Big Sam's Funky Nation

A NOCCA training and two brass bands before adulthood

Sammie Williams grew up in New Orleans and took formal trombone instruction at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, studying along the way with the saxophonist Kidd Jordan — a lineage that explains why a player marketed on volume and showmanship has such exact intonation when the tempo drops. He has said he came to the instrument at fifteen and did not plan on it as a living: "The path found me… I had no idea that I would ever be a musician, especially full-time. When you have a calling, you can't deny it."

Still in his teens he was a founding member of the Stooges Brass Band, then joined the Dirty Dozen Brass Band — the group that had already rewritten what a New Orleans brass band was allowed to play. The Dozen chair opened doors fast: work alongside Karl Denson, Dave Matthews, Widespread Panic and James Brown, and a spot on Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint's 2006 album The River in Reverse. He also appeared in the 2005 documentary Make It Funky! and took a recurring role in HBO's Treme, the post-Katrina drama that cast working New Orleans musicians as themselves.

Building a band that was not a brass band

The Funky Nation came together in the early 2000s, at first as a side project run around Dirty Dozen commitments and then as the main job. The instrumentation was the point of departure: rather than a marching horn line over sousaphone and snare, Williams put trombone and trumpet in front of guitar, bass, keys and a drum kit. The band's own description of the result is funk and rock carrying elements of traditional and contemporary jazz, acid jazz, dance, hard rock and punk.

Williams has been blunt about the expectation he spends every gig correcting. Ahead of a 2018 date in Tyler, Texas, he said audiences arrive assuming one thing and get another: "They think brass band and/or Trad band… but that's not us. We come to bring the FUNK!" The distinction matters commercially as well as musically — it is what has put the group on festival bills that rarely book brass bands, among them Bonnaroo, SXSW, Voodoo Music + Experience and Austin City Limits, as well as the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

The records

The studio catalogue runs from the debut Birth of a Nation through Peace, Love & Understanding, King of the Party, Evolution and Songs in the Key of Funk, Volume 1 in 2018, to No More Shakes in 2020. Songs in the Key of Funk remains the clearest statement of intent: originals written towards Morris Day & The Time and Parliament-Funkadelic, and cut in five days at The Parlor Recording Studio in New Orleans — a schedule that keeps the arrangements at the tempo the band plays them live rather than at the tempo a producer would prefer.

Since then the output has moved to singles and live albums, which suits a group whose income is the road. "Let's Boogie", with Anjelika "Jelly" Joseph, arrived in 2024. Two more followed in 2025: "Black & Gold" with Rechell Cook, and the seasonal "Santa Claus Hat" with Roderick Paulin. The same year produced Live at the 2025 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, a seven-track document of the Fair Grounds set that is the most accurate recording of how the band actually construct an hour on stage.

On 6 January 2026 the group released "Carnival Thing", credited to Big Sam's Funky Nation featuring The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and the Stooges Brass Band. Putting both of the bands Williams came up in on one Carnival record is the neatest career summary he has issued, and the song went straight into the live set.

Standing in 2026

The band's year has been built around New Orleans rather than a national tour. They played Tipitina's — their most documented venue, with eighteen logged shows — on 27 December 2025, then Wednesday at the Square in Lafayette Square on 11 March 2026. When OffBeat published the full Jazz Fest 2026 lineup on 15 January, the Funky Nation were on it for the second weekend of a festival running 23–26 April and 30 April–3 May.

That run gave them three dates inside nine days: The Fillmore New Orleans on 25 April, the Blue Nile on Frenchmen Street at 10.30pm on 2 May, and a Fair Grounds Race Course slot at 12.25pm on 3 May. Playing a late Frenchmen Street show and a lunchtime festival set within fifteen hours is standard practice for a New Orleans band during Jazz Fest, and it is the part of the calendar the group are plainly built for.

Publicly listed dates are thin after that, which is normal for a band that takes a great deal of work close to the date. Two are on the books: the New Orleans Jazz Market on 25 September 2026 at 7pm — a seated 2,800-capacity room in Central City, and a very different setting from the Blue Nile — and Savage Labs Wynwood in Miami on 13 November 2026. The Jazz Market show is the only one currently on general sale.

The band on stage

The touring six-piece is Williams on trombone and lead vocals, Drew "Da Phessah" Baham on trumpet and vocals, Jerry "JBlakk" Henderson on bass, Alfred "Sgt Gutta" Jordan on drums, Seizo Shibayama on guitar and Kendrick Marshall on keys. Henderson, Jordan, Baham and Marshall have been in place since at least 2018; the guitar chair has turned over, with Shibayama now in the seat Keenan McRae held.

The two-horn front line is what distinguishes the group from a straight funk band. Baham's trumpet doubles Williams' melody lines at the top of a tune and then splits off into harmony, which lets a band with no second guitar and no horn section still sound like a large ensemble. Williams sings most of the material himself, which is uncommon for a trombonist and means the instrument is put down and picked up mid-song rather than played continuously.

Carnival repertoire and a hip-hop quotation

Recent setlists show a band who have stopped treating their catalogue as chronology. The Jazz Fest set on 3 May 2026 ran nine songs: Juicebox, Big Sam's Blues, Coffee Pot, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival Thing, King of the Party, Funky Donkey, Love On My Side and Black & Gold — the new single at the end, the brand-new Carnival collaboration in the middle, and a Professor Longhair standard sitting between them. Juicebox and Coffee Pot also opened the Fillmore appearance on 25 April.

The live album from 2025 shows the joins. Get On Up runs straight into Big Sam's Blues; Everything's Gonna Be Alright into Jukebox; Coffee Pot into A Tribe Called Quest's Can I Kick It; and the closing block is Pokechop into Funky Donkey into It's The Weekend. Those segues are how the band get through a festival slot without a break, and the Tribe quotation is the clearest signal of where a group who came out of brass bands now place themselves.