When the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival kicks off this week, an array of local heroes will dominate the lineup. Among their ranks, as usual, will be Trombone Shorty (Troy Andrews), the hottest musician in the Big Easy; Oscar-and-Grammy-toting dynamo Jon Batiste, who graced the official poster of the 2022 festival; the Dixie Cups, featured on this year’s poster; Irma Thomas, the soul queen of New Orleans; and perennial crowd-pleasers Boyfriend and Big Freedia. Also on the bill will be representatives of a constellation of musical families from the Crescent City, with names like Batiste, Benoit, Boutté, Brunious, Lastie, Marsalis, Neville, and Payton. There will be tributes to the late Wayne Shorter and Tina Turner, as well as sets billed as jazz funerals for Russell Batiste and Jimmy Buffett—with the latter having kicked off his musical career in NOLA. Headlining the whole shebang—unsurprisingly—will be a band of scruffy rock and blues veterans (ages 80, 80, and 76, respectively) who collectively go by the name the Rolling Stones.
But this year there will be one New Orleanian onstage whose presence looms especially large. And that will be Tremé-raised trumpet legend James Andrews (the eldest brother of Trombone Shorty), who is sometimes unsung and underappreciated in a town that breeds jazz and blues giants.
Andrews, also known as 12, is probably most recognizable from his appearances on the HBO series Treme. And for returning with his brother Troy to a devastated New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, where, 17 days after the deluge, he vowed to the souls gathered in Jackson Square: “We’re gonna rebuild this city, note by note.” Today, however, Andrews is just as vocal—and ever-present. “Forget New York City jazz,” he recently declared, sounding like an official civic emissary. “New Orleans is the home of traditional jazz. We’re on a mission to keep telling the world about New Orleans music. To spread it everywhere.”
It’s been quite a month for Andrews, 55. Between shows in Switzerland and Ottawa, he played a showcase in April on the final day of the annual French Quarter Fest, a neighborly amalgam of 1,700 performers who play at 20-plus venues throughout one of the most storied and historic districts in New Orleans. He has a new album, James Andrews & the Crescent City Allstars—“Available on vinyl!” as he recently shouted from the stage. “We’re getting next year’s Grammy!”—that was recorded at his brother’s studio, Buckjump, in the Lower Garden District. He has a new initiative, the New Orleans Musicians Burial Fund, intended to help cover the interment costs for performers who, as Andrews explains, “didn’t have insurance for a proper place of burial or, if they or their families wanted it, to have a dignified jazz funeral.”
And this Saturday, he’ll take up his usual Jazz Fest perch, sure to put on a gig that’s a highlight of the festival due to his knack for rousing a crowd with manic energy, unbridled optimism, and gravel-voiced wisecracks. Andrews has become, in effect, a kind of musical mayor of the city—“one of the primary cultural ambassadors from the cradle of music,” as Karen Dalton Beninato says in the new disc’s liner notes. “I’ve been to every Jazz Fest,” he maintains, explaining his attendance tally, which goes back to 1970 (when the event was founded by music-festival impresario George Wein, with Quint Davis and Allison Miner). “There’s a picture of me—at five!—at the first one, in Congo Square.”
Since the 2021 passing of the family matriarch, Lois Nelson Andrews, son James, the eldest grandchild, has taken on the mantle of the Andrews, Nelson, and Hill families. This circle includes his musician siblings Troy, Terry “Buster,” and Bruce (as well as the late Darnell “D-Boy”), along with assorted cousins such as Keva Holiday (she sings on his new album), Revert “Peanut,” Glen David, Glen “Buddha” Finister, Eldridge, Tyrone, Rodrick, and the late Travis “Trumpet Black” Hill, as well as “a couple of Tyreeks and a million Glens,” says Andrews. “And Herlin Riley, who played with Wynton Marsalis—and all these youngsters coming, including my son Jenard.”
“Without James Andrews,” drummer Glen Finister observed late last year, “a lot of us wouldn’t be playing music and wouldn’t be where we are…. James put everyone on their first gig.” (Full disclosure: My son, Sam Friend, a New Orleans–based musician, played his first Jazz Fest with Andrews and occasionally performs with him.)
With Jazz Fest fast approaching, the Crescent City Allstars’ most recent headlining gig is still fresh in my memory. Two Sundays ago, as the sun was setting on the French Quarter Fest’s Jackson Square stage, Andrews addressed the assembled, his limbs and trumpet all swaying like one of those flailing inflatable stick figures popular at used-car lots. He implored the audience to raise both hands in the air, as if in celebration. Then, looking out at the sea of waving arms, he cracked, “Watch your wallets! This is the French Quarter!”
He played his original composition “The Big Time Stuff,” along with John Boutté’s “Treme Song (Down in the Treme),” which Andrews has adopted as a sort of theme song. He then broke into his late grandfather Jessie Hill’s signature, “Ooh Poo Pah Doo,” accompanied on the chorus by the bouncing crowd.
He brought his cousin Keva Holiday to the bandstand to sing the gospel staple “Oh Happy Day.” He brought up jazz icon Cassandra Wilson. He brought up Trombone Shorty—to play drums, no less—shouting to the audience as he shoved two James Andrews albums into his brother’s hands, “Repeat after me: Crescent City Allstars dot com! Crescent City Allstars dot com!” He brought up a Mardi Gras Indian in full regalia and a succession of so-called baby dolls (traditional umbrella-holding, bloomer-festooned revelers, whose ranks were revived by his mother).
And then he brought down the house, quite literally. Without informing the police—or so he proclaimed from the stage—he asked everyone in Jackson Square to follow him in an impromptu “second line” procession to a nearby bar. “It’s the 40th anniversary of French Quarter Fest,” he said. “We ain’t never done this before.” And with that, the brash man with the brass band strode northwest up St. Peter Street, playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Festivalgoers trailed him, 20 abreast, weaving in and out of traffic to the spacious, old-school tavern B Mac’s, whose owners didn’t know what hit ’em.
“They’re good people,” Andrews insisted. “I wanted to throw them some business.”
