Trombone Shorty Celebrated a Decade of Closing Jazz Fest on Sunday

Trombone Shorty

Shorty’s set ended the 2023 Jazz Fest on a high note.

Ten years ago, Quint Davis bet on Trombone Shorty and installed him as the Jazz Fest closer of the future, giving him the final spot on the then-Acura Stage. Shorty is a very different act from The Neville Brothers, who held that spot for more than 20 years. Their sets had a one-love spirituality underlined by Aaron’s love of gospel and Cyril’s affection for music from other cultures, many of which came with a spiritual component. Shorty’s roots are in jazz, R&B, funk and rock, but his music doesn’t nod to higher powers.

For a while, his sets felt like the Jazz Fest afterparty. He had his audience, but it was smaller than the audiences for The Black Keys, Arcade Fire, Neil Young, and Jack White that played before him. In 2015, it looked like the booking was trying to get Shorty over by putting Lenny Kravitz in front of him. Since Shorty’s experience in Kravitz’s band was transformational, their sets back to back felt like a passing of the torch, and Kravitz certainly did his part.

Shorty’s shows with Orleans Avenue have been solid as they’ve marked his growth as a bandleader and performer. They have been reliably hard, funky and fun, and the crowds have grown. This year it became clear that Shorty’s effort and Davis’ gamble have paid off. After Mumford and Sons finished on the Festival Stage Sunday afternoon, the audience stayed. The grounds were packed to the back with chairs set up on the track. If anything, the crowd grew after Mumford.

Smartly, Shorty has never tried to step into the Nevilles’ shoes. He’s his own act with an eye toward star time. Before the band came on stage to the strains of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” that used to accompany Elvis Presley’s band on the way to the stage, the video monitors showed Orleans Avenue, all in white, walking to the stage. That visual felt like the lead-up to a big fight, and the combination was funny and audacious, but it also elevated the moment. The corny theatrics made it feel like an event.   

Shorty wore a red Sgt. Pepper jacket to the stage to start “Where it At?,” which stretched out as their songs tend to do. At one point, the backing vocalists started singing, “Girl don’t you do that,” quoting from DJ Jubilee’s “Get it Ready Ready.” It was the second time in the weekend that Jubilee got love from the stage since Jon Batiste included moments from the same song in his set Friday. Batiste and Shorty stayed connected throughout the afternoon, joining Mumford and Sons for a version of “The House of the Rising Son,” then finishing Shorty’s set together for “Sunny Side of the Street” and a medley of “Down By the Riverside” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Part of the fun of the moment was seeing two friends have fun together, but it was also great to see Shorty’s place confirmed. He’s a headliner not only be decree but by popularity, and he knows what to do with the spotlight.

Elsewhere on Sunday:

- The Continental Drifters reunion on Sunday afternoon was impressive in part because they’ve been in and out of each others’ orbits for so long that they know how to fit together, but never so smoothly that it seems routine. They still seem to appreciate different musical or onstage moments, and in some cases appreciate them more since the passing of founding member Carlo Nuccio served as a reminder that they won’t all sing together for ever.

That looseness also means that they can find something. On Sunday, guitarist Robert Mache went full Crazy Horse on “Who We Are, Where We Live,” playing a distortion-drenched solo that seemed to surprise everybody onstage, but rather than rein him in, the band moved a step or two in his direction.

- Low Cut Connie opened the day by providing us with a glimpse into an alternate reality: What would Springsteen be like if he focused on the songs that made frat parties rock instead of Dylanesque songs that mythologized being young and aimless in New Jersey? And I don’t write that as a slag. Bandleader Adam Weiner is a charismatic front man who worked the crowd in a way that they’re rarely worked at 11:30 a.m. He left the stage and went to the rail to actually reach the audience, and during “Big Boy,” he went to the fans in the Big Chief pen to feel their muscles. His piano in the center of the stage was an instrument, a prop, and riser that he or other members of the band used to stand, pose or dance on. When he wasn’t roaming the stage or the space in front of it, he sat down to play a few New Orleans piano covers: Lee Dorsey’s “Get Out My Life, Woman,” and Huey “Piano” Smith’s “High Blood Pressure” and “Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu.”

“My favorite piano player,” he announced.

- Pirulo y la Tribu’s set in the Cultural Exchange Tent was electric, so much so that when he asked the audience to sing along during the first song, people tried even though many clearly didn’t speak Spanish or know what he sang. We—I include myself in that number—sang sounds back, but the set was so involving from the start that we had to try. You got a clue about the influences of his contemporary salsa when he played a very entertaining version of OutKast’s “I Like the Way You Move.”