Musician starts foundation to save lives

By Alex Rawls
New Orleans Advocate

For more than a decade, the Neville Brothers and the Radiators closed the main stages on the final Sunday of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell.

But the Radiators closed the Gentilly Stage for the last time in 2011, and the Nevilles were the last act for the last time on the Acura Stage in 2012.

Since then, the Gentilly Stage has seen a variety of closers, while Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue has settled into the symbolic space the Neville Brothers once occupied.

Shorty started a busy festival week Saturday when he headlined the Saenger Theatre for the first time for a show he titled “The Tremé Threauxdown.” He and Orleans Avenue started the show, but it became a jam with Allen Toussaint, Kermit Ruffins, New Breed Brass Band, and Mystikal — all people who were influential on his music, Troy Andrews said last week during a rehearsal for the show.

On Thursday night, he’ll host Shorty Fest at Generations Hall, a fundraiser for The Trombone Shorty Foundation, before playing at the Fair Grounds Sunday.

Andrews had a good year in 2014. His stock rose nationally; he recorded with Foo Fighters and played before them when the rock band performed at Voodoo in City Park last fall.

When Prince played the Essence Music Festival last July, he brought Shorty onstage, then kept him there for the next half-hour to jam. Shorty’s blend of funk, R&B, rock and hip-hop can speak to those very different audiences, but it is also true to the New Orleans tradition.

He credits the broad reach of his music and his ability to fine-tune it for the audience in front of him to his musical upbringing in New Orleans.

“Playing with the Neville Brothers, with Kermit, with Danny Barker, you learn those skills,” Andrews said.

He wants the Trombone Shorty Foundation to be part of that education for the next generation. The organization aspires to “preserve and perpetuate the unique musical culture of New Orleans by passing down its traditions to future generations of musicians,” according to its mission statement.

For Shorty, it’s an extension of the kind of organic education he received from Tuba Fats, his brother James Andrews, and the countless musicians he encountered while growing up in Tremé.

The idea came to him three or four years ago while on tour in Miami.

“I was watching the news and it was talking about murders in New Orleans, and that made an impact to see how we were perceived outside New Orleans,” Andrews said. “I wanted to see if I could save some kids’ lives through music.”

His first response was to buy some instruments and approach Mayor Mitch Landrieu — Andrews calls him “Mitch” — about how to get the instruments to students who needed them. But that was a stop-gap effort. He wanted to do something more lasting, so the foundation was born.

Bill Taylor is executive director. His personal shorthand version of its mission is simple: “To create more Trombone Shortys,” he said.

“It’s to help provide a platform through which kids who have grown up in similar situations to Troy can follow their dreams, musical and otherwise.”

There are a number of organizations that focus on music education with an eye toward helping children beyond their musical dreams, and Taylor wants the foundation to be the bridge between high school band programs and NOCCA, which can only take a finite number of students.

“We want to give these children, who you’d call underserved, the opportunity to take it to the next level,” Taylor said. “That’s a combination of skills in performing as well as business acumen.”

Shorty Fest at Generations Hall is a fundraiser for the foundation. Students in the program will perform in a show that will also include a tribute to Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Golden Eagles, with an all-star band that features Bill Kreutzmann of The Grateful Dead, June Yamagishi, Kirk Joseph, Nick Daniels, Raymond Weber, Davell Crawford, and Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi Allstars. Corey Henry and The Treme Funktet, New Breed Brass Band, Tank and The Bangas, TYSSON, Sweet Crude, and MainLine will also perform, and Ivan Neville will sit in with Shorty and Orleans Avenue.

“He’s a part of the band when we can have him,” Andrews said. “We learn so much from him. Whenever he’s free, we’ll take him.”

Earlier this month, Andrews also became the subject of a children’s book. He and Taylor co-wrote “Trombone Shorty,” which was illustrated by Caldecott Award-winning artist Bryan Collier.

Neither Andrews nor Taylor were thinking about a book, but when Taylor asked Shorty for stories to help align the foundation’s activities with his real-life journey, he realized they had possibilities.

“It’s an unbelievable story, and some of the things that happened to him early on are remarkable,” Taylor said. While listening, it occurred to him that it was an inspiring tale that would make a good kids’ book.

The book is on sale now, and Andrews will sign copies at Shorty Fest, with part of the proceeds from sales going to the foundation.

“I was reading it and felt like a kid again,” he said. “I looked at the illustrations without reading the words and it made my imagination create my own story, even though it’s my story. I was thinking about some things that really weren’t me.”

2013 Jazz Fest off the charts

Hard choices to be made as Jazz Fest cubes revealed

By Alison Fensterstock, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
The producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell may have spent a little too much time with Dr. John over the years – because apparently, Quint Davis is now making up words. At Tuesday morning’s 30-days-out press party announcing the “cubes” – the stage-by-stage performance schedule for 2013’s festival – Davis commented, “The look-forward-to-it-ness is off the charts.”

On a chilly morning in the paddock area of the Fair Grounds, it didn’t feel much like Jazz Fest to the assembled crowd, who huddled in scarves and coats. But then, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band began to play, schedules were handed out and Davis threw a few yards of 2013’s official Jazz Fest shirt fabric – printed with brass instruments and Louisiana irises - over his chunky sweater, and the “look-forward-to-it-ness” did start to get a bit contagious.

New Orleans City Councilmembers Susan Guidry, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Jackie Clarkson all addressed the crowd, as did Shell representative Hasting Stewart. Guidry seemed particularly gleeful, noting that she was “thrilled to death;” the festival, she said, is “a playground, that allows us to be the biggest children in the country.”

“This is our international stage for what we do best, locally,” Clarkson said. “This is bigger than a Hollywood production, bigger than a red carpet.”

A couple of things of note for the 2013 festival: this year’s Cultural Exchange Pavilion will focus on the heritage of Native America, with a somewhat expanded footprint over pavilions of years past. (In 2012, the focus was Mardi Gras Indians; in 2011, Haiti.) The celebration of Native America includes live music and dance in the Cultural Exchange village’s performance tent, drum-making, mask-carving, food, “living history” exhibitions, live mural painting, kids’ activities, a series of nine panel discussions, a traveling exhibit on the native nations of Louisiana courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum, and more.

New this year is a television broadcast of the fest on the AXS TV channel, which is available via DirecTV and Dish Network; the network will cover the festival for all seven days, culminating in a three-day, continuous live broadcast May 3-5.

The day-to-day artists’ breakdown for Jazz Fest 2013 was unveiled in January, and the cubes brought no major surprises – though, as always, they revealed the tough choices festgoers will have to make

Widespread Panic, of course, gets the longest set of the festival, with two and a half hours allotted on the Gentilly Stage Thursday, May 2, for its lengthy jams. Thursday offers a particularly nicely scheduled closing set: the Panic goes up against punk godmother Patti Smith, the contemporary R&B soul of Kem and the vintage, jazzy soul of Roy Ayers, which shouldn’t make for a too-difficult choice.

More of a challenge is Saturday, May 4’s headlining set, which puts two of the most eagerly anticipated shows of the 2013 fest right up against each other: Fleetwood Mac on Acura versus Frank Ocean at Congo Square. And Sunday, May 5 demands that festgoers choose between old-school and new-school, as Trombone Shorty steps into the prestigious festival closing slot on the Acura Stage, while Aaron Neville takes a solo turn to end the day at Gentilly.

The festival’s roster grows more top-heavy every year with the addition of more and more marquee headliners; at the Fair Grounds Tuesday, though, Davis took care to remind festivalgoers that the event also has a deep bench.

“There are little things everywhere,” he said, urging fans to “dig deep” into the schedule for gems like Earth, Wind and Fire’s interview on the Allison Miner Heritage Stage first thing in the morning Sunday, April 28, or Jamaican guitarist Brushy One-String, who plays several brief sets throughout the festival.

A couple of first impressions from the cubes, to help plan your days at the Fair Grounds:

Best reason to stay in one place for a while: on Saturday, April 27, Allen Toussaint’s 3:30 p.m. Acura Stage set is followed directly by Billy Joel’s headlining performance. Piano, piano, piano.

Best reason to get up early: Hurray for the Riff Raff open up the Acura Stage Sunday, April 28, at 11:15 a.m. The local folk-pop group, helmed by songwriter Alynda Lee Segarra, gave a triumphant show in a similar early Acura set last year, and have evolved by leaps and bounds in terms of songcraft and performance since then.

Best day to eschew the big stages at closing time, at least for a minute: I would never tell anyone to skip Billy Joel or Jill Scott, who headline Acura and Congo Square Saturday, April 27. But if you have a moment or an itch to stretch your legs, stroll over to the Blues Tent that evening for Daptone Records soul dynamo Charles Bradley and his Extraordinaires, or to the Fais Do Do stage for the excellent multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird.

Watch NOLA.com for more Jazz Fest picks from Keith Spera and myself this week.

©  NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Preservation Hall closed out Jazz Fest

 By Keith Spera, The Times-Picayune 

On paper at least, Sunday's closing set on the New Orleans Jazz Fest's Gentilly Stage was a celebration of Preservation Hall's 50th Anniversary. But it was much more. Preservation Hall, founded in 1961, is only nine years older than Jazz Fest. And the hall's evolution parallels that of the festival itself.

EnlargeJohn McCusker, The Times-PicayuneJOHN MCCUSKER / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE Jim James sings with the Preservation Hall band Sunday. The Preservation Hall Jazz Band marked the 50th anniversary of the venerable institution with a set at the Gentilly Stage during the last day of the second week of the New Orleans Jazz Fest, Sunday May 6, 2012.Preservation Hall at Gentilly Stage gallery (8 photos)

Both originated as humble, homegrown celebrations of indigenous New Orleans culture, but are now global brand names. Attrition has sapped both entities of early icons. New faces have stepped in, some more rooted in tradition than others. And both the hall and the festival have, in recent years, welcomed a bevy of celebrity guests in an attempt to connect with a wider audience.

On Sunday in the Gentilly Stage slot occupied for years by the now-defunct Radiators, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and its many guests embodied its own, and Jazz Fest's, intermarriage of old and new.

Appropriately enough, George Wein, the 86-year-old founder of Jazz Fest, introduced the band. As the founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, he was already a jazz industry legend when civic leaders first invited him to New Orleans in the 1960s to launch a music festival here. Wein hired Quint Davis, then a Tulane University student and now Jazz Fest's producer/director, to help round up musicians for the inaugural Jazz Fest in 1970.

With the assistance of a cane, Wein mounted the Gentilly Stage on Sunday 45 minutes after the Foo Fighters, arguably the heaviest arena rock band ever booked at Jazz Fest, crashed to a close at the Acura Stage. He recalled how Allan and Sandra Jaffe, Preservation Hall's founders, helped introduce him to local music.

Their son, Ben Jaffe, is now Preservation Hall's creative director and sousaphonist. Under his stewardship, the band has embarked on many new adventures far afield of its namesake St. Peter Street club, from collaborating with Tom Waits, bluegrass bandleader Del McCoury and U2 guitarist The Edge, to remaking a Kinks song, to touring with arena rockers My Morning Jacket.

At the Gentilly Stage, Wein celebrated Ben Jaffe for carrying on the tradition, even as he innovates. Wein then sat at the piano and joined Jaffe and the black-and-white-clad members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band for "Basin Street Blues," perhaps the quintessential New Orleans jazz standard.

EnlargeJohn McCusker, The Times-PicayuneJOHN MCCUSKER / THE TIMES-PICAYUNE The To Be Continued Brass Band performs at the Jazz and Heritage Stage during the last day of the second week of the New Orleans Jazz Fest, Sunday May 6, 2012. Here Edward Jackson plays as the sweat drenches his face.New Orleans Jazz Fest 2012, second Sunday gallery (91 photos)

After Wein exited, the band struck up "Bourbon Street Parade," another nod to tradition. Pres Hall saxophonist and singer Clint Maedgen, recruited from the carnival-of-the-bizarre New Orleans Bingo! Show, lit into "Tootie Ma Is a Big Fine Thing." It's an old song, but one that Preservation Hall recently recorded with Waits.

Tribute having been paid to tradition, it was star time. Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews, a son of Treme, is New Orleans' latest breakout star. Less than half as old as the Hall, he led the band through the New Orleans funk standard "It Ain't My Fault." Mark Braud, the Hall's baby-faced trumpeter, razzed it up with a high-octane solo.

Members of the Rebirth Brass Band, clutching their recently awarded Grammy, represented the contemporary brass band era with their signature "Do Whatcha Wanna," followed by "Let's Get It On."

Suffice to say, the late Sweet Emma Barrett, icon of Preservation Hall's early years, never sang "Let's Get It On."

Contemporary folk singer Ani DiFranco was a self-made star before she settled in New Orleans a few years ago and started a family. With a tattoo peaking up from the top of her T-shirt, she presided over a spry, sunny and sweet version of early blues singer Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train."

Trixie Minx & Fleur de Tease, representatives of the ongoing local burlesque revival, added a dash of color in flirty red dresses and parasols that fit together like puzzle pieces to recreate the Preservation Hall logo.

Allen Toussaint and Bonnie Raitt -- he the epitome of New Orleans cool, an orchestrator of the golden age of New Orleans rhythm & blues; she a blues-schooled guitarist and one of Jazz Fest's longest-tenured "guest" artists -- combined to sing Preservation Hall's praises.

The just-concluded Jazz Fest boasted more marquee names than ever, including Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band, the Eagles, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, the Foo Fighters, Cee Lo Green, Bon Iver and My Morning Jacket. My Morning Jacket's unlikely collaboration with Preservation Hall is a case study in how New Orleans tradition can cross-pollinate with more commercially successful bands, to the mutual benefit of both.

My Morning Jacket vocalist Jim James' guest turn with Pres Hall on Sunday was the set's highlight. He poured himself into a slow, spooky, New Orleans noir version of "St. James Infirmary," affixing an "s" to each verb in an affectation of hipster dialect. As Charlie Gabriel's clarinet preened and the sousaphones stomped, James banged his shaggy head, lost in revelry.

Country-folk singer Steve Earle, who portrayed a New Orleans street singer on HBO's "Treme," stepped up on "Tain't Nobody's Business," a blues that dates to the vaudeville era. Earle's version, like DiFranco's "Freight Train," appeared on the 2010 compilation "Preservation: An Album to Benefit Preservation Hall & the Preservation Hall Music Outreach Program."

What followed underscored the continuity of New Orleans music in general, and Preservation Hall specifically. On one end of the stage was trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, at 100 the city's oldest active jazz musician, and trombonist Wendell Eugene, who once was a bandmate of Braud's grandfather. On the other end were the young students of the Preservation Hall Junior Jazz Band.

They all joined in an uproarious "When the Saints Go Marching In," which Braud updated with a "Who Dat" chant. The finale boasted everyone -- the Preservation Hall crew and their multitude of special guests -- on a rollicking, kitchen-sink take on the age-old gospel standard "I'll Fly Away."

It was the Preservation Hall Jazz Band looking back, even as it looked forward. Just like Jazz Fest.

Keith Spera can be reached at kspera@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3470. Follow him on Twitter at KeithSperaTP. 

© 2012 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

Piano man fine-tunes concert grands at Jazz Fest

 By Sheila Stroup, The Times-Picayune 

In his quiet way, Johnny O'Brien was the first performer at this year's New Orleans Jazz Fest. On opening day, he arrived not long after the sun came up and stood for a moment on the infield, taking in the annual transformation of the Fair Grounds. "It was the most beautiful I'd ever seen it in 30 years," he says. "The grass was so green, and the slate was clean. The palette was ready for whatever was going to happen."

View full sizeChris Granger, The Times-PicayuneAt the New Orleans Jazz Fest on Thursday, Johnny O'Brien tunes a Steinway grand piano in the Jazz Tent, an instrument that will be used by Herbie Hancock, among others.

O'Brien made his way to the stage of the Jazz Tent, where he sat down at the 9-foot Steinway concert grand piano -- a favorite of Herbie Hancock's -- to do some last-minute tuning and to play the magnificent instrument. "I was out here all by myself with no one to hear me except the guards," he says.

For three decades, O'Brien has been taking care of the pianos at Jazz Fest, checking them early in the morning, stopping at a stage between sets for a quick fine-tuning, performing emergency repairs. "Last year, one of the pianos fell through a soft spot on the Economy Stage and broke a leg," he says.

He fixed it. O'Brien is an accomplished musician, piano rebuilder and Steinway concert technician. He became a part of Jazz Fest when Sherman Bernard asked him to restore a 1927 Steinway that had been beat into submission by powerhouses like Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Professor Longhair, James Booker and Fats Domino.

"Sherman was the piano tuner for the New Orleans Symphony for many years, and he was the first tuner at Jazz Fest," O'Brien says. Bernard was there when there was one piano at Congo Square in Armstrong Park. After the festival started to take off in a big way, he needed help, and he asked O'Brien to join him.

O'Brien's Jazz Fest baptism, a wet one, came the second weekend of his first year. "One of those New Orleans rain-and-wind events blew up and tore the tops off stages, and the tarps on the pianos blew away," he says. "On one particular piano, someone left the key cover up. We had to tip it over to pour the water out of it."

His two most effective technician's tools for drying out the actions on those soggy pianos? "Towels and a hair dryer," he says.

He was working on the last one when he heard someone behind him say, "We need to start." "I turned to look, and Booker was standing there," O'Brien says. "I told him, 'I did the best I could,' and he said, 'I've played on worse.'"

O'Brien's hardest Fest day each year is the Thursday before opening day, when he arrives early and stays late, doing the initial tuning on the pianos. The eight Steinway concert grands he works on, with occasional help from Bernard and another local tuner, are trucked in from New York and require major tuning after their long ride. He goes from stage to stage armed with a large toolbox full of tools.

Each of the 88 keys on the pianos has three strings that must be tuned. First, he tunes the string in the middle of each key, and then he brings the two outside strings in unison with it. "You have to have a very good ear to do it," he says. "As you go on working with pianos, your sense of pitch develops."

He tuned his first piano as a young musician in Richmond, Va., with a band he'd formed called Southern Light. When he went on tour, he always traveled with his piano. "It was expensive to get it tuned before every performance, so I decided to tune it myself," he says.

He bought a tuning hammer and some mutes and went to work on it a few hours before he was scheduled to perform. "I made a big mess of it," he says, laughing.

After that experience he bought a piano from a man who tuned and restored pianos. "He said, 'I'll give you a good price because it needs some work, and I'll show you how to do it,'" O'Brien says.

View full sizeChris Granger, The Times-Picayune'Pianos have taken me to amazing places,' piano tuner Johnny O'Brien says.

He ended up serving an apprenticeship at the man's shop, and he was hooked. In 1978, he discovered Willis Snyder, a master craftsman and technician who had built a piano restoration shop in rural Pennsylvania next to a trout stream. He found his way to Snyder's shop frequently in the years that followed.

"He was really the best," O'Brien says. "He was a remarkable man and a brilliant technician with a wonderful sense of humor. He kept me going, because the more you get into this, the more difficult it gets."

O'Brien also studied at the Steinway piano factory in New York and started attending the annual Piano Technicians Guild conventions, where he met the best technicians in the field.

His first botched piano tuning led him to a remarkable career of tuning and restoring pianos, even bringing them back from the dead. He restored a Steinway grand piano that was underwater during Hurricane Camille and another one that went through a flood in Jamaica.

"I've restored Steinways that have been eaten by termites, that have been through fires, that have caught on fire," he says. There's nothing he's afraid to tackle on a piano. "And there's a lot that can go wrong," he says. "A Steinway concert grand has 12,000 moving parts."

In 1981, O'Brien's Jamaican-born grandfather took him to see Jamaica, and it was love at first sight. What was supposed to be a brief vacation turned into a new way of living when he learned that the island had been without a piano technician for years.

He stayed there and began breathing life back into pianos, including two 9-foot Steinway performing concert grands at the Jamaica School of Music. "I spent 15 years there, commuting back to the states," he says. "I still work in Jamaica three or four months out of the year."

From the time he started working on pianos, O'Brien's life has been a nomadic one. "Last year, I was on 53 flights, all of them piano-related," he says. "Pianos have taken me to amazing places."

Some of his restorations are done at a shop in Yonkers, New York. Others, he does on-site. When Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, calls him to work in a recording studio on one of his mega-yachts, he goes. "It began as a friendship," O'Brien says. "He's a great guitarist and an accomplished musician, and I started jamming with his band. I'm astounded by how many friendships I've made through pianos."

He works with jazz musicians, classical musicians, performing artists who play all kinds of music, doctors who chose medical school over a career as a musician. Think of a renowned piano player and O'Brien has probably worked with him: Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Herbie Hancock, Henry Butler.

"I worked with Henry Butler at a long-ago Piano Night at Tipitina's, and I was just taken with him," he says. "He stole Piano Night. He just tore it up that year."

He has worked with Allen Toussaint and Ellis Marsalis for decades, and they're two of his favorite musicians. "And Jon Cleary," he says. "He's one of my best friends, and he's a fantastic piano player."

O'Brien loves bringing a beautiful old piano to life, but that part of his job is a lonely one, filled with solitary hours of painstaking work. He also loves talking to the musicians, having long discussions about the voice and touch of a piano he is working on for them.

"The personality of a piano can be shaped by the technician," he says. "It's like you're taking care of a family member, and you're the doctor."

After he does the morning touch-ups at the Jazz Fest, O'Brien spends his time walking around the Fair Grounds, Panama hat on his head, listening. If he hears the piano in the Gospel Tent being played very hard, he knows he'll need to give it some TLC the next morning. "Those keys are going to stick," he says.

His favorite thing to do at the Fest is to stand back to listen to a musician play a piano after he has tuned it and given it a bright, clear voice. "I'm the man behind the scenes, doing the best I can to make the pianos sound and feel right for them," he says. "And in 30 years, I've never had a complaint."

Sheila Stroup's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday in Living. Contact her at sstroup@timespicayune.com or 985.898.4831.

© 2012 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.

New Jazz Fest poster unveiled

2012 Jazz Fest poster of Trombone Shorty a gem

 By Doug MacCash, The Times-Picayune 

The 2012 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell poster is an explosively colored clarion call to Crescent City music lovers and art lovers alike. Titled "Porch Song: A Portrait of Trombone Shorty," the poster depicts a fiery sunset serenade by Treme native and New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts graduate Troy Andrews by former Treme resident and NOCCA graduate Terrance Osborne.

Published by Art4Now.com, 2012 & TM N.O.J.H. Foundation, Inc.Artist Terrance Osborne created the 2012 New Orleans Jazz Fest poster, featuring trombonist Troy 'Trombone Shorty' Andrews.

Osborne, 37, who masterfully designed the Jazz Fest's 2007 Congo Square poster depicting Philip Frazier and the 2010 Congo Square poster of Uncle Lionel Batiste, matches Andrews' muscular, kinetic trombone style with equally energetic brush handling and dynamic intersection of shapes.

Based on website previews of the poster, Osborne's expressive 2012 composition is among the best of the long-running series. It's certainly the most exciting offering since Douglas Bourgeois' poignant post-flood portrait of Irma Thomas in 2008. Conceptually, the combination of youthful subject and artist rescues the Jazz Fest souvenir from a rather stodgy recent trend. 

Osborne, a Xavier University graduate, said that several inspirations contributed to the pyrotechnic 2012 image. As he painted, he said, he immersed himself in Andrews' music.

"The song I listened to again and again was 'For True,' he said.

As Osborne considered the popular trombonist's characteristic pose and how to place him in the Treme scenery, he said he was reminded of a scene from his favorite science fiction movie "The Matrix." In the scene, the hero takes a breath and "the whole environment drew in and rippled with him," Osborne explained. In the poster, Andrews seems to achieve the same sort of oneness with the architecture.

"When he's playing his tune, the neighborhood is bending to his notes," Osborne said. "It's almost as if he and the Treme are one."

Beneath Osborne's fluid, musical streetscape is an interlocking visual structure that transforms the scene into an abstract maze. Let your eyes ricochet around the red diamond that forms the dominant background shape, from the crimson sky above to the wedge-shaped red door on the left, to the bricks beneath the porch, to the scarlet house on the right, then back into the sky.

Now let your eyes trace Andrew's cobra-shaped body as it curves through the center dodging the background facets. Don't miss the tiny purple shotgun house that points like an arrow toward the bell of the trombone and the semi-circular Victorian roof ornament that halos the horn.

Every angle harmonizes with another. Every line contributes to the flow.

Osborne is a compositional control freak who commands every corner of the scene to perfection.

Meet Jazz Fest 2010 Congo Square poster artist Terrance OsborneArtist Terrance Osborne discusses his work with Times-Picayune critic Doug MacCash

The mysterious woman peeking from a doorway across the street adds a little sizzle to the design. The tuba standing behind Andrews adds a little history. Though Osborne said he did not speak to Andrews directly during the poster-making process, he asked through an intermediary what the trombonist would like to see inside the open doorway in the scene. Andrews suggested a tuba.

"Tuba Fats (Anthony Lacen 1950-2004) used to come by when he was a little boy and leave the tuba in the living room," Osborne explained. "Troy would pick it up and try to play it." And the tiny TS painted in the brickwork, for Terrance and his wife Stephanie, adds a little romance. 

In an email message forwarded from Andrews, 26, who is currently performing in Japan, the musician wrote that: "I think the poster looks wonderful - they did a great job - it's colorful and lively and has a great vibe. And I think this makes me the youngest AND the second youngest musician to be on a Jazz Fest poster and that's really a great honor for me." The image of Andrews seated on a curb was featured on the 2009 Congo Square poster.

"I'm so grateful, Osborne said of the high-profile commission. "This is where I wanted to be. It's exciting."

Osborne said he was in the midst of several painting projects when the Jazz Fest call came sometime before Thanksgiving.

As Osborne tells the story, poster producer Bud Brimberg "asked how busy I was?"

Osborne told him "I was slammed at the time."

So, Brimberg said, "It looks like you're too busy to do the official poster."

"I said no, no, no, I'm not," Osborne recalls. "It was kind of bittersweet. I had a bunch of corporate commissions at the time. I had to push those back, but how could I pass it up?"

Art and music fans can be glad he didn't. Based on today's computer-screen preview, the 2012 poster represents an ideal synthesis of New Orleans contemporary sight and sound. Osborne, Andrews, Jazz Fest and the rest of us can be proud.

Details about the poster: It is available for pre-order at art4now.com. Prices vary by editions:

• 10,000 Numbered prints on archival paper, 19" x 35", $69
• 2,500 Artist-signed & numbered prints on 100% rag paper, 20" x 37", $239
• 750 Artist signed and pencil remarqued, signed by Trombone Shorty & numbered Remarque prints on 100% rag paper, 21" x 39", $595
• 300 Artist-overpainted and signed, signed by Trombone Shorty & numbered C-Marque canvas screen prints, suitable for stretching, 26" x 40", $895

Read the story: "New Orleans Jazz Fest Congo Square poster artist Terrance Osborne paints old-time New Orleans houses from his new home in Gretna" here.

 Doug MacCash can be reached at dmaccash@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3481. Follow him at twitter.com/DougMacCashTP.

© 2012 NOLA.com. All rights reserved.