Call and Response: Reconnecting with Galactic

It's a very primal satisfaction...to cry out into the dark and hear someone else cry back. It provides a sense of place, like a haggard kind of sonar. It can help you find your way back home. It can help you find your escape. Share joy or provide sympathy. Signal a warning, start a fight or announce a celebration. It's what makes the response so electric, and it's what makes an echo so haunting. More than anything else, it's a reassurance that you're not alone.

And when we first started putting bone to skin and foot to ground to try to find a beat, call and response got built in. So here we are in 2010 and the best sounds are still built around this very same caveman formula, and nowhere is this ancient art more alive than New Orleans.

New Orleans in August is something akin to an industrial dish washer set to "Pots and Pans" with a weeks dead nutria rat strung out on your top rack. It's at this time that some of the local musicians, who would otherwise be perfectly content to follow to the Kermit Ruffins formula of weed and BBQ in Crescent City perpetual motion, decide to venture out into the rest of the country.

With the strange Katrina/BP bounce, everything New Orleans, from the food to the art to the long-suffering football team, has suddenly become America's good-hearted, chronically snakebit little brother everybody's rooting for to pull through. It's as if someone took the lovable loser mystique of the Chicago Cubs, planted it in a swamp with a dash of black pepper and let it ferment for a few hundred years. As far as it goes, 2010's turned out to be a decent vintage.

It was this gulfstream of events that brought Galactic to an energized, packed-out venue in the Mid-Atlantic where no less than 5 years ago, the Neville family would've been best known for Aaron's ill-fitting denim vests and adult contemporary duets. But today, the crowd was ready. They cheered on Ivan and Ian when they joined the band on stage and were prepared to embrace the beauty of the trombone lead. On this night, when the band cried out the obscure chants of the back corners of the Quarter, the voices in the dark cried back with a jubilant fury. There's a difference between echo and reverberation, and you know it when you feel it.

For most frat boys of the Southeast, Galactic is something of a known quantity. Not on the same level of familiarity of the Panic, but somewhere around the neighborhood. You've probably seen them before and probably more than once. The albums have played in the better of the jammy party mixes since the mid-90s. It's no different for me, and I had no special expectations for the show.

But for whatever reason, this one just hit. Like musical comfort food at the moment it's most needed. A good piece of fried chicken after a bad break-up while stranded in Canada. They brought out some Nevilles (Cyril, Ian and Ivan) and threw down a two hour set complete with extended Stanton Moore drum solo, blistering harmonica, bristling, brass splintering horns and slapping bass with hip-hop and bounce interludes. When traditional vocals were called for, Cyril Neville takes the lead. There aren't many better.

Most music, of all genres, whether you know it or not, is generally built from the bass and rhythm up. With Galactic, it's a celebration of the bottom and there's no question who's driving this wreck. It's the sweaty white boy behind emo glasses with his foot on the gas and bass drum pedals. Everybody else is just trying to hang on by their fingernails, but smiling throughout. Because they know it's damn good when it works. And like I said, on this night, it worked.