Troy Andrews and his band Orleans Avenue mix R&B, jazz, rock, rap and funk in their search for new ways to make audiences feel good
Guardian Weekly, Tuesday 17 September 2013 14.01 BST
For a man who drags a trombone around, Troy Andrews has a gift for fitting in. Fans know the 27-year-old New Orleans jazz-funk alchemist as Trombone Shorty. Maybe they've seen him share a stage with Dr John. Or with southern rap architect Mannie Fresh. Or with the beardy country bros in Zac Brown Band. On a blissfully temperate August night out at the Wolf Trap stage in Vienna, Virginia, Andrews and his bandmates are preparing to warm up for Grace Potter, a high-heeled roots-rock singer from Vermont who stamps out hearts like cigarette butts.
Andrews isn't sweating it. "If it's a rock concert, we can do that," he says backstage, more congenial than cocky. "If it's a funk concert, we can do that. We're able to play all different styles … That's what we do in New Orleans every day. To me, that's normal."
He sounds just as comfortable on his new album, Say That to Say This. The 10-song disc was produced by R&B singer Raphael Saadiq, frequently evokes Andrews's rock hero, Lenny Kravitz, and includes a collaboration with New Orleans funk idols the Meters, who reunited at Andrews' request. But as the border-blind bandleader throws more ingredients into the mix, his songs pose an inherent question: when are you making gumbo, and when are you making mud?
Andrews says he's busy wrestling another aesthetic conundrum: he's perpetually searching for new ways to make audiences feel good. It's an approach that sounds an awful lot like pandering to the masses, but to Andrews, it's rooted in decades of tradition. "In New Orleans, we celebrate everything," he says. "It's probably the only place you'll see people dancing in a funeral home. So I've been brought up in a culture where the music is an escape for everyone. No matter what kinds of problems we might be going through, or what kinds of problems the world might be going through, music is the place where we can all get along. We can all jam."
He grew up jamming in a highly musical family. His grandfather was the R&B singer Jessie Hill. His older brother and mentor, trumpet player James Andrews, was the first person to take him on the road; he was four years old. They called him Trombone Shorty because his horn was taller than he was. When asked to pinpoint the moment he first remembers being taller than his horn, Andrews flashes on a concert somewhere in the Caribbean in his early teens. He'd been up late playing video games the night before and was using his trombone as a crutch as he tried to keep his eyelids open before the gig.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/sep/17/trombone-shorty-new-orleans-jazz
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