When Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews and his band Orleans Avenue released their breakthrough CD Backatown in the spring of 2010, there were few outside his club-circuit fan base and the New Orleans cognoscenti who would have predicted how far it would take the 24-year-old brass bandleader.
The CD hung at the No. 1 position on the Billboard charts for several weeks, goosing the mainstream press from NPR to USA Today to The New York Times into breathless plaudits of astonishment. By the end of the year, Andrews was splashed across magazine covers, hoisting his horn on Letterman and Fallon and Conan, and eventually scoring a Grammy nomination.
It took a lot of people by surprise, including Andrews himself. “Yeah, it really did,” he told us last week during a jet-lagged interview on his first day back in the States after a two-week blur of a tour in Europe. “We were doing back-to-back tours for two or three years, just building up a fan base. It just showed me that people were waiting on us to put something out. I don’t think I expected anything. … I just wanted to get some music out there to hold us over and please our audience that was already with us.”
Andrews says that Backatown helped set a benchmark for their follow-up album, For True, which was released in September.
“We were just excited to get into the studio to see if we could out-do ourselves with musicianship,” Andrews says. “Like, we’d listen to the record and we were like, ‘We’ve played it so much; I know we could do better.’ We wanted to write better songs and build off the foundation of Backatown. … But not even for the record’s sake. Just me bein’ a musician, I wanted to hear the growth between Backatown and For True. I wanted to hear how much better we had all become as musicians. That’s what I wanted to do with this record. And I hear it.”
And Andrews is, again, bobbing at the top of the Billboard Contemporary Jazz Charts with For True. The album serves up sly, horn-driven instrumentals, like the scratch-track opener “Buckjump,” the lusciously arranged “Dumaine St.,” funk workouts like the title track and airtight R&B pop like “The Craziest Thing.” Galactic’s Ben Ellman reprises his role as CD producer, keeping the proceedings poised somewhere between righteous and greasy and capably managing the roster of guest stars (Kid Rock, Jeff Beck, Lenny Kravitz, a couple of Nevilles and the Rebirth horn section) that came and went through the studio for these sessions.
Plenty of the mainstream exposure that Andrews garnered for Backatown referenced his “discovery” by Lenny Kravitz back in 2005, when the singer/guitarist caught Andrews’ gig down in New Orleans in 2005 and subsequently invited him on tour. A little big-stage exposure from international stars never hurts, but Andrews was no well-kept secret to the club and street fair scene in New Orleans. Born into a musical family and raised in the Tremé section of New Orleans, Andrews was pointed toward brass instruments by his older brother James and has been playing out since he was about 4 years of age, mentored along the way by cats like the Nevilles, the Rebirth Brass Band and The Dirty Dozen. (“Oh yeah,” Dirty Dozen reedman Roger Lewis told us last February, “He’s a special one … just a super-talented, gifted young man.)
“Y’know,” Andrews reflects, “everybody in New Orleans is like family. … These guys were all like parents to me; they prepared me for this moment. You know, ‘Stay straight, play New Orleans style of music, ’cause you never know who’s gonna call you some day.’ Tellin’ me things like that when I was 6 or 7 years old, I didn’t really understand it at the time. They’d come and teach me some things, like the Dirty Dozen would go out on tour and they’d come back and ask me if I worked on the things they showed me. It’s a beautiful thing. But they don’t treat me any different; they still kick my butt if I do somethin’ crazy.”
And what about his first mentor, his brother James? “Yeah, I was just with him yesterday. We play together whenever I’m in town; I’ll play with him or he’ll come play with us.
“He took me on tour around the world with him when I was 7 and 8, going to all these big jazz festivals around the world. He took me to Cuba, Haiti, Saudi Arabia. … So he’s really been like my father, and he’s just really proud.”
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On the Bill
Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue play the Bluebird Theater on Wednesday, Dec. 28, and Thursday, Dec. 29. Doors at 7 p.m. Must be 16 to enter. Kinetix opens on Wednesday; Fox Street All Stars opens on Thursday. Tickets are $27 in advance, $32 day of show. Two-day passes are available for $54. 3317 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, 303-322-2308.
