It's been 15 years since Digable Planets had the crossover hit "Rebirth of the Slick (Cool Like Dat)," won a Grammy and then broke up a year later when its second album failed to reach the same level of success as its debut.

Today, Doodlebug and Butterfly, as two of the original members call themselves, are creating new music again under the Digable Planets name and testing out the new material on a self-funded tour.

"That's the best way to promote your music is to actually just stand in front of the crowd, potential consumers or music lovers that listen to you, and see what they feel like from the gate," Doodlebug said. "I like it that way because you get a direct response."

The music is still a combination of jazz and hip-hop, but now it has greater doses of funk and rock 'n' roll. The lyrics also reflect the life experiences the duo has had in the past decade-and-a-half.

"The experiences that we've accumulated have now evolved into this new music that wasn't there in 1992 when we did 'Cool Like Dat,' " Doodlebug said. "Each album is almost like a reflection of that moment in time when we were recording. Now we have children. At that time, we were single, we weren't fathers, we weren't parents."

Digable Planets plans to take the songs that have the best response from its current tour back into the studio to tweak them for a new album to be released in 2010. That will be the group's first album of original material since 1994.

"Just to let people know that we're still out there, we're still there. The Digable Planets aren't going anywhere, whether you've heard of us in 10 years or not. We're still out there, we're still grinding, we still love doing music, we still have a message to convey," Doodlebug said. "The fact that we had a hit record was just kind of luck or just being in the right place at the right time or something. I don't know. We didn't make the song to try to be a hit record or for it to be a major hit. We just poured our heart into it, just like we're doing now."