Nick Garrison

The trombone is one of the oldest voices in jazz, an instrument that learned early how to sing like a person and cry like one too. In Nick Garrison's hands it does both, threading between New Orleans parade tradition, straight-ahead jazz, early swing, and the deeper blues current that runs underneath all of it.

Garrison spent twelve years working through Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and New Orleans before settling in Asheville, and he carries that geography with him as something closer to lineage than résumé. He talks often about the transparency of the chain, where the music came from and through whom, and that reverence shapes every choice he makes on the bandstand. He's shared stages with Ellis Marsalis, Rufus Reid, the Treme Brass Band, Sonny Landreth, Wessell "Warmdaddy" Anderson, and trombone elders including Joseph Alessi and Bill Reichenbach.

A classically trained crossover artist, Garrison holds the second trombone chair with the Acadiana Symphony, has performed with the Louisiana Philharmonic, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Asheville Symphony, and teaches Applied Trombone at UNC Asheville while pursuing a Masters in Jazz Studies at the Peabody Institute. He founded NOIRE there, the New Orleans Inclusive Repertory Ensemble, a class dedicated to teaching the music of the Crescent City the way it's actually learned, by ear, with attention to role and idiom.

As a bandleader he fronts ensembles in quintet, quartet, and trio formations, singing and playing through traditional New Orleans tunes, deep-cut jazz standards, and originals. He has appeared on more than twenty albums since 2014 and toured in more than thirty-five states and eight countries. Beyond music he is a ceramic potter, a cocktail bartender, and an advocate for social justice, which feels of a piece with how he plays: hands-on, attentive to material, interested in where things come from.