SXSW Artist Spotlight: Sly5thAve
As part of our SXSW 2025 Artist Spotlight series, 360°Sound spoke with multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, and composer Sly5thAve. An Austin native, Sly5thAve’s compositions are shaped by his deep understanding of jazz, soul, and hip-hop. He first hit the national scene with his acclaimed album The Invisible Man: An Orchestral Tribute To Dr. Dre.
His latest LP, Liberation, is his first record of all original orchestral arrangements, and it features a host of ace players, including Snarky Puppy percussionists Robert “Sput” Searight and Nate Werth. Sly5thAve will be playing two showcases during SXSW 2025 in Austin, Texas – March 11 at 8 p.m. at The Driskill Hotel’s Crystal Room and March 14 at 11:20 p.m. at Zilker Brewing. In this exclusive Q&A, Sly5thAve talks about his new record, arranging for an orchestra, and “playin’ the hell outta that saxophone.”
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Scroll to the bottom to view the full video interview.
360°Sound: As a multi-instrumentalist, producer, arranger, and composer, you wear a lot of hats. Please give us a brief introduction to your career so far.
Sly5thAve: Yes sir, I think all of those things arose out of necessity. First and foremost, I consider myself a saxophone player. I love jazz music, and I grew up playing in church, and so that’s my entry point into it. And then when I moved to New York, I got involved with these guys that were indie rockers that were making beats and producing things. That’s when I first started got involved with behind-the-scenes producing things.
I would always want to put more horns on the recording than they needed. Like they needed one flute, and I wanted to put 15 flutes, because I heard the whole arrangement in my head. So, I started producing my own horn tracks, which evolved into me being a full-time arranger. And then the whole time I’ve always liked writing my own music.
You received formal jazz training at the University of North Texas. How has that education benefited your career?
It was cool because I started from a place of reading music. Playing in church was the first time I really had to improvise and play by ear. When I got to North Texas, I’m like, “I know the B-flat blues scale,” and I just played it on every song, regardless of what key it was in. But then when I got to North Texas, I started to be able to make the connections between what I was hearing and what my habits were, and then how that related to the music in a theoretical sense.
Then I left from Texas, and I was like, I need to forget all this shit. Otherwise, I’m just gonna sound like a robot all the time. It’s a constant balance of feel and theory and all that stuff. I feel like it’s a good place to exist, because I can communicate with rappers, with people that don’t read music or know what the names of notes are, and I can also communicate with an orchestra. I’m like, “Change this note and measure.”
Liberation was recorded with a 40-piece orchestra. Tell us about how that opportunity came about, and the process of arranging and recording with an orchestra.
When I took an arrangement class in North Texas, I was finding myself, so I would frequently show up late, lagging a bit from whatever happened the night before, because it was a jazz music college, so I was hanging out. But I was practicing more than I was hanging out, for sure. But I was always late, and I was kind of lazy.
When I started making these horn arrangements and things, I was very reluctant. I was like, “I really wanted to do this. But I don’t want to be an arranger. That’s so much work.” And then it kept evolving and evolving. And they called me to do this Cali Love show in L.A. maybe 10 years ago, which is the music of Dr. Dre. They asked, “Can you write for strings?” I was like, “Yeah.” I had never done it before, so I had to figure it out. And that just led me deeper and deeper.
I started doing some arrangements on the side, and then I could find the space between written music and non-written music. I love Mozart and Beethoven. I love the classic string symphonies and pieces. But I felt that my place was to bridge the orchestra, which is this big impressive thing, and infuse that with something that’s more relatable to my generation, and the people who maybe didn’t grow up listening to classical music. That was easy with the music of Dr. Dre, because everybody that’s my age knew Dr. Dre, and even people who were younger knew the cultural references, so there’s that connection to the music, which is sometimes difficult for people in this day and age with Instagram and short attention spans.
Liberation was an attempt to do a fully original project, and I took everything that Ive learned over the last 10 years or so. I tried to write it several times before, but post-pandemic, I spent a lot more time on myself, and I was doing a lot more arranging, because I had to lean into that to make money when all the gigs stopped. And so, if I’m gonna spend all this time working on other people’s projects, making their stuff sound awesome, let me sit down and do this thing that I’ve been talking about doing forever. And I sat down to write it, and I woke up two months later, and it was done because I had a bunch of time to sit inside.
I love Blaxploitation soundtracks. I love hip hop. I love those classic arrangements, like Burt Bacharach, and all the stuff that he did with Hal David and Dionne Warwick. I love “Alfie” and those cheesy ‘60s songs. I think the only reason people don’t do it as much today is logistically, it’s a lot more difficult because the music industry has changed. So it was a passion project, for sure. I saved all my pennies, and I just went for it. It actually was funny, because I was thinking from a place of scarcity, like trying to save money. I was like, ‘Alright, I’m just gonna make a record and then put some strings on it.’ But when we did the strings I was like, ‘Man, they sound so dope. We got to do everything else with it, too.’ I just got carried away, and it became this full orchestra record.
What can people expect from your live set?
My catalog has different things, there’s orchestra things, there’s production things, there’s jazzy things. But what I’ve kind of settled on is, we’re gonna play live. I’m just gonna get my band of my good friends, and I’m just gonna play the hell out that saxophone.
We’re gonna be doing some music from Liberation. We’re gonna be doing some new unreleased music, and gonna be a lot of good melodies, lotta improvisations, but it will be a jazzy show for sure. It will be a show that you can hopefully connect with in an emotional way and leave feeling uplifted.
Sly5thAve will be performing two official sets at SXSW 2025 in Austin, Texas – March 11 at 8 p.m. @The Driskill Hotel’s Crystal Room and March 14 at 11:20 p.m. @Zilker Brewing as part of the UTOPIA Sessions.
You can also catch him elsewhere in Austin during SXSW: March 11 at the Flamingo Cantina w/ Vanessa Zamora; March 13 at Monk’s Jazz Club; and March 14 at Vaquero Taquero w/ Vanessa Zamora
