From punk to funk fame

When the New Orleans jazz-funk band Galactic comes here for several appearances, it will be a bit of a homecoming. Guitarist Jeff Raines and bassist Robert Mercurio grew up in this area, and in the mid-1980s tore up a junior high school church social in Chevy Chase while playing together in a surf punk band called the Skizmatics.

Luckily for all concerned, the punk didn’t stick.

“We definitely grew up punk rock D.C. kids, and we used to love that stuff,” Mr. Mercurio says. “Right when we were getting a little older, we started digging the funk, like P-funk and James Brown.”

Galactic plays Nissan Pavilion on Sunday and Merriweather Post Pavilion on Wednesday, with dates in Dewey Beach, Del., and Baltimore before winding it up at Live on Penn in downtown Washington on July 17.

In 1990, in their pursuit of funk and music in general, both Mr. Raines and Mr. Mercurio decided to go to college in New Orleans. “Knowing that it was a killer music town,” Mr. Mercurio says, “we were trying to combine the two of having a good time and playing music and getting an education.”

Both got their degrees, Mr. Mercurio at Loyola and Mr. Raines at Tulane — and they picked up much more outside academia.

“We got education from the bars and going to see shows and playing with other people, rather than in college,” Mr. Mercurio says. “There’s no degree for that.”

What they got was schooling in New Orleans funk music. “We went down there and they had their own indigenous kind of funk. And it was killer,” Mr. Mercurio remembers. “We just sucked it up.”

The music they most connected with was the earthy New Orleans sound of the funk legends the Meters. They met the other four members of Galactic through the New Orleans music scene, and when they all got together in 1994, the group was primarily a Meters cover band. It didn’t take long for people to see that the band had more potential than that. In 1996, they recorded their first CD themselves. Two years later it was re-released by major label Capricorn.

Four more albums have followed, each one more original and personal and more critically acclaimed. The latest, Ruckus (released in 2003), is a rolling, churning mix of techno funk and the greasy ooze of New Orleans swamp funk. To create this unique sound they teamed with a new producer, Dan “The Automator” Nakamura of the hip-hop world, and tried things in different ways.

“We really hadn’t written any of the songs before we went in,” Mr. Mercurio recalls. “We wanted to do all our songwriting in the studio for the first time.”

They had recently built their own studio in the warehouse district in New Orleans. So this time they could hole up for as long as they wanted and not worry so much about costs.

Many of the songs start out as short pieces of improv-isational material that were recorded from their live shows. After shows, they make notes on what section they might like to keep for later use.

“We fish through our improvisational stuff to find grooves and melodies,” Mr. Mercurio says. “And then figure out the rest of it from that. Find some sort of a hook, if the hook’s the groove or the hook’s the melody and then build around it.”

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When you grow up listening and singing with a special artist like renowned Texas blues guitarist Johnny Copeland, it’s hard not to have some of the talent rub off.

“I have an obviously different voice, but I stole a lot of his phrasing,” says Johnny Copeland’s daughter, Shemekia Copeland, who plays the Reston Festival in Reston on Sunday. “I don’t know if I stole it as much as that’s just how I learned.”

Her schooling started early. By the time she was 8, her father was bringing her up on stage to sing a number during his show. When she was 16, she started pursuing her singing career in earnest. Johnny Copeland’s health was failing, and he took her on the road with him as his opening act.

She soon landed a record contract with blues label Alligator Records. She recorded her first album when she was 18. Her second album, “Wicked” (recorded two years later), was nominated for a Grammy and won the W.C. Handy Award for Best Blues Album of the Year 2001. Her third album, “Talking to Strangers,” won the same in 2003.

She’s also been recognized as an entertainer. She is a three-time winner of the W.C. Handy Award for Contemporary Blues Female Artist of the Year.

“My father was such a great entertainer,” says Miss Copeland, now 25. “I like to think I got a lot of that from him.”