Red Stick Ramblers stir up musical gumbo

When most people think of Louisiana music, it’s the Dixieland brass sound of New Orleans, but the Red Stick Ramblers are preserving lesser-appreciated bayou traditions.

The group formed in 1999 out of Baton Rouge (French for Red Stick) and quickly picked up a reputation for bringing the goods in Cajun, western swing and gypsy jazz. Recently, though, new line-up changes have expanded the band’s palette, as they’ve now started dabbling in cousin rural genres like vintage country, blues and honky-tonk.

On their fourth and latest release, “Made in the Shade” (Sugar Hill), which was produced by Dirk Powell, the band shows it still likes to swing, especially with the cover of Bob Wills’ well-recognized ballad “Don’t Cry, Baby.”

But the now Lafeyette-based quintet also has opened many more doors. The title track features some serious boogie-woogie preservation. While a take on Clifton Chenier’s “Hot Tamale Baby” finds band fiddler Kevin Wimmer cutting gritty zydeco fills with his bow, lead singer Linzay Young’s “Les Oiseaux Vont Chanter” could easily pass for an old-world Cajun traditional infused with the dark vibe of a murder ballad.

“We’ve to put of our own songs on each new record,” Young said. “But we also still try to hit our favorites.

“It might be more of a shift, rather than an expansion,” he said of the sonic changes of the band, which also features guitarist Chas Justice, Eric Frey on bass and Glen Fields on drums. “We used to do some Django Reinhardt and European swing stuff, but now we’ve kind of honed it down to the Americana side of things. It’s been a growing process to find what fits us.”

Despite a lengthy traverse of the musical map, “Made” manages to come off as a cohesive acoustic statement, refreshingly exploring avenues often overlooked in the emerging market of young string bands.

Young even channels his inner Willie Nelson with “The Cowboy Song.”

“That was a tribute to all the cowboy songs that we like to listen to,” he said. “It’s about that whole mythology of being out on the range. We can relate with our nomadic lifestyle out on the highway.

The album also did not go without a nod to recent natural devastation with “Katrina.”

“Chas and Eric ended up having a bunch of displaced people from New Orleans staying at their house,” Young said. “They ended up cooking every night and having parties, so they would sit around and vent by making up songs.”

More than anything, though, the Ramblers are a live dance band — an outfit that makes its crowds want to get up and move, destined to become an underground fixture in fruitful live music towns. The group brings the good times to the Gravity Lounge on Tuesday night.

The band will head back into the studio later this year, and also once again put on its Black Pot Festival in its hometown on Oct. 24.

“We try to get a lot of our friends that we’ve been playing with to come down to Louisiana when the weather has cooled off,” Young said.

“It’s a big party with a cast-iron pot cookoff. It’s our baby.”