Glen David Andrews at Musical Instrument Museum

In a city whose spirit world is as old as Mother Africa’s children, Glen David Andrews, a native son of New Orleans, has made a compelling case for his own deliverance with a powerful new project that correlates his own reclaimed life to his reclaimed city. Recorded at the Living Room, a converted church on the West Bank, in Algiers, just outside of New Orleans in November 2013, Redemption is Andrews’s balm after a very personal storm. The music is about ghosts and their residual energy; about acceptance and forgiveness; about rebirth and renewal. “Every song on this record tells a story that I hope people will relate to,” the singer, songwriter and trombonist says proudly. “This is a record about my journey back from the living dead.”...

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In a city whose spirit world is as old as Mother Africa’s children, Glen David Andrews, a native son of New Orleans, has made a compelling case for his own deliverance with a powerful new project that correlates his own reclaimed life to his reclaimed city. Recorded at the Living Room, a converted church on the West Bank, in Algiers, just outside of New Orleans in November 2013, Redemption is Andrews’s balm after a very personal storm. The music is about ghosts and their residual energy; about acceptance and forgiveness; about rebirth and renewal. “Every song on this record tells a story that I hope people will relate to,” the singer, songwriter and trombonist says proudly. “This is a record about my journey back from the living dead.”

Andrews comes from a storied extended family of musicians. He was born in the historic Tremé neighborhood – which many consider to be the oldest black community in the United States – where the struggle to survive is older than the mighty oak trees in the Crescent City. According to family folklore, Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a patriarch of modern New Orleans music, directed the bell of his horn toward Andrews’s mother’s belly as a way to induce labor. Andrews was born the following day. Transfixed by the magic and mystery of the city’s second-line parades, Andrews and his older brother, Derrick Tabb of the Rebirth Brass Band, along with their younger cousin Troy “Trombone Shorty,” soaked up life’s musical lessons by learning the history of the brass band tradition firsthand from iconic figures like Tuba Fats. They also learned the power of the city’s Mardi Gras Indian culture.

“As a singer and trombonist he summons, as do his city’s emblematic musicians, a sound that mingles joy with pain and beats that swing implicitly at any tempo. Yet there’s something more: a raw power born of sheer focus and a complex sweetness that comes across in both tender and frenzied moments. Those aspects have made Mr. Andrews a magnetic presence at home, whether raising his horn in second-line street parades, leading his distinctly modern-leaning band at nightclubs, or commanding the Congo Square stage at the annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.”—Wall Street Journal

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