A 'Monumental' Moment With The Foo Fighters

"It was one of the most exciting experiences I’ve experienced in life – it was great,” New Orleans native Troy Andrews, who travels as Trombone Shorty, admits of the day, May last year, when Dave Grohl and Foo Fighters came down to check out and record at the historic Preservation Hall – and Andrews was interviewed by Grohl for the HBO documentary series, Sonic Highways. “I look up to Dave Grohl and I’m a big fan of Nirvana and Foo Fighters for a very, very long time, and to be able to play with those guys in that particular place was monumental, really big.”

He may be playing to festival audiences of thousands around the world, but Andrews, whose professional musical career began at the age of six fronting his own traditional New Orleans brass band, is as much in awe of his musical heroes as he was as a kid. In his late teens, in 2005, Andrews was in another hero Lenny Kravitz’s touring band and Kravitz returned the favour, playing bass on a track on the 2011 Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue album, For True. As it happens, the band toured the US last year opening for Kravitz and will be doing the same in Australia. So Andrews is hoping Grohl will guest on the next album for which he’s currently working up material. “He’s a very, very nice guy and we love makin’ music together, so I’m gonna definitely try to get him if I can.

“I’ve been workin’ on some ideas for things,” he explains. “I’ve just been puttin’ down some sketch ideas by myself in the studio every once in a while. I go in there and play every instrument and just exhaust all my ideas down, and things are comin’ along.”

Andrews pulled off something of a coup when he was recording the last Trombone Shorty album, 2013’s Say That To Say This, when he managed to get another of his childhood heroes, the iconic New Orleans soul-funk combo The Meters, to come in and feature on a new version of their 1977 track, Be My Lady.

“Well you know, The Meters don’t have a manager, so I had to call each one of ‘em individually and tell ‘em my idea, and all of ‘em kinda laughed at the beginnin’… ‘Yeah, well, that sounds like a good idea. If you could get the rest of the guys to agree I would love to do it.’ There’s great respect from me to The Meters and they respect what I do. They’re like my uncles. I grew up in New Orleans, comin’ up under them in different things and I was able to get them to agree and that day, I didn’t record my part because I just wanted to be able to be in the studio to experience what The Meters did when they were creatin’ all those great records back in the late ‘60s and ‘70s.”