GLEN DAVID ANDREWS hopped down from an outdoor stage at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in May, leaving his trombone behind. He sang in a powerful raspy voice, inflected with just a hint of Louis Armstrong. Segueing from one song to another - the controversial 1920s classic “Black and Blue” to the more recent brass-band tune “Cell Block Nine,” for example - he sprinkled each with improvised lyrics. “It's my time,” he shouted between numbers.

Andrews, 30, has a lanky 6-foot-4-inch body and a mercurial personality. The brass-band music and traditional jazz he was raised on are still his greatest loves. “The musicians that played in my neighborhood, they brought me out of the womb,” he says, not by way of metaphor. According to his mother, Vana Acker, when she was pregnant, Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen, a traditional-music icon and mentor to many musicians, came by and blew his horn outside the house. He said the sound of the tuba would induce labor. Glen David was born the next day.

“Aside from being a great musician, Glen David has absorbed a fading tradition,” says Ben Jaffe, who runs Preservation Hall, where Andrews performs every month . “He's a link for his generation to something important., but he also has a rare enthusiasm and energy that makes it all special and exciting for even casual listeners.” Though most contemporary brass-band musicians have embraced the more funk and pop-oriented sound of say, the Rebirth band, a shift that began some 30 years ago, Andrews always includes some of the old hymns, spirituals and trad-jazz tunes in his performances.

He released a live gospel CD, “Walking Through Heaven’s Gate”, on Threadhead Records in 2009, probably the first CD to have captured on record the entrancing quality of Andrews' performances at venues like Jazzfest, Lincoln Center, Preservation Hall, Tipitina’s, and most powerfully of all, on the streets, where it all began.

He's appeared in season one of HBO’s Treme, playing himself and performing one of his original tunes, Knock Wit Me, and has already filmed 2 episodes for season two. He has appeared in numerous documentaries, including Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, by Lolis Eric Elie, Swiss filmmaker Peter Entell's chronicle of the controversial, post-Katrina proposed closing of St. Augustine Church, Shake the Devil Off, and Spike Lee’s two epics about Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, and If Da Creek Don’t Rise.