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trombone shorty
In the early ’90s, Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, a young brass
player who could keep up with pros three times his age before he could
fully extend his instrument, was an integral part of this scene. As that
kid—now a 25-year-old, Grammy-nominated star—looks back on his
career and the development of his new disc, there’s a sense that he never
really gave up the creative wagering or constant motion of a second line.
“It’s crazy where music will take you in New Orleans,” Andrews says
wistfully. Shorty, as he’s still called despite his lanky stature, is seated in
the green room of New Orleans music mecca Tipitina’s a few days before
the Sept. 13 release of his Verve Forecast disc For True, which debuted
at No. 1 on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz chart. He gives bear hugs to
club employees, all of whom ask about the record release party he’ll host
here in a few days. Then he casually mentions the time he confounded a
Tipitina’s audience by diving off the stage in the middle of a performance.
“There’s no boundaries,” Andrews announces, looking utterly at ease
under the watchful gaze of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, whose
portraits loom above him on the venue’s walls. “Once we actually played
a second line in somebody’s bedroom.”
He pauses and smiles, delighting in the memory of a mid-parade surprise.
“The band surrounded the bed. The person had just passed away …
and the bandleader was like, ‘We’re goin’ in the house!’ So we’re knockin’
over ceiling fans. We got 200 people in one house. It was shaking with the
music, and the lights go out. It’s amazing where music will take you in this
city. It’s probably the only place you could play a funeral, a second line, a
birthday party and then go play on a stage in one day.”
Andrews’ itinerary nowadays often involves stages of the big, international
variety. For True arrived just a year-and-a-half after Backatown
(Verve Forecast) captured the top slot on Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz
chart, stayed there for nine weeks straight and earned Andrews his first
Grammy nod. The new CD serves as a second installment of his unique
mix of multiple genres of music. He calls it “supafunkrock,” but that term
leaves out blues, r&b, brass band music, Motown, bounce and the serious
jazz training through which he and his band filter all of these elements.
Supremely driven and focused, Andrews works constantly, shuns
alcohol and counts among his heroes high school teachers like Kent
Jordan and the late Clyde Kerr Jr., both of whom drilled him endlessly on
jazz fundamentals. But when it comes to his own music, Andrews is all
for taking chances. In the last few years, he’s left his bop and funk albums
behind to engineer his own genre of music. He has also conquered a fear
of singing to become a full-fledged vocalist.
Additionally, Andrews is working on a signature line of horns,
which are designed to allow music students more flexibility and less
fatigue. But he doesn’t plan to put the instruments on the market until
he gets them “in every school in New Orleans with a music program.”
True to his word, Andrews delivered a set of horns—and a performance
alongside Mayor Mitch Landrieu—to his alma mater, KIPP McDonogh
15 Middle School for the Creative Arts, on Sept. 7.
“A life without risk is no life at all,” Andrews is fond of saying.
The material on For True was written in spurts during a year that saw
Andrews evolve from local New Orleans celebrity to international
star, thanks to exhaustive touring, national TV appearances and high-profile
events like the Red Hot + Blue fundraising concert he curated at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music in December. Cameo appearances on the
HBO series “Treme” also helped raise his profile.
Sitting in the green room of Tip’s, clutching a bag of fries, a confident
yet sleep-deprived Andrews believes he’s ready to tackle phase two of
his major-label career. He is also acutely aware of the challenges at hand.
“We’ve been rehearsing non-stop,” he says. “We’re really cramming it
in, in a short time. I want to get it to where we can play both records down.
We haven’t played every song off of Backatown yet and we just learned
the entire new record this week.”
Just as Backatown was, For True is heavily overdubbed. Members of
Andrews’ band, Orleans Avenue, recorded their parts separately, and
Galactic’s Ben Ellman worked long hours with Andrews in the studio to
develop the finished CD. Besides singing and playing trombone and trumpet,
Andrews also contributes drums, organ, piano, synth bass and percussion
parts to the 14 tracks, all of which he wrote or co-wrote. Guest
appearances by Lenny Kravitz, Warren Haynes, Kid Rock and others who
will not appear on most of the band’s tour dates add to the challenge of
translating the album to the concert stage.
As Ellman points out, that difference can be a learning tool. “I think
it’s a great way to grow as a band because you can get things done in the
studio that you could never get done live,” says Ellman, who has known
Andrews since the early ’90s when they played together in the New
Birth Brass Band. “It’s a good way to take your band to the next level,
and I think that’s happened with Troy. He wasn’t going to play most of
Backatown live, but slowly he started learning the songs. As for the new
songs I’ve heard him playing, he’s come up with arrangements that work
great live.”
Timing hasn’t been easy. Andrews’ languid cadence and easygoing
demeanor do little to mask what his constantly buzzing phone makes quite
clear: Success like this takes work. The band’s packed schedule necessitated
composing new music during sound checks, on tour buses or during
all-nighters in the studio with Ellman. And even when ideas had been
explored and song structures started coming together, maintaining a cohesive
sound required extra vigilance.
“It’s hard to make albums with us, because we play so many different
styles,” explains Andrews. “We get in the studio and we start playing
something, but it might not [fit] what we’re doing at this particular
moment. If we were limited musicians, we’d finish the album really fast,
but our minds go into these different avenues and it’s hard to focus.”
Slippery genre definitions aside, For True falls impressively into place
as a compendium to Backatown. Andrews’ r&b-soaked crooning returns,
his efforts split in even ratios between vocals, trumpet and his namesake
horn. Bass-heavy arrangements again play up the big-beat horn lines.
Bassist Mike Ballard says the chords for “One Night Only (The March)”
from Backatown inspired the For True opener, “Buckjump,” which he cowrote.
He explains: “I wanted to keep the same energy and show that we
can be more mature with it.”
Other innovations changed this time around.
“The initial tunes [Andrews] came in with were more developed this
time than the last time,” says Ellman. “I think he’d spent more time songwriting
with a record in mind, so our jumping off platforms were a little
more defined. Some of the best stuff comes from the spontaneity of being
in a studio session where you’re not on the clock and you’re able to experiment,
which is a lot of what we did. We scratched at his preconceived
26 DOWNBEAT DECEMBER 2011