Stanton Moore

Metairie, Tulane, and a band called Galactic Prophylactic

Stanton Moore was born on 9 July 1972 in New Orleans and raised in Metairie, the suburb on the other side of the 17th Street Canal. The band that made his name came together in the city in 1994 under the name Galactic Prophylactic, built around guitarist Jeff Raines and bassist Robert Mercurio — childhood friends from Maryland who had moved south to study at Tulane and Loyola. What started as an octet contracted into the core group that has held since, with Moore behind the kit throughout.

His own records began four years later. All Kooked Out! arrived in 1998 on Fog City, followed by Flyin' the Koop on Blue Thumb in 2001 — funk drumming records made by a drummer who wanted his name on the sleeve rather than a session credit buried inside it.

The teaching came alongside the playing. Moore helped build the Tipitina's Foundation workshop programme, which gave young players somewhere to perform in the years after Hurricane Katrina, and in 2017 he set up the Stanton Moore Drum Academy to move that instruction online. He has also designed signature snare drums and cymbals, working first with Sabian and later with Zildjian.

Galactic, and a band that bought its own room

Galactic's current shape is a seven-piece: Mercurio on bass, Raines on guitar, Richard Vogel on Hammond organ, Ben Ellman on saxophone and harmonica, Moore on drums, with trumpeter Eric Gordon and singer Anjelika 'Jelly' Joseph both joining in 2019. The tenth studio album, Already Ready Already, came that same year.

The more consequential move was structural. In 2018 the band bought Tipitina's, the Napoleon Avenue club they had been playing since their first year together, which turned a group of touring musicians into the owners of the room they came up in. Moore now programmes and plays there as a matter of routine rather than as a homecoming.

Since then the band has leaned into collaboration rather than conventional albums: the Tchompitoulas EP in 2023, built around Joseph and guests, and then Audience with the Queen in 2025, a full record made with Irma Thomas and issued on the band's own Tchoup-Zilla imprint. It is the clearest statement yet of what Galactic became after 2019 — a house band for singers, with Moore's drumming doing the work of a rhythm section rather than a feature.

The solo shelf, and the turn towards swing

Moore's own catalogue splits roughly in half. The first part is organ-trio funk: III in 2006, then Emphasis! (On Parenthesis) in 2008 and Groove Alchemy in 2010, the latter two cut with keyboardist Robert Walter and guitarist Will Bernard — a line-up he has toured nationally for close to twenty years.

The second part starts in 2014. Conversations, released on The Royal Potato Family, was a straight-ahead jazz trio record with bassist James Singleton and pianist David Torkanowsky, and the material was worked out in public: a month-long Snug Harbor residency that began on 2 September 2014, two sets every Tuesday at 8pm and 10pm, fifteen dollars at the door. The stated point of it was to step back from unrelenting funk towards swing and improvisation in a small room. Three years later came With You In Mind, a set of Allen Toussaint songs.

More recently he has worked as a co-leader: Krasno/Moore Project: Book of Queens with guitarist Eric Krasno on Concord Jazz in 2023, and Live at the 2025 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, issued through MunckMix in 2025.

2026: a metal album, an organ trio, and a Jazz Fest fixture

The year's biggest surprise sits well outside the jazz and funk columns. Corrosion of Conformity released Good God / Baad Man on 3 April 2026 through Nuclear Blast, with Moore on drums — his first appearance on a Corrosion of Conformity studio album in twenty-one years, since In the Arms of God in 2005. He had returned to the band as its session drummer in 2022, following the death of Reed Mullin. The record was tracked between March and August 2025 with producer Warren Riker, the first Corrosion of Conformity release since a 1987 EP not to involve long-time producer John Custer, and the first to feature Bobby Landgraf on bass after Mike Dean's 2024 departure. Four singles trailed it: 'Gimme Some Moore' on 10 February 2026, 'You or Me' on 10 March, 'Asleep on the Killing Floor' on the album's release day, and 'Baad Man' on 6 July. At eight years, the gap since No Cross No Crown is the longest between studio albums in that band's history.

Four weeks later came something closer to home. The Breaks — Moore with Robert Walter on organ and Eddie Roberts of The New Mastersounds on guitar — released a self-titled debut on Color Red on 1 May 2026. Eight tracks, among them 'Hasheesh', 'Snowballers' and 'Inheritance Powder', with Brad Walker on saxophone, Michael Bradford on trumpet, Big Sam Williams on trombone and Pedro Segundo on percussion filling out part of the record. Walter's summary of the project was that these are two of his favourite musicians and two of his closest friends, and that playing with them is easy. The trio took it to Tipitina's on 2 May and to Fuji Rock in Japan on 26 July.

Jazz Fest season has its own fixture now. On 30 April 2026, Stanton Moore & Friends played the Toulouse Theatre on Toulouse Street — Moore with Walter, Will Bernard, saxophonist Skerik and Big Sam — doors at 8pm, music at 9pm, tickets from thirty-two dollars in advance to sixty-five for VIP, with a dollar a ticket going to Grace At The Green Light, which works with the city's unhoused population. It was the third consecutive year the same five had done it, having started as a loose jam.

Where he actually is most nights

The autumn and winter 2026 schedule is almost entirely a New Orleans schedule. Wednesdays belong to the Maple Leaf Bar on Oak Street — 14 and 28 October, 4, 11 and 25 November, 16 December. Mondays belong to The Columns Hotel on St Charles Avenue, booked through 26 October, 3, 8, 23 and 30 November and most of December. Around those sit Tipitina's on 16 October and again on 23 December, Snug Harbor on 25 October, a three-night run at the New Orleans Jazz Museum from 11 to 13 December, and one short trip out: Nectar Lounge in Seattle on 12 November and The Get Down in Portland the following night.

That residency pattern is the real shape of the career. A recording from the Maple Leaf on 19 November 2025 — one of the venue's Happy Organ Hour nights, with Joe Ashlar on B3 and Chris Adkins on guitar — runs to roughly three hours and nineteen minutes across two sets, twelve pieces in the first and nine in the second, nearly all instrumental and stitched together with on-mic banter. Titles such as 'Potlicker', 'Key Hole' and 'Snuggle Struggle' suggest how much of the evening is written on the spot.