Charlie Halloran is one of New Orleans's busiest trombonists, a St. Louis native who came to town with a master's degree in trombone from the Eastman School of Music. His New Orleans career began the way it had to: pulled off a Mardi Gras float by the Squirrel Nut Zippers in 2009, he spent the better part of a decade touring with them. He is a go-to sideman for Jon Cleary — appearing on the Grammy-winning Go Go Juice — and for Anders Osborne, and his playing has been heard on screen in Treme and NCIS: New Orleans.
Halloran was a two-time DownBeat critics poll Rising Star (2013, 2017) and won OffBeat's Best Trombonist in 2014 and 2016. His sideman calendar reads like a map of the revival: the Shotgun Jazz Band, Panorama Jazz Band, Meschiya Lake & the Little Big Horns, the Palmetto Bug Stompers, Tuba Skinny, and the Preservation Hall All-Stars. At one French Quarter Fest he played with nine bands in four days.
As a leader he has grown bolder. His first album, Charlie Halloran & the Quality 6 (2015), was pure classic trad; then he followed a passion for calypso with Ce Beguine! (2017), recorded live to 78-rpm lacquer disc in a room with no electricity, and The Alcoa Sessions, an imagined songbook of the 1949–59 Alcoa steamship cruises from New Orleans to Trinidad, Venezuela, and Guadeloupe. He leads the Tropicales, his calypso band, in a weekly 9th Ward gig.
