Quotes from Trombone Shorty

Music is changing. I'm just doing what I'm doing, and hopefully in the next 20, 30 years, some kids can take what I'm doing and change it again. If the music doesn't move, then it's dead.

I could just play my horn in my room for 20 minutes a day, and I will be happy.

We're not really trying to do anything besides represent where we come from, and that's New Orleans.

I just wanted to keep growing and touring with my band.

My grandfather influenced my brother, and my brother was my biggest influence.

There's a lot of music at my fingertips that I can be influenced by. And just because I play a horn, I don't need to sound, or try to capture, what was happening before me. I can just respect it and learn from it.

As a musician, as a horn player, sometimes I even get bored listening to all instrumental music.

I've lost a bunch of friends - some of them in jail, some of them made bad choices, some of them aren't where they should be.

No matter what kinds of problems we might be going through, or what kinds of problems the world might be going through, music is the place where we can all get along. We can all jam.

I've grown up in the Treme, and I played in a bunch of brass bands. My brother, James Andrews, had a brass band.

Whenever I go jamming, people are looking to cut me. The young ones learn my stuff and come play it at me, and I have to learn other stuff. I feel a lot of pressure. But it's cool. It's a good pressure.

I had a lot of older musicians looking out for me, teaching me, and showing me things when they saw how interested I was in music from a young age. They would take me to the side and just play some things in my ear, and I would try to play it back to them.

My only time off is when I'm sleeping.

I got a chance to work with Mystikal and Mannie Fresh and Juvenile and all these people as I was growing up, and so that really influenced everything I do.

I may be taking a different approach, being a guy leading a band with a trombone, but if you take that out of it and put in a guitar or keyboard, it would be considered funk-rock music.

When I was a kid, my friends and I formed a band, Trombone Shorty's Brass Band. When I was six, I was a bandleader for my brother's band.

Whenever we can, we try to talk to students. If I can, I'll invite kids from a school to a sound check and take questions from them. I want to show them it's cool to play the trombone. Kids are influenced by what's accessible to them. It's hard for kids to be introduced to music other than what they see on TV and video.

I never really listened to any particular trombone players.

Most people don't even know what a trombone is. It's not that popular as a front instrument... I picked it up and fell in love with it as a kid. It's a difficult instrument, but I like doing things that seem impossible.

We had a bunch of instruments around the house. Like, I played different instruments, trumpet, bass, drums, piano, all that, but whatever I could get my hands on.

When I play the trumpet, I'm in a different character.

My parents pushed me toward trombone because they didn't need another trumpet player.

Life would be pretty boring if I didn't explore. It's about letting my ears take me on an adventure to soak in everything I can.

I didn't grow up during the time that Louis Armstrong or Miles Davis and all those people were playing. So it's not really my responsibility to keep it up, what they were doing.