’s about growing up in the city.

“The only conception we had at the beginning was we wanted a cohesiveness with a story, a reason to have all these people on the album and not just ‘Galactic featuring,’ and ‘Galactic featuring.’ That’s why we wanted this storyline where we’d ask people to pick a corner.”

The most homespun versions come from Juvenile working with the Soul Rebels Brass Band on the title cut and Big Chief Monk Boudreaux on “Second and Dryades” – the latter a corner serving as the spot where the city’s Mardi Gras Indian gangs meet and “do battle.” Juvenile’s appearance might not feel like much more than a novelty, while the Soul Rebels’ horn phrases bring an unexpected swing to the song. Boudreaux’s rap comes off more like the expected Indian chants, hipped up by some of Ellman’s production techniques, including turning cowbell clangs into meditative arpeggios.

“It certainly was a nice distraction from Katrina, especially for me to be sitting in the producer’s seat,” Ellman notes. “I don’t know what else I’d be doing. It really kept me busy. We started doing writing on it before Katrina. It kept us focused, kept us in New Orleans, kept us working instead of just hitting the road touring.”