Stanton Moore | New Orleans funk, in one drummer

There is a way of playing drums that only exists in one city, and Stanton Moore has spent thirty years making sure the rest of the world can hear it.

New Orleans drumming is not a style so much as a whole separate grammar — second line, street beats, Professor Longhair’s rumba left hand, and a relationship between the bass drum and the snare that does not exist anywhere else in American music.

Moore plays it, teaches it, and has built a career out of translating it. Here is what he is doing.

Who is Stanton Moore?

Stanton Moore was born on 1 October 1972 in New Orleans, and has essentially never left.

In 1994 he co-founded Galactic, the New Orleans funk band that has been going ever since — through Coolin’ Off, Late for the Future, Ruckus, From the Corner to the Block and a long list of records that mix funk, jazz, hip-hop and brass-band tradition.

He also leads the Stanton Moore Trio, plays with Garage a Trois and Galactic’s many side configurations, and has recorded with a formidable range of guests.

Drumeo’s voters gave him Soul/Funk Drummer Of The Year in 2024.

The New Orleans thing, explained

If you have never played it, the short version is this.

Second line comes from the brass-band parades: the bass drum plays a syncopated, rolling pattern rather than four on the floor, and the snare answers it with press rolls and rim work. The pulse is implied rather than stated.

That means the bass drum is a melodic voice. In rock, the kick anchors. In New Orleans playing, the kick dances and something else anchors — usually the ride or a cowbell.

Layer on top of that the rumba-derived left hand from Professor Longhair, the Meters’ Zigaboo Modeliste vocabulary, and the funeral-march-to-celebration structure of a second line parade, and you have a genuinely separate tradition.

Moore is its most visible current teacher.

The teaching

He runs the Spirit of New Orleans Drum Camp, teaches widely through clinics and online material, and has written instructional books that are essentially the standard texts on this material for anybody outside Louisiana.

That work matters. The tradition is oral, learned on the street and in the church, and without people like Moore writing it down, most of the world would never get near it.

What Stanton Moore actually does

He plays the bass drum as a lead voice. Loose, syncopated, constantly moving.

His left hand is full of press rolls. Not a fill — a texture, played quietly and continuously.

He grooves without a backbeat. A great deal of his playing has no simple 2 and 4 anywhere in it, and it still makes people dance.

He is a jazz drummer when he wants to be. The Trio records swing properly.

He uses the whole kit as percussion. Cowbells, blocks, tambourines, hand percussion mounted within reach. It is closer to a Latin setup than a rock one in that respect.

Stanton Moore’s drum kit

His rig has one genuinely unusual feature.

• Two bass drums, hit at once. A 20”x14” and a 26”x14”, set up to be struck simultaneously with a custom DW pedal. The result is one enormous composite kick sound — the attack of the small drum and the depth of the big one.
• Drums — Gretsch Brooklyn. Warm, resonant, vintage-voiced shells, plus the Gretsch Catalina Club Micro Kit for smaller rooms.
• Snares. A Gretsch Brooklyn 14”x6.5” steel, and his own Gretsch signature 14”x4.5” wood snare, launched in 2010.
• Cymbals. He launched a signature line with Bosphorus in 2005, and also plays Zildjian Kerope and Crescent models — all at the dark, dry, old-sounding end of the spectrum.
• Sticks — Vic Firth, with a signature model since 2005.
• Percussion. LP hardware, Pete Engelhart metal percussion, and — in his own words — enough cowbells and jingly things to keep an octopus occupied.

Every era, with buy links, is on Stanton Moore’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

You do not need two bass drums. You need two habits and one cheap purchase.

Play the kick off the beat. Take any funk groove and move half the kick notes to the “e” and the “a”. It will feel wrong. Keep going.

Learn a press roll. Quiet, buzzing, continuous, under everything. It is the single most characteristic sound in this tradition.

And buy a cowbell. Genuinely. Mount it where you can play it with the ride hand — that is the anchor that lets the kick wander. Our cymbal buying guide covers the dark, dry cymbals that suit this music, and the Gear Guru will spec a warm, vintage-voiced kit to a budget.

Where to start listening

• Galactic — “Go Go” or anything from Late for the Future (2000).
• Stanton Moore Trio — With You in Mind (2017). The Allen Toussaint tribute.
• Galactic — From the Corner to the Block (2007). Funk and hip-hop, fused.
• His instructional material. Unusually, the teaching videos are as musical as the records.
• The Meters — anything. Not him, but the source. Start with “Cissy Strut”.

Final thoughts

Moore’s real achievement is not the band or the records. It is that a whole regional tradition — one that was genuinely at risk of staying local — is now taught, transcribed and played worldwide, substantially because of him.

He is also very good fun to listen to, which in a drummer this scholarly is not guaranteed.

See Stanton Moore’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Steve Jordan — another drummer whose entire value is in the feel.