Last Saturday I attended a concert at Red Rocks. Yes, Grace Potter & the Nocturnals headlined, and yes, they are my everything. GPN were scintillating as usual, but something about the opening act stuck with me. It’s a guy named Trombone Shorty.
Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue is a funky, jazz/rock outfit out of New Orleans. I’ve seen them live twice now, and both times they’ve put on an incredible show. Their frontman (Shorty himself, real name probably on Wikipedia), is entertaining, charismatic, and a hell of a performer, but here’s the main thing:
He plays the trombone.
And the trumpet. And sings. But mainly the trombone, hence the name. And it’s completely awesome. It’s a totally unique sound – at least for pop music – and it’s great stuff. I’m listening to it on Spotify as I type this. But as I watched him and his band tear through “Hurricane Season” and “Fire and Brimstone” in front of 10,000 dancing and swaying music lovers, it struck me how unlikely a story this was.
I don’t know much about Trombone Shorty’s background (again, Wikipedia), but I’d venture a guess that he got a lot of advice along the way, and that a good deal of it revolved around one idea:
That trombone thing ain’t gonna work.
Nope. You kidding me? Trombone? You see anyone on the Top 100 chart playing trombone? No sir. Trombone’s for geriatrics and high school dorks. You wanna make it in the music biz, you gotta do something else. You gotta rap. You gotta play guitar. You gotta write beats for talentless assclowns who yell into microphones, or something, because that’s how you make it. That’s what sells. Trombone don’t sell. Ditch it.
Just a guess, but I bet he heard that, in different permutations, quite a bit along the way. And he probably considered it. But in the end, he stuck with the trombone (and the trumpet, and arranging badass funk numbers), because that’s what he loved. That’s what burned inside him. That was his jam. And the industry assholes laughed and told him he was a fool, but he kept at it. And then one day he signed with a label and did national tours and collaborated with Lenny Kravitz and played to a sold-out Red Rocks.
Screw “the right way.” Do your thing.