SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
WINTER, 2017
VOLUME FIVE NUMBER ONE
ORNETTE COLEMAN
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
TYSHAWN SOREY
(November 4-10)
JALEEL SHAW
(November 11-17)
COUNT BASIE
(November 18-24)
NICHOLAS PAYTON
(November 25-December 1)
JONATHAN FINLAYSON
(December 2-8)
JIMMY HEATH
(December 9-15)
BRIAN BLADE
(December 16-22)
RAVI COLTRANE
(December 23-29)
CHRISTIAN SCOTT
(December 30-January 5)
GIL SCOTT-HERON
(January 6-12)
MARK TURNER
(January 13-19)
CRAIG TABORN
(January 20-26)
Nicholas Payton
(b. September 26, 1973)
Artist Biography by Richard Skelly
New Orleans-born trumpeter, keyboardist, singer, and composer Nicholas Payton is a dynamic performer, steeped in acoustic jazz and post-bop, whose music often finds him exploring genres beyond the confines of the jazz tradition. Born in New Orleans in 1974, Payton grew up the son of Walter Payton, a well-known bassist on the Crescent City jazz scene. His mother also played piano. Around four years old, he started playing trumpet after asking his father to get him one. Soon, he was accompanying his father to shows at local clubs, where he had the chance to hear many great trumpet players. The turning point for the young Payton came around age ten, when he heard a Miles Davis quartet album that was in his parents' record collection. He started performing publicly, working everywhere from jazz funerals to weddings to bar mitzvahs, and even played on the streets for tips.
During this period, he attended New Orleans' High School for the Creative Arts and studied with Clyde Kerr, Jr.; he later studied briefly at the University of New Orleans with pianist Ellis Marsalis. However, his college career at UNO was interrupted by the chance to go on the road with drummer Elvin Jones. Previously, he had spent time on the road with Marcus Roberts and other touring musicians, but those were shorter stints. Through the years, Payton has recorded and performed with Wynton Marsalis, Dr. Michael White, Christian McBride, Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, Doc Cheatham, and Joe Henderson, among others.
As a solo artist, he began his recording career with Verve Records, releasing From This Moment in 1994, followed by 1995's Gumbo Nouveau. A year later, he gained even more attention appearing alongside a handful of his jazz contemporaries in acclaimed director Robert Altman's film Kansas City, for which he also appeared on the soundtrack. In 1997, he received a Grammy Award for his playing on Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton, a collaborative album with then-nonagenarian trumpeter Doc Cheatham. Also that year, he joined bassist Christian McBride and guitarist Mark Whitfield for Fingerpainting: The Music of Herbie Hancock. He then rounded out his Verve contract with several well-received, tradition-steeped efforts including 1998's Payton's Place, 1999's Nick@Night, and 2001's homage to Louis Armstrong, Dear Louis.
In 2003, Payton signed with Warner Bros. and marked the move by shifting away from his acoustic-based sound and delivering the '70s fusion-influenced Sonic Trance. However, an auto accident briefly sidelined his career as he took time to fully recover. He returned with Mysterious Shorter on Chesky in 2006 and Into the Blue on Nonesuch in 2008, both of which found him delving into an eclectic mix of straight-ahead jazz, post-bop, funk, and R&B-influenced sounds. Increasingly known as a risk-taker, Payton took one of his grandest on 2011's Bitches, a concept recording that detailed the stages and ending of a romantic relationship. He composed and arranged all 16 songs (which included lyrics), played every instrument, sang, and played trumpet throughout, and produced the entire set as well. Also featured on the album were special guest vocalists Cassandra Wilson, Esperanza Spalding, N'Dambi, ChinahBlac, and Saunders Sermons.
Along with performing, from 2011 to 2013 he held the position of Distinguished Artist and Visiting Lecturer at Tulane University. During this period, he began self-releasing albums on his own BMF label, including #BAM: Live at Bohemian Caverns (recorded at the historic Washington, D.C. club) and Sketches of Spain (a live re-recording of the classic Miles Davis and Gil Evans album), featuring Simphonie Orchester Basel. Two instrumental albums followed with 2014's Numbers and 2015's Letters, both of which showcased Payton on keyboard and piano. In 2016, Payton returned to more of a full band-oriented approach with the hip-hop and spoken word-inflected The Egyptian Second Line. A year later he delivered another highly inventive hip-hop and world music-influenced production, Afro-Caribbean Mixtape.
Nicholas Payton
Since 1994 when Nicholas Payton made his recording debut as a leader with From This Moment, the trumpeter has been lauded as a significant, top-tier voice in jazz. Even though he started out as a “young lion of jazz,” heralded as one of the new-generation guardians of the hard bop flame, Payton consistently committed himself to discovering his voice outside of the strict confines of that rearview mirror approach to the music.
While his jazz journey has taken him down many roads”from heritage artist to electric experimenter”the 34-year-old trumpeter arrives at a new plateau of jazz maturity with Into the Blue, his ninth album and his first for Nonesuch . It’s at once a nod to the past and a leap into the future. “It’s an amalgam of every recording I’ve done up until now,” says Payton. “As a musician, as an artist, you’re always trying to zero in on the bull’s eye as a means of becoming a better version of yourself. With Into the Blue, I’ve been able to find the kind of music that’s more inclusive of all of my life. The approach and the ideas of my music have become more singular, more cohesive. I had no agenda in terms of a specific genre or style, only to be true to who I am now.”
Into the Blue is a collection of ten tunes steeped in melody and groove that Payton says “embodies the sensibilities of beauty, elegance and simplicity” and delivers “danceable tempos.”
He adds, “The true staples of jazz for me”the hallmarks of the music throughout its history”are love songs and the element of dance.” In addition to seven originals that range from the funky upbeat to the melancholic slow burn, the album includes two tunes by the trumpeter’s bassist/composer father, Walter Payton (the opening love song written for his wife, “Drucilla,” and his walking bass line-driven “Nida,” a celebration of his two sons, Nicholas and Dario) and a cover of the Jerry Goldsmith song “Chinatown,” from the movie of the same name. Joining Payton, who also sings on the hushed ballad, “Blue,” are acoustic and Fender Rhodes pianist Kevin Hays, acoustic bassist Vincent Archer, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Daniel Sadownick.
Instead of being recorded in a New York studio, Payton felt that it was fitting for the setting to be in his New Orleans hometown. “The focal point of the album is strength in subtly and understatement, a quiet revolution of sorts through love,” he says. “Even though the city has undergone tremendous change lately, it still represents a consistent foundation for me.”
Payton exhibits tonal clarity throughout, avoiding the bursts of clarion exhilaration often associated with the trumpet. “I wanted to keep my playing within a certain range,” he says. “I didn’t want to play too high or too low. I was going for the sweet register of the horn so that I could play with color and richness. The trumpet can be such a brassy, powerful instrument, but I wanted to focus more on the core of the sound by staying close to the middle.”
Born into a musical family (he remembers sitting under the piano while his father rehearsed with his band) and mentored by two Crescent City jazz masters (Clyde Kerr Jr. at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and Ellis Marsalis at the University of New Orleans), Payton was well-prepared to leap into the jazz fray when he emerged on the New York jazz scene in the early 1990s. He impressed fellow New Orleans native and Jazz at Lincoln Center Artistic Director, Wynton Marsalis and was a regular in the early years of programming at the institution. Payton went on to put his own spin on Louis Armstrong-associated music on his sophomore CD, the appropriately-titled 1995 disc Gumbo Nouveau. While over the next several years, Payton continued to hone his craft working with such jazz legends as Doc Cheatham (on their Grammy Award-winning 1997 eponymous duo), Hank Jones, Elvin Jones, and Ray Brown, in 2003 he boldly moved beyond the straight-ahead. He shocked the jazz world with his adventurous CD Sonic Trance, an exhilarating plugged-in outing infused with elements of hip-hop, electronica, and effects-driven trumpeting.
“I wanted to make a shift to the other extreme,” Payton says. “I had been recording albums more in line with traditional jazz. Sonic Trance was all about breaking free from that. Now, I want to fuse those polarities, I'm seeking a more centered vision with Into the Blue.” He says that when he was in his 20s, it was as if he were living two lives”one being a young-lion torchbearer for making the music sound a certain way in 4/4 time with a swing feel, the other being at home with the musical experimentations of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the electric fusion of Return to Forever and Weather Report, soul and R&B from Stevie Wonder to Anita Baker, and hip-hop.
The first CD he’s recorded since he entered his 30s, Into the Blue stands, Payton says, “most solidly in a place where I’m coming to terms with who I am. I’ve weeded out those things that don’t feel right for me. I’m not out to try to impress and I’m not worried that what I play is going to upset some people. I want to write and play music that speaks for me and means something to me, that I feel passionate about.”
Grooves are central to the project. “I was writing a lot from a groove first before melody,” Payton explains. “I was writing conga parts, real specific parts written out. I wanted that dance element that was there at the roots of jazz. I feel a lot of jazz has gotten away from that legacy.” He adds, “Whereas experimentation has its advantages, some things should always remain the same.”
Indeed, Into the Blue marks some impressive pushing on Payton’s part. He delivers a sweetened rhythmic brew on the Rhodes”driven “Let It Ride,” which he says exemplifies ”the feel of this album…that’s the feeling that comprises everything I love in music.” “Triptych” extends the groove deeper as Payton soars elegantly above. “The Crimson Touch” is invigorated by the trumpet-piano interplay while “The Backwards Step” starts out with Payton’s lyrical rumination and develops into a relaxed vibe with a Latin spice. In a nod to the Big Easy, “Fleur de Lis,” with its swirling soundscape, is “a melody in the middle zone,” Payton says, “where we’re deliberately trying to play everything soft.” Into the Blue concludes with a surge in velocity, as Payton and co. take a percussive jaunt through “The Charleston Hop (The Blue Steps),” which offers the leader the opportunity to energize the trumpet in typical fashion. “I wanted to include at least one tune here that shows I still know how to burn out,” he says.
Into the Blue is produced by Bob Belden, known not only for his own groups but also for his integral role in issuing the Columbia/Legacy box sets of Miles Davis music. “Bob and I have been friends for years,” says Payton. “I go to his house when I’m in New York and he always turns me on to some new bootlegs he’s unearthed. I’ve always been leery of working with a producer, which is why I’ve produced most of my own albums. For Into the Blue, though, I thought that if I were to work with a producer that person would have to share a certain sensibility in music, someone who really hears and understands and has taste. Bob is the cat. It was great having another set of ears I trust for this project.”
Nicholas Payton (born September 26, 1973) is a jazz trumpet player from New Orleans, Louisiana. The son of bassist and sousaphonist Walter Payton, he took up the trumpet at the age of four and by the time he was nine he was playing in the Young Tuxedo Brass Band alongside his father. Encouraged by Wynton Marsalis, who was himself involved in New Orleans' jazz and brass band music in his youth, Payton played semi-professionally throughout his grade school years and at the age of 12 played with the All Star Jazz Band at festivals throughout the United States and Europe. Upon leaving school he enrolled first at the New Orleans Centre for Creative Arts and then at the University of New Orleans, where he studied with Ellis Marsalis.
Payton's Place, Payton's third album as a leader.After touring with Marcus Roberts and Elvin Jones in the early 90s Payton signed a recording contract with Verve; his first album, From This Moment, appeared in 1994. In 1996 he performed on the soundtrack of the movie Kansas City, and in 1997 received a Grammy Award (Best Instrumental Solo) for his playing on the album Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton. After seven albums on Verve Payton signed with Warner Bros. Records, releasing Sonic Trance, his first album on the new label, in 2003. Besides his recordings under his own name, Payton has also played and recorded with Wynton Marsalis, Christian McBride, Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, Doc Cheatham and Joe Henderson.
Reverb Features
Nicholas Payton and what we mean when we say black music
by Sam DeLeo
February 19, 2015
The Denver Post
Nicholas Payton, founder of the Black American Music movement, talks about music’s cultural influences, race and more ahead of his trio’s performances on Feb. 19-20 at Dazzle Jazz.
It’s one thing to devote your life to music. It’s another to talk about that experience the way Nicholas Payton does.
Unsurprisingly, music surrounded Payton as a child growing up in New Orleans.
“Bands would just form on the streets,” he said in an interview this week. “I still don’t know any other place where that happens.”
He started playing trumpet when he was four and was performing shows with his father, an established bassist, by the time he was nine. In order to perform on a cruise with renowned musicians like Clark Terry, he learned the trombone – at 12. Now 41, Payton’s musical virtuosity has awarded him a Grammy and over a dozen albums as a leader, and he recently began his own recording label. But Payton is also a writer, a spokesman for the music that has been his life.
On his popular blog The Cherub Speaks, Payton tackles controversial issues about music, culture and the interplay between them. He’s a founder and proponent of the Black American Music (BAM) movement, which seeks to identify music, specifically black forms of music, according to its roots instead of the genres and labels we use to describe it. His opinions are as distinctly his own as his trumpet lines. And whether you agree with all of them or not, Payton is one of the few musicians brave enough to bring discussions to light that are long overdue.
We talked with Payton about his music and musings in advance of his trio’s performances this Thursday and Friday at Dazzle Jazz.
What went into the decision not to overdub your trumpet onto the tracks of your album “Numbers” from last year, where you just play a Fender Rhodes?
Going into the project, the whole idea was to focus on a groove. It’s been really popular now to play with the time, and place things solidly back on the one, on the groove. I felt to leave that album as it was, without my trumpet over it, was to remain a little truer to that vision.
Do you think a counterculture exists today, and do you think one is necessary to create music that can do more than entertain?
To me, the essence of art is to do more than entertain. The artists I revere are those who use art as a means of catharsis, of communing with other people or with nature and – in terms of society – who use it to remind us that fundamentally we’re human beings put here to try to evolve. Music and art can break down constructs preventing that. So yeah, it’s more than just entertainment, it’s about creating what inspires people to remember who they are fundamentally. Great art breaks down those barriers.
Speaking of breaking down barriers, “Sketches of Spain” by Miles Davis and Gil Evans was an album that drew from European roots, not Black American Music, so, given your views on the primacy of African rhythm and meter, what made you want to reinterpret that album in 2013?
Well, first, the recording was from a live performance in Basel, Switzerland. I was prepared to produce my “Black American Symphony” (Payton’s six-movement symphony). And they suggested, how about you do something with the music of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, as well – you know, “Miles, Duke and Nick.” That’s how I ended up doing “Sketches of Spain.” But really, it gets a little murky when you look at the cultural influences of Spain via the Moors from Africa. Many European cultural influences came from Africa. Essentially, we’re all African. So the idea was to show the relationship of those influences, not to discredit the impact Europe has had on the world, and music especially.
If, as you’ve proposed, you get rid of genres and labels in music but insist that music be rooted in African meter and rhythm, does that become a little like replacing one limitation with another?
Just because it’s African doesn’t mean that everyone can’t play it. Race is not a real thing, but culture and geography are real things. In my mind, am I really black, are others really white? No, but if I don’t deal with these things, if I don’t address them, they can act as obstacles. That’s the point of great art – to break to down these constructs.
What about black classical composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor or William Grant Still, or even Charley Pride, the black country singer who was popular in the ‘70s – are their musical pursuits somehow less authentic?
We’re not taught about Africa in world history – at least I didn’t learn about that at my school. You would think that all African people did was go from being savages to slaves as far as Western education was concerned. But it is possible to create from a wholly African culture. Dvorak spoke of that when they brought him here to the U.S. He said you have everything you need with these rhythms.
What contemporary music or artist is making the biggest impression on you right now?
There’s Butcher Brown from Virginia, which is the band actually playing on “Numbers.” Erykah Badu is someone I always appreciate. We share a bass player, Braylon Lacy. I’m looking forward to her next album, I was just watching some of her videos last night.
Do you think the recent resurgence in vinyl, in kind of slowing down the way we consume songs and albums, is positive for music?
Yeah, we don’t spend as much time embroiled in tactile experiences now. For all the ease of communication in one sense, I think we’re regressing in another, we’re forgetting what it means to be human. It’s my mission to create art that affirms and reinforces the fact we are still human beings – that is, we are still tactile beings.
How is the tour going, and will you be ready to swing when you come to Denver?
I haven’t had more fun as a musician than playing with (drummer) Bill Stewart and (bassist) Vicente Archer. And we are always ready to swing.
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Denver-based writer Sam DeLeo is a published poet, has seen two of his plays produced and recently completed his novel, “As We Used to Sing.” His selected work can be read at samdeleo.com.
When you say jazz, Nicholas Payton hears BAM
by Chris Barton A selection of notable releases in another year that found jazz evolving as boundaries and definitions shifted and fell, leaving only the music behind.
Best of 2012: Movies | TV | Pop music | Jazz | Video Games | Art | Theater | Dance | Classical music
Chris Barton, Los Angeles Times
In a cramped UCLA classroom, trumpeter Nicholas Payton is leading a young septet of college students through his piece "The Backwards Step." He's here as part of a weeklong teaching residency, and the song he plays to the group at the Thelonious Monk Institute is led by his gliding trumpet. Framed by keyboard and vibraphone, it sounds like a simmering post-bop standard. But to Payton, this isn't just jazz — it's the sound of Black American Music.
BAM, an acronym Payton coined to break with the word "jazz," is a term that's become linked with the 39-year-old trumpeter.
"When Black American Music became 'jazz,' it separated itself from the American popular music idiom," Payton wrote in 2011 in one of his earlier online musings on the subject. "I'm just trying to take it back to its roots." The post closed with a declaration: "I am Nicholas Payton and I play Black American Music."
The New Orleans-based artist recently took a break between his classes to discuss his ideas surrounding the notion of BAM. "I don't have a problem with anyone who wants to refer to what they do as jazz," Payton said over lunch. He was sharply dressed in a polka-dotted shirt, black vest and matching hat with a bright blue feather in its band. "I do have a problem with the historical connotations of the word, which has been well documented.... Many great artists including Thelonious Monk were not fans of the word. [Sidney] Bechet, Miles, we can go on down the line."
Payton's oft-repeated Twitter hashtag, #BAM, has become something of a calling card, but he began his online campaign in 2011 with a blog post titled "On Why Jazz Isn't Cool Anymore." The 128-line story included musings such as "jazz is a label that was forced upon the musicians," "jazz died in 1959" and "jazz is haunted by its own hungry ghosts."
"I'm not against anyone supporting the music or playing the music," said Payton. "But the fact that it's been misappropriated and mislabeled and packaged as such that it doesn't have anything to do with black people is ultimately detrimental to the art form.... It's not about renaming it so much as giving the proper acknowledgment to those who created it."
His cause has culminated in a campaign on the social media site Thunderclap, where he proposed to have #BAM added as a genre on the music site CD Baby.
He set a goal of 500 supporters, which he exceeded a day before his deadline in March. Musicians were among those joining his cause on Twitter, including the Bad Plus' Ethan Iverson and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist Flea, who wrote "I support #BAM, let artists call music what they want."
But not everyone agreed. His ideas rubbed many the wrong way, especially since he is far from a fringe figure in jazz, lobbing his opinions from the outside. The son of New Orleans bassist and composer Walter Payton, he is a respected musician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the music's history and enough of a mainstream presence to have toured as part of an ad-hoc band celebrating the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records.
In recent years, Payton became something of a lightning rod, and as a result many musicians have since been asked to weigh in on using the term BAM. It became a particularly hot topic over the last year, which saw jazz artists tapping into the broader spectrum of black popular music, such as hip-hop, soul and funk on Grammy-winning releases from Esperanza Spalding and Robert Glasper, who has played with Payton in the past.
When asked about #BAM in 2012, Glasper agreed with Payton's ideas – to a point. "I understand the origin of the word [jazz] and I understand what Nicholas is talking about, and I respect that," he explained. "I just don't think to call it Black American Music is the way to go, because there's a whole lot of black American music under that umbrella, and they all have names. So now what?"
"I think the umbrella is BAM, but this piece of the genre that doesn't want to be called jazz needs to be called something else," he said.
In a tweet posted last spring, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire playfully acknowledged he'd grown tired of the subject. "If another interviewer asks me what I think about @robertglasper or @paynic and bam I think I'll go put on a clown suit and pie them," he wrote. ("Do it!" Payton quickly responded.)
Others reacted harshly, such as fellow Crescent City native Branford Marsalis, who tartly dismissed Payton's talk as "nothing" and "a nondiscussion" in a 2012 interview with JazzTimes. No stranger to controversy surrounding the definition of jazz, Marsalis' response took Payton by surprise, particularly since he sees that the two fundamentally agree about the jazz tradition.
"I've seen him in the past say essentially the same thing," he said. "It's not so much what I'm saying, it's just that he's used to creating the conversation.... It's been hard for [Branford] to admit that I'm right."
Payton's advocacy of #BAM has also resulted in some in the jazz community branding him a racist. "Saying something is black has become offensive to the mainstream, which shouldn't be the case," he explained.
There is no way to talk about Payton's views on jazz without talking about race and the language surrounding it. Over a freewheeling conversation that touched on Al Sharpton, technology's impact on society and '70s television, Payton scoffs at the idea of a "post-racial" society (a term that gained prominence after the election of President Obama). Among his examples are the Trayvon Martin case, proposed shifts in language about slavery in textbooks and the immigration debate.
"That whole dichotomy like we see here, it's 'Go back to Mexico.' This was actually Mexico before you quarantined and marginalized a whole section of people and said 'This is yours,'" he said. "That's what's happened with black people, that's what happened with jazz. It's been taken and we've been erased out of it, and it's been called something else," he said.
It's a situation that Payton sees as playing a role in a disengagement on the part of the black community from jazz, which he feels #BAM would help address. "I think the image that many black folks associate with jazz is primarily being white music. Because that's who goes out to the clubs, that's who they see," he said. "If you ask most black folks or maybe people in general who is the most popular living jazz artist they might say Kenny G."
Amid all the talk of #BAM, race and politics, Payton is still a musician, of course. He recently released a churning, funk-charged live recording with Vicente Archer and Lenny White called "#BAM Live at Bohemian Caverns," which also featured Payton on Fender Rhodes. The record was released on Payton's own BMF Productions, and his independent approach comes after being signed to Concord Records, who in 2010 was scheduled to release his album "Bitches."
A funk and R&B-drenched chronicle of a soured relationship that featured keyboard, drum machine and vocal turns by Spalding, Cassandra Wilson and Payton, "Bitches" was intended as an homage to "Bitches Brew," which was celebrating its 40th anniversary. Concord rejected the album, but Payton eventually gave it away online, and the album was released in 2011 on another label after his master recordings were returned.
"I think if I had called it 'The Love Record' it would've been perfectly fine," Payton said. "Certainly the fact that it was me singing on everything, that was one issue, but it was ultimately the title." The notion leads Payton to reflect on the history of Concord, which was bought by a group led by television producer Norman Lear in 1999.
"Part of Norman Lear's concept was being open in terms of language," Payton said, looking back to the legacy of Archie Bunker and George Jefferson. "So the irony is ... censoring me for using a word when they used all kinds of language on those shows 40 years ago. So we haven't advanced now?"
While Nicholas Payton the #BAM activist seems close to overshadowing Nicholas Payton the musician, the trumpeter flatly doesn't draw a distinction, and hopes he can be considered both. When asked what one misconception about his efforts could be corrected, he said, "That the idea of Black American Music is an exclusionary or divisive proposition. It is nothing more than a cultural acknowledgment that black Americans have contributed to world popular and social culture and should be credited for that."
"The world's first pop music was black music, was what they call jazz," Payton explained. "Louis Armstrong was the world's first pop star, he was Michael Jackson of his time. Young black kids don't know that, and they should know this goes way back before the genius with the white glove."
Nicholas Payton's Modern Trumpet
June 6, 2008
New York Sun
To some, jazz is a sound. To others, it's a feeling or a mood. To still others, it's an attitude. To me, jazz is busting my rear to get to a club on time, and then finding that the bandleader himself is 10 minutes late. Still, I am hardly the one to wag my finger and shout, "J'accuse!" since I am far from a paragon of punctuality. Nevertheless, when the trumpeter Nicholas Payton finally appeared for his opening show at Jazz Standard on Wednesday night, the band, even with the last-minute substitution of the pianist Robert Glasper for Kevin Hays (Mr. Payton's regular pianist, who appears with him on his new album on the Nonesuch label, "Into the Blue"), was well-rehearsed, very familiar with the leader's original music, and good to go.
Mr. Payton's current mode is lightly electric, and it's important that the addition of just one electronic instrument, in this case a keyboard, gives the band a vaguely fusion-esque texture, even though there's no guitar and the rest of the group is acoustic (even the bass). The use of a percussionist (Daniel Sadownick) with a full, pan-Afro-Latin kit, boosts the group's level of rhythmic intricacy and recalls the beats of Miles Davis, even though the warm and full sound of Mr. Payton's trumpet has little in common with Miles's.
Although Mr. Hays's keyboard is heard on virtually every track of the album, at the Jazz Standard Mr. Glasper mostly played traditional acoustic piano. This makes sense, as electric keyboards always sound like more of an effect, or something ones wants to hear in the background of an ensemble, rather than for a featured solo. For that reason, the group is more aggressive and biting in person, and more mellow and laid-back on the album. In either mode, though, it's entirely agreeable.
The use of electronics and comparatively subtle funk rhythms is hardly surprising in the larger context of Mr. Payton's career, which includes 10 very diverse albums as a leader even though he's only 34. His current music, however, caught me totally off guard at two points: Halfway through the opening show, as he came to the conclusion of his own tune, "Triptych," Mr. Payton lunged unexpectedly into "The Days of Wine and Roses." Ironically, this song, which was dismissed as easy listening when it was a hit for Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, inspired the thorniest, hardest-edged performance of the evening, with Mr. Payton working mostly in a trio mode with the bassist Vicente Archer and the trap drummer Marcus Gilmore. When Mr. Glasper came in to solo, he, like Mr. Payton, laid down highly abstract improvised lines that would certainly not be easily associated with Mercer or Mancini.
Also surprising is the amount of singing Mr. Payton is now doing: "The Backwards Step," composed by his father, Walter Payton (currently the bassist with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), is heard instrumentally on the album, but Mr. Payton used it as the set opener on Wednesday with something like a vocal. It wasn't exactly singing — more like chanting in some unidentified language of the African diaspora; even when he switched to English, it still seemed more like an incantation than a lyric. Mr. Payton's current repertoire also includes an original approximation of a traditional torch ballad, "Blue" (on the album), and a jolly, backbeat-driven street parade song, "I Wanna Stay in New Orleans," which he played and sang as a coda at Jazz Standard.
Before he reached that point, however, he and Mr. Glasper drove the set to a climax, first with Jerry Goldsmith's haunting theme to the film "Chinatown" (on which Mr. Glasper, in particular, played more intimately than I've ever heard him, with more than a touch of the blues), and then Mr. Payton's "Concentric Circles." The latter built to a duel of sorts between the two key soloists, who played overlapping two-bar phrases back and forth and kept the tension mounting. The only suitable way to end the excellent set was with Mr. Payton's cheerful requiem for his hometown.
* * *
Indeed, this is a great season for New Orleans trumpeters. Mr. Payton's contemporary, Terence Blanchard, preceded him at the Jazz Standard last week, and right now Keely Smith, the longtime musical and marital partner of Louis Prima, one of the all-time great Crescent City trumpet kings, is in residence at Birdland.
Now admitting to 80 (contradicting most sources, which claim she was born in 1932), Ms. Smith continues to sing as strongly as ever, with nary a hint of vocal decline. The only thing that changes as the years go on and she continues to make semiannual appearances in New York, is that her onstage banter gets steadily raunchier. I'm increasingly convinced that this is a deliberate contrivance on her part: Even as Ms. Smith gets more graphic about how she wants to do the mattress mambo or the pelvic polka with any available male in the joint, her ballads and love songs sound, contrastingly, ever sweeter and more sincere, and she never fails to break your heart with a classic love song like "More Than You Know," "I Have Dreamed," or her hit, "I Wish You Love."
For the current show, Ms. Smith's key accompanists are her stalwart pianist and expert arranger (and son-in-law), Dennis Michaels, and the exuberant tenor saxophonist Jerry Vivino. This time around, the band is a rocking six-piece in the mold of Sam Butera and the Witnesses, the combo that expertly accompanied Ms. Smith and Prima in days past. Ms. Smith can switch from the vulgar to the romantic to the swinging in less than a heartbeat, as when, in the middle of "That Old Black Magic" (which she sang at the Grammies with Kid Rock earlier this year), she makes reference to a gogootza — Sicilian slang for a variety of hard-shelled eggplant that generally serves as a euphemism for the male sex organ. In her opening show on Tuesday, a fan in the audience presented her with an actual gogootza, wrapped in a ribbon bow, and her eyes lit up, as if no one could have possibly pleased her more.
wfriedwald@nysun.com
by Eric Sandler
Nicholas Payton: Looking Beyond the Music
Photo by Michael Wilson
At 37-years-old, Nicholas Payton has amassed a great deal of experience in music, but after talking with him it seems, more-so in life. He is a man of fiery passion and concrete ideals. You are just as likely to be inspired by his blog posts as his trumpet wizardry. Yet, for someone of such heated views, he is also extremely soft-spoken and controlled. Read on for a window into how Nicholas Payton sees our society and it’s implications on life as we know it.
How has the jazz scene changed since you started out?
I think there’s a lot less camaraderie amongst the musicians. Things seem a lot more cliquish now than what used to be. There’s camaraderie within certain sects of cats, you know, but everybody has there own little sub-groups that they circulate within. Whereas before, it was just one global community. I think that’s hurt the music and the scene quite a bit actually particularly with the disconnect of the younger cats from the older cats. There was always a checks and balances in place and that would keep cats in line so to speak, but that just really doesn’t happen anymore, or not as much anyways.
Also obviously the record industry is completely different,; the internet has changed the game. The recording industry as it was when I was coming up is virtually nonexistent and it’s pretty much obsolete in the way that it was before. The positive side is that I think it’s empowered the artists now with the social networking scene. Artists can deal directly with fans. The only problem is it’s wide open. When you would make a record before, it was a special thing because everybody didn’t have a recording. Now everybody has a record, so how do you sift through all the material that’s on the internet to figure out who’s actually playing and who’s killing. Everybody can put a video on Youtube; everybody can post a link on Facebook.
Between those two things — the recording industry and the lack of camaraderie — the passing down of the torch from the older cats to the younger cats is something that is just not as prevalent as it once was. And that was also a way of determining who the next up and coming cats were. It would sort of validate, well this cat is playing with your Art Blakey’s or your Horace Silver’s or whoever. You would know that’s someone to keep your eye on. Now that doesn’t really exist, so young cats are coming out here not really having any practical experience. Some people frown on that, but to some degree, what are they supposed to do, just not play? The amount of opportunities that were once in place where a cat could serve an apprenticeship is far less. At the same time, I believe that there is a lack of interest from the younger people to actually want to serve a tutelage under a master. Everyone wants to be stars now and just get their own stuff out there and not really pay any dues. So on both ends, I feel the outreach and also the interest of the younger people to want to learn from the older people has severely diminished.
Do you see a disconnect between jazz musicians and jazz audiences nowadays; the audience has seemingly diminished?
I mean, that’s what it’s supposed to do. Automatically when you say jazz, it just means less and less and less, which is why I’ve developed somewhat of a disdain for the word because there are so many things masquerading as what’s supposed to be jazz anyway. If you say jazz it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be swinging, that it’s going to feel good, that it’s going to be soulful. So what is that really? I think automatically, it just marginalizes the musicians and the artists to say that it’s okay if two people are in the club. It’s okay if you give the musicians substandard conditions. I’m saying I don’t want less, I want more. I think we deserve more. This music was once a popular music that people could dance to. It had a social context. Why do we have to marginalize ourselves and say like, “it’s okay if we don’t have a voice and are not heard.”
You talk a lot about your association of funk and soul to your “blackness.” What’s going on racially in music today?
Well that’s always been an issue, however, I do think at times the Black-American sensibility was more popular. It’s kind of on the fringe to me. The music we listen to, most pop music, and even so-called R&B music is not really soulful. There’s not really a distinction between any type of popular music. They all kind of sound the same. Anything that has a swing rhythm, anything that is heavily laden with a blues sensibility is not really pushed to the forefront. I think that’s a problem. Not that I have anything against anything else, but I think that the black sensibility needs to live on as well, which is a big reason I did the Bitches record which is heavily laden with that soulful type of style. I think that’s how it needs to stay in common parlance.
With Bitches, you play every instrument and sing. Have you been working on the singing and other instruments along with the trumpet for a while?
Well it’s something that’s always been on the backburner for me. I started singing really seriously when I was 12-years-old in the Baptist Church choir. But as I got more involved in the instrumental thing, that took precedence. I would say around the time I was doing the Louis Armstrong album, Dear Louis, it was because his vocals were such an integral part of his musicianship that inspired me to once again reinvestigate singing. And being a trumpeter from New Orleans, all the trumpet players sing. It’s just part of the tradition. So when I was doing that project, that sort of inspired me to rediscover that aspect of my musicianship. It’s something that I’ve been working on and working towards ever since.
You had Esperanza Spalding sing on Bitches as well. How do you think someone of her caliber can win the Grammy for “Best New Artist” and yet get put down so much afterwards?
It was very interesting to me because she won the “Best New Artist.” It was like she was a pop star and then instantly right after the acceptance of the award, they had her play with these kids using the music as a backdrop for the voiceover for the PSA about music. That was ironic to me. She went from a pop star to a jazz musician immediately. The moment you say jazz, automatically you are disrespected and I just don’t get that. Like she doesn’t deserve her own performance? I’m glad that the voting members of NARAS recognized her. I mean it’s kind of obvious to me, but we’ve gotten to the point now where we’ve become so dismal about it that we’re shocked when someone who actually deserves a Grammy gets one. So this is one of the times where they got it right. As far as all the hate stuff, I think we’re surprised when we see that kind of negative energy coming out of people, but I don’t think we should be. Look at the state of the world. That is always bubbling underneath the surface, that negative hate energy. Certain circumstances bring that to light. This was just one of those cases where we really saw the worst in people unfortunately. But it’s all good for her because even with all that negative hate energy, a lot more people know who she is. So that’s great for her. The thing is, if she really wasn’t doing anything, if she wasn’t really about anything, there wouldn’t be that hate. Whenever you have a lot of passion and that kind of strong energy surrounding something, there must be something significant about it. She is not to be dismissed. Even a lot of so-called jazz musicians are hating on her. These cats never even checked her out. They don’t know the breadth of stuff she does to place that type of judgment on her. She plays the shit out of the bass. I’ve played with her and I’ve seen her, and I’m very hard on bass players because my father was one. I play bass. I wish her a long career. Every record she’s constantly growing and developing and doing her own thing. She’s only begun to do the things that she has promise to do.
Can you talk about this idea that swing is born out of struggle, and it’s application to music today?
It’s one of those elusive terms. Obviously a lot of these rhythms had root in the African tradition, but it’s very different what went down in Congo Square to all the transmutations of all those things, from the Caribbean to Africa, the motherland. What happened in New Orleans is something very different with that beat. That’s the genesis of funk, hip-hop, pop music, blues, all of that stuff. When I hear someone like J Dilla, he’s still dealing with the swing rhythm. It’s still the same thing. What’s different is how he chose to manifest that rhythm, his instrument. Baby Dodds developed the first drum kit. J Dilla’s instrument of choice was the MPC. Same idea, just different instruments, different time.
How would you describe your personal relationship with your instrument, the trumpet?
I feel I’ve mastered it to the degree one can ever master anything. The more you know, the more you understand about it, you realize you actually don’t know, and for me, the harder I work to try and figure those things out. So there’s no way to say, “I’ve arrived.” It’s constantly discovering new things. It’s very important for me to develop that childlike perspective on the instrument. I look at it as an extension of who I am; that ultimately it’s just that, an instrument. The voice, the sound, the ideas, the creative flow…that’s something that I as a person must be able to do. The instrument is essentially empty; it’s just like a pen. It’s the writer who has the ideas that it must ultimately be channeled through. By the time it gets to the trumpet, that idea has already been born and sent out. The trumpet is just a microphone. But you have to learn how to use that microphone. The more you understand about that, the less that flow is impeded. So that’s what you’re constantly trying to work on.
The late-great Bill Fielder used to say, “The trumpet is but a mirror of the mind.” The thing is though, that the mirror has to be constantly polished. That’s what we practice for. The trumpet is somewhat of an unforgiving instrument. It always makes you work harder than you actually have to in order to produce sound. So the artist, this is very important, the artist tries to figure out a way to get the most out of it with the least amount of effort, and that’s something you’re constantly in the process of refining. Like Bruce Lee, you know, he might not be the strongest cat just in terms of bulk and muscle mass, but he could take on any opponent because he knew how exactly to strike a blow. Just pure brute force will only get you so far on the trumpet. You can’t continue to play like that for a career. You’ll have a very short lifespan. Like anything else, if you live hard, you’ll expire hard. The more graceful you can be, the more longevity that you’ll have.
You’re known not only for your ability to wail on the trumpet, but your absolute control over your sound. How did you develop this control?
It’s something I’m always thinking about, but it’s why I picked the trumpet in the first place. To me, the trumpet was an instrument that you could do that. You could play in such a way to command attention. It’s such a regal instrument. At the same time it has this very sensitive, beautiful side to it, and everything in between. So early on, when I was four-years-old and I told my father I wanted to play the trumpet, that’s what was in my mind. This instrument will allow me, for my personality, the greatest range of expression. Before I even put lips to the trumpet, that was how I was thinking of it.
Who was it that you were listening to that made you think like that?
I was able to see some of the greatest trumpeters that ever lived right here in New Orleans. Clyde Kerr, Jr., Wendell Brunious, Leroy Jones, and Teddy Riley. Those were my big four, cats that even today I still draw inspiration from. They all had that New Orleans thing, but very different. It wasn’t derivative, very unique voices, very soulful, very pretty sounding, very masculine sounds.
What impresses you when listening to other musicians?
Artists being true to who they are will set someone apart to me from another cat who may have a pile of chops and can get around the piano or has a lot of facility. That is just a tool. I’m not interested in people who have amassed the most tools. I would take someone with less tools who has more common sense and who’s more fearless. I do respect someone who has facility because that means a person is disciplined which is very important too. So I wouldn’t say soul at the expense of facility, but a balance of both is something that I look for. You can have all the soul in the world, but if you’re struggling to get it out, you’re very limited. Vice-versa, you can have all the facility in the world but if your music is not connected to a larger meaning or something deeper than just impressing your peer group or an audience, then there’s no depth.
Your website reads, “I have no agenda in terms of a specific genre or style, only to be true to who I am.” Who is Nicholas Payton?
That thing is changing all the time. That quote kind of says it. Who I am at any given moment can be very different. That’s all I can do, be true to that, whatever it is. Sometimes that’s bombastic, sometimes that’s somber, sometimes it’s very virtuosic, sometimes it’s raw. The best way I can express it is through the creative outlets I’ve been given. Through music, through words, through lyrics, through compositions, through improvisation, on the bass, on the drums.
Do you think there is a way to bring jazz back as a popular art form again?
I think something in our priorities would have to change as a society. It’s an issue that’s bigger than music that is plaguing us. I think people have a problem appreciating things with quality because that is not a priority so much anymore. We live in an era where people eat Hot Pockets and all kinds of other gross things that you throw in the microwave. Quality doesn’t matter. We’re into volume and expedience. As long as that’s where our priorities are, there will be a smaller and smaller number of people that actually appreciate something that is real, true beauty, because that sensibility is dying. So I think once our priorities shift, we get music programs back in the schools again, I mean, I’ve gone into schools where kids see bass and they don’t know what it is. They don’t even know if it’s a musical instrument. That’s pretty sad. We’ve lost touch with something in terms of our culture.
It’s better in places like Europe and Japan, but they’re following American trends so it’s only a matter of time before we start to see that diminish elsewhere as well. But I think once our priorities shift and we get to the point where we start to appreciate things that have true depth and meaning, then we’ll start to see people wanting to listen to music that is more representative of that sensibility. I think the best way to bring that about is to be a light yourself. Things of quality will ultimately prevail. If there are more people who are willing to take a risk and refuse to compromise, I mean, I think it’s attractive for artists to dumb what they’re doing down for the sake of the almighty dollar. More people just have to take stand and say no, I will not capitulate to the industries devaluing art for the sake of mass appeal. The more artists that take that stance and choose art first, then the people will be forced to have to reckon with that. People are always going to go for the easiest, the lowest common denominator. Musicians are going to undercut one another to play cheaper or get in there quicker. That mentality is what ultimately has to change. That’s why people seek the music that they do. It’s bigger than the music. Life is bigger than music. So until we get our priorities together as people, we’re not going to see a significant change in what they choose to listen to.
Do you think the integration of jazz and hip-hop is something that can help the process with the younger generations?
To me integration connotes somehow that these things are two different things. At their best they’re not. That’s why I don’t get off into all these labels. Great artists are essentially trying to do the same thing. If it wasn’t for so-called jazz, there wouldn’t be so-called hip-hop. What Charlie Parker was doing in the ‘40’s or what Jelly Roll Morton was doing in the ‘20’s, if you listen to the syncopation of that, it’s the same rhythmic code. You look at somebody like Biggie and just deal with it from a rhythmic perspective, he’s riffing off of a rhythmic vibe just like cats have been doing within so-called jazz music since it’s inception. That’s something I was trying to illustrate on my piece “Cannabis Leaf Rag.” These ragtime rhythms and these hip-hop rhythms are essentially the same. Different instruments, same aesthetic.
What aside from music inspires you in life?
I would say that music hardly ever inspires me. It’s always life. Even when I’m listening to music, the thing that inspires me is listening to the journey of that artist. The music is just a conduit. I’m moved by music that has nothing to do with music. I’m not moved by music that sounds like music and feels like it came from a musical idea. We are saturated with products instead of actual art. People are losing touch with what real music sounds like; they don’t know. We’re developing a generation of children that might not hear real music ever until some group decides to play at their school or something. You don’t hear it on the videogames or on TV, it’s not on the movie soundtracks. It’s just not a part of their lives. We’re grooming generation after generation of people who know less and less about what that is. So if we want to reverse the effects of that, it’s the duty of those who actually do know to try and teach that. You don’t have to beat people over the head with it, people will ultimately come to it. The issue is ignorance. People simply don’t know because they’re not exposed to it. That’s pretty sad to me.
Interview by Eric Sandler
http://www.nicholaspayton.com/projects/
Nicholas Payton
- Menu
NICK'S CURRENT PROJECTS:
RECORDINGS
AFRO-CARIBBEAN MIXTAPE
Like a master chef possessing a deft sense of proportion, taste and poetic flair, this forward-looking heir to the traditions of New Orleans blends an array of related musical food groups—Bebop, Swing, the Great American Songbook, New Orleans second-line, Mardi Gras Indian, Instrumental Soul, Rhythm-and-Blues, Urban, Hip-Hop, and various Afro-descended dialects of Central America and the Caribbean—into a focused sound that is entirely his own argot.
TEXTURES
The strokes of a paint brush have a rhythm. They create patterns, lines, curves, shapes, forms, and ultimately a rhythmic flow. They create movement. Their movement create a feeling. Colors also create a rhythm. They make your eyes move from one component to another. They allow your mind to travel. To think. Ultimately a story is told. A feeling is created. A visual beat penetrates one's mind and soul.
What happens when master artist Nicholas Payton is a part of the artistic process of painter Anastasia Pelias? Textures is born. As Nicholas told me, “They are off the cuff tracks done in real time with an artist who paints.” Nicholas takes the strokes of Anastasia's brush and mirrors them with a beat. The visual beat becomes an aural beat. A pulse. A movement. The colors become harmonies. The strokes become rhythmic shifts. The two become synonymous with each other.
LIVE SHOWS
THE BLACK AMERICAN SYMPHONY
The Black American Symphony in six movements for Quartet and Symphony Orchestra.
Composed by Nicholas Payton, and performed in concert by the Nicholas Payton Quartet and Orchestra.
Premiered June 2012 in Prague, Czech Republic, with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra @ Smetana Hall, the Municipal House, Prague, Czech Republic.
The objective of The Black American Symphony is to highlight the contribution Black American music has made to the world. The idea is to use as many forms of Black American music, from its inception to date, to illustrate that Black musics as they have been categorized (blues, gospel, jazz, Rhythm & Blues, Hiphop, etc.) are all a part of a continuum. They are not stylized genres, but rather, the communal expression of a people that has simply changed form with the times.
Unlike William Grant Still's African American Symphony, (which respectfully adopts a European aesthetic), Nicholas was committed to composing a symphony that would draw exclusively from the canon of great Black American music from Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Charles Stepney, Michael Jackson, etc…
Black American Symphony is not a repertory work, but a timely statement that sums up the last 100 years of Black American music and suggests the possibilities of what is ahead for the next 100 years.
Nicholas Payton rehearsing the Black American Symphony in Prague with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra for Prague Proms 2012.
THE TELEVISION STUDIO ORCHESTRA
The Television Studio Orchestra is as cinematic as it is Swinging. Sublimely global in its sonic reach, and composed of a brilliant battery of modern and multifaceted players who come in a variety of funky flavors, black and white, male and female, fresh faced talents and road tested journeymen, the Orchestra creates a sonic pallet that is both completely new and yet very familiar. Of the Orchestra's debut performance at Dizzy's, the Wall Street Journal declared: “Mr. Payton's gifts as a trumpet soloist have never been open to question, and now with this latest effort he establishes himself as a composer-arranger-maestro on par with any working today.”
Nicholas Payton and The Television Studio Orchestra, Live @ Dizzy's 3.4.11 Nicholas Payton: Trumpet / Vocals / Arranger Johnaye Kendrick: Vocals Erica Von Kleist: Piccolo Flute Anat Cohen: Clarinet Patience Higgins: Bass Clarinet Chelsea Baratz: Tenor Sax Sharel Cassity: Alto Sax Michael Dease: Trombone Emily Asher: Trombone Max Seigel: Bass Trombone / Tuba Corey King:Trombone Frank Green: Trumpet Freddie Hendrix:Trumpet Bria Skonberg:Trumpet Philip Dizack: Trumpet Omar Abdul Karim"Trumpet Mike Moreno: Guitar Lawrence Fields: Fender Rhodes Robert Hurst III: Bass Roland Guerrero: Percussion Ulysses Owens: Drums
Nicholas Payton’s once-fiery blog has been quiet lately. After his provocative 2011 rejection of the word “jazz” in favor of Black American Music, Payton has mostly retreated from the volatile jazz internet.
Nicholas Payton. Courtesy AB Artists.
But he has not abandoned his polemic: he has just shifted medium. Payton’s latest release, the extended Afro-Caribbean Mixtape, traverses styles from across the black musical spectrum. Throughout, Payton features spoken word samples from musical legends like Max Roach and luminaries of Africana thought like Dr. Greg Kimanthi Carr. In short, it is Payton offering an album-length explanation of Black American Music.
Payton was recently in town for a fierce run with the Kevin Eubanks Quartet at Birdland. He sat down with me across the street from the stalwart venue to talk music, politics, and the return of the 1990s.
Vilde Aaslid (Rail): Most of your recent albums, like Letters, Numbers, and Textures have been assembled out of small pieces. But with Afro-Caribbean Mixtape it sounds like you are trying to tell a bigger story.
Nicholas Payton: With Afro-Caribbean Mixtape I wanted to tell a narrative that would illustrate how rhythms came from Africa and through the colonial era that funneled through the Caribbean: places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and on up through the northernmost part of the Caribbean, which is New Orleans. There, because enslaved Africans weren’t allowed to speak their native languages, they developed a new language in the blues and the work song, and that was essentially the genesis of what became pop music and its first star was Louis Armstrong. From the times before recording on up through the latest artists in the pop field, be it we’re talking Drake or Rihanna or Katy Perry or Taylor Swift, that tribal African DNA exists encoded and embedded in the music. Even in the simple rock back beat, Africa is in there. I’ve also been a proponent of shunning the use of the categorization of jazz, because I think it separates itself from the popular idiom, and I think as a result pop music has lost its roots. Because of this lack of connection, they don’t see the ancestry and the elders of this tradition as part of who they are. With this album I hope to rejoin what a lot of these false labels, like jazz, sought to separate. I hope to connect all these black musics and do my part to restore the broken branches on this tree and reconnect some of these links to the roots. Basically, my mission is to restore what genre seeks to separate. I’m, in my way, trying to rewrite history.
Rail: You say in the liner notes that “we aren’t born a race, we are raced,” and I think that resonates a lot with this conversation about genre. So maybe in the same way music is not born with a genre it is genre-ed. Do you a see a parallel between these processes?
Payton: Totally. I am in general anti- any kind of false construct, anything that creates dualism or separate things that are meant to be approached more holistically. I think these distortions and disconnections create chasms in our society that are the genesis of war, political strife, marginalization, and violence. Because people see themselves as at odds. And then there’s elitism, the human instinct to want to indulge in a hierarchical system where I’m better than you because of XYZ reason. We don’t see ourselves as tied to a larger whole. If we thought more in terms of communal structures there wouldn’t be a need to separate ourselves, to feel better than someone else.
Rail: So the word “jazz” has implicit within it a hierarchy?
Payton: Jazz sells itself short when it bills itself as this super intellectual music that’s above your understanding. I am choosing to separate myself from this elitist idea that we’re better than you, this is not for you. This is communal music at its essence. I grew up in a town where I saw that directly from the second line parade where this so-called jazz music was viewed as communal music. You could set up in any neighborhood and have a band start marching up the street and everyone from the two-year-old to the eighty-year-old knows what body movements correspond to what kind of rhythms and everybody’s sort of in sync.
Music is the most direct way to break through some of these false constructs. It is pretty much our only chance at healing these divides which serve to undermine humanity at its best. Actually, it’s even more than humanity. I’ve been getting a bit of this from Octavia Butler, who doesn’t even identify as human. She feels that not only is race a problem, but humanity itself is a problem that desires a hierarchical structure. As long as we continue to identify as human then there can be no true liberation. Even if we do away with race there’s going to be some sort of classist system that seeks to oppress one class and give supremacy and privilege to others.
Rail: A lot has happened in the world since you first put forward the idea of Black American Music in 2011. I wonder if you could reflect a bit on what it means in 2017.
IN CONVERSATION
Relexifying the Canon of Black Music
NICHOLAS PAYTON with Vilde Aaslid
Nicholas Payton’s once-fiery blog has been quiet lately. After his provocative 2011 rejection of the word “jazz” in favor of Black American Music, Payton has mostly retreated from the volatile jazz internet.
Nicholas Payton. Courtesy AB Artists.
But he has not abandoned his polemic: he has just shifted medium. Payton’s latest release, the extended Afro-Caribbean Mixtape, traverses styles from across the black musical spectrum. Throughout, Payton features spoken word samples from musical legends like Max Roach and luminaries of Africana thought like Dr. Greg Kimanthi Carr. In short, it is Payton offering an album-length explanation of Black American Music.
Payton was recently in town for a fierce run with the Kevin Eubanks Quartet at Birdland. He sat down with me across the street from the stalwart venue to talk music, politics, and the return of the 1990s.
Vilde Aaslid (Rail): Most of your recent albums, like Letters, Numbers, and Textures have been assembled out of small pieces. But with Afro-Caribbean Mixtape it sounds like you are trying to tell a bigger story.
Nicholas Payton: With Afro-Caribbean Mixtape I wanted to tell a narrative that would illustrate how rhythms came from Africa and through the colonial era that funneled through the Caribbean: places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and on up through the northernmost part of the Caribbean, which is New Orleans. There, because enslaved Africans weren’t allowed to speak their native languages, they developed a new language in the blues and the work song, and that was essentially the genesis of what became pop music and its first star was Louis Armstrong. From the times before recording on up through the latest artists in the pop field, be it we’re talking Drake or Rihanna or Katy Perry or Taylor Swift, that tribal African DNA exists encoded and embedded in the music. Even in the simple rock back beat, Africa is in there. I’ve also been a proponent of shunning the use of the categorization of jazz, because I think it separates itself from the popular idiom, and I think as a result pop music has lost its roots. Because of this lack of connection, they don’t see the ancestry and the elders of this tradition as part of who they are. With this album I hope to rejoin what a lot of these false labels, like jazz, sought to separate. I hope to connect all these black musics and do my part to restore the broken branches on this tree and reconnect some of these links to the roots. Basically, my mission is to restore what genre seeks to separate. I’m, in my way, trying to rewrite history.
Rail: You say in the liner notes that “we aren’t born a race, we are raced,” and I think that resonates a lot with this conversation about genre. So maybe in the same way music is not born with a genre it is genre-ed. Do you a see a parallel between these processes?
Payton: Totally. I am in general anti- any kind of false construct, anything that creates dualism or separate things that are meant to be approached more holistically. I think these distortions and disconnections create chasms in our society that are the genesis of war, political strife, marginalization, and violence. Because people see themselves as at odds. And then there’s elitism, the human instinct to want to indulge in a hierarchical system where I’m better than you because of XYZ reason. We don’t see ourselves as tied to a larger whole. If we thought more in terms of communal structures there wouldn’t be a need to separate ourselves, to feel better than someone else.
Rail: So the word “jazz” has implicit within it a hierarchy?
Payton: Jazz sells itself short when it bills itself as this super intellectual music that’s above your understanding. I am choosing to separate myself from this elitist idea that we’re better than you, this is not for you. This is communal music at its essence. I grew up in a town where I saw that directly from the second line parade where this so-called jazz music was viewed as communal music. You could set up in any neighborhood and have a band start marching up the street and everyone from the two-year-old to the eighty-year-old knows what body movements correspond to what kind of rhythms and everybody’s sort of in sync.
Music is the most direct way to break through some of these false constructs. It is pretty much our only chance at healing these divides which serve to undermine humanity at its best. Actually, it’s even more than humanity. I’ve been getting a bit of this from Octavia Butler, who doesn’t even identify as human. She feels that not only is race a problem, but humanity itself is a problem that desires a hierarchical structure. As long as we continue to identify as human then there can be no true liberation. Even if we do away with race there’s going to be some sort of classist system that seeks to oppress one class and give supremacy and privilege to others.
Rail: You use the spoken word samples in a lot of different ways on the album, but in “Relexification,” it seems like you treat it as sound as much as lexical.
Payton: Exactly. Someone asked me why did I hire a DJ when I could have treated the samples myself. I wanted it to be music, I didn’t want it to just be words. I wanted to hire somebody who could use these words rhythmically in a way that would only enhance what was being said.
Rail: Could you talk a bit about Ernie Smith, who speaks on that track?
Payton: Ernie Smith is one of the first to create the idea of Ebonics. We relexify the English language to our African linguistic patterns. Words are more than just a tool of communication; how we think is formed in language. And that’s why when people attempt to colonize another usually the first thing they make them do is to stop speaking their language. Because if you speak as those who oppress you do, you begin to think like them.
Rail: Relexification as a concept seems like it resonates with some of your ideas about Black American Music.
Payton: It’s rewriting the false narratives that we’ve been sold, as far as being slaves. To have history tell it, black people’s history started as being slaves. In fact, we are not slaves, we were enslaved. That’s a big difference. Changing the words that we use to describe things affects how we feel about things. If we change those words, if we relexify our thoughts and our actions, we begin to peel away at the false layers and get to the core of who we truly are. So yeah, that’s a centerpiece of the album, because basically the album is my attempt to relexify the canon of black music.
Rail: Some of the voices that are on the album and some of the aesthetics of the liner notes remind me of a kind of mid-’90s Afro-centricity.
Payton: The font I used was actually from the TV show Martin. I knew I wanted to use that font, or like School Daze, Spike Lee, because I felt that was a strong time in black culture. In the ’80s I was really deepening my understanding of black nationalism. I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I was rebelling against the system. And you know, some things change and some things stay the same. In some sense I’m still that same pro-black kid. If you look at the picture on the package, I have a medallion with the African symbol, with red green and black. Those things were popular when a lot of groups like Public Enemy were taking off the bling, taking off the rope chains, and wearing symbols that were made of earth and stone and leather, to reclaim this primal African sensibility. I felt like that was a very fertile, good time for black culture, and seeing the trend of the ‘90s come back I thought maybe there’s a way to bring some of that other consciousness back into fruition.
Rail: A lot has happened in the world since you first put forward the idea of Black American Music in 2011. I wonder if you could reflect a bit on what it means in 2017.
Payton: I took a lot of heat for the things I said. I kind of had the misfortune, as many artists do, of being ahead of my time. So now I’m just giving space for others. And I think that’s a big part of why this album came through me in the way that it did. I never could quite figure out how to make my music political, because to me music was just beautiful. I wanted to keep that the way that it was, and I was able to express these things through words. So I think that because I hadn’t been writing a lot I figured out a way to create music that really was an overt political statement. Almost like shutting a piece of my expression off, it reared itself in another way.
Contributor
Opinion Commentary
Nicholas Payton speaks: about jazz and #BAM
Trumpeter Nicholas Payton has just released a new album, Sketches of Spain, a live re-make of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration. (Photo courtesy of Stanford Jazz.)
by Richard Scheinin | rscheinin@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
October 3, 2013 | UPDATED: August 12, 2016
With one moaned note, trumpeter Nicholas Payton can telegraph a 100-year tradition. This formidable musician also is a businessman with his own label (BMF Records; you can guess what the acronym stands for) and a pointed essayist via his Twitter feed (@paynic) and blog (nicholaspayton.wordpress.com). Slyly titled “The Cherub Speaks,” the blog is where he riffs at length, stirring things up, talking about race and the economics of music.
Last week, Payton turned 40 and released his new album, “Sketches of Spain,” a live re-make of the Miles Davis-Gil Evans collaboration from 1959-60. He also penned an essay titled “Why Hiphop Isn’t Cool Anymore,” a sequel to 2011’s “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore,” in which he declared that “Jazz ain’t cool, it’s cold, like necrophilia.” Payton (a jazz-Grammy winner) argued that jazz died half a century ago — and that the word “jazz” is a racist term imposed on black musicians by white marketers. He prefers to call it by another name: #BAM, or Black American Music.
I spent two hours on the phone with Payton, who grew up in New Orleans and still lives there. He spoke of his father (the late bassist Walter Payton) and of Professor Longhair (who used to rehearse in the Payton family’s living room). He discussed his upcoming “Black American Symphony,” recorded with his band and the Sinfonieorchester Basel. He expanded on various Tweets and blog posts, on topics ranging from Miley Cyrus (Payton isn’t a fan) to Marvin Gaye (he’s Payton’s hero) to #BAM. As soft-spoken and amicable as he is directly opinionated, he also talked about his own surprise at his increasingly public role as a writer, and how he is viewed by some as a rabble-rouser, by others as a truth-teller.
Q Why do you have the blog? And has it changed the way people perceive you? Do they now see you as a hero, a villain, a militant? Have you lost any gigs because of your writings?
A I feel it’s important, what I’m doing. It has caused some degree of trouble in certain instances. I have had people not want to give me gigs based on what I’m blogging. But to me that’s really silly. Because to me that should be based on “does the cat show up on time, dress well and show up ready to play?” — and that’s my reputation, for all that. Because I say “mother…” on a blog post, is that any reason to not want to hire me? My reputation is that I’m a gentleman and I treat people with kindness. But if you disrespect me, then I’m going to say something about it.
Q Do you feel isolated, expressing your opinions publicly?
A Artists don’t stand up for themselves these days. They’ve become more like politicians. And they’re afraid of losing whatever — afraid of not getting a gig. And yet things keep deteriorating. The kind of offers that are acceptable now — they wouldn’t have flown years ago. I’ve found out that I’ve had to say, “No, I will not stay at that hotel.” Certain conditions have become unacceptable.”
Q Musicians have told me they’re earning a lot less in clubs these days.
A I just can’t do it, man. It becomes a thing where you do become, in some instances, a troublemaker. But I’d rather have that and have someone respect me than accept any kind of offer. Because I came up under cats like Clark Terry, Ray Brown, Elvin Jones, and these guys didn’t take stuff from people. They were nice guys, but they set the bar. If they were disrespected, they spoke up.
And I find that, in many instances, I’m the lone soldier, and I’m trying to keep the bar where they set it. I don’t consider myself an old cat, but with the passing of so many of the masters, I am responsible for making sure that stuff doesn’t go haywire and absolutely out of control. And I’ve come into that role a lot sooner than I’d expected. It’s not necessarily something I do to be a rabble-rouser or a provocateur.
But I have to have a voice. My life would be a lot simpler, in some instances, if I’d just shut the … up and play the gig. But being an artist is being a lot more than that; so I’m left with a choice: What do I do? Just shut the … up and play the gig, or make a stand for what I was taught was right, and to speak out for the music and its cultural ties in terms of the black community and things that I think are important?
They should actually be taking some of the falls.
Q Who should be taking the falls? Other musicians?
A Yes. It shouldn’t solely be focused on me. A lot of the things that I’m saying are a lot of things that they believe and they know. There are a lot of conversations that have happened in the back of the dressing room. I can’t tell you how many emails and talks I have with cats saying, “You’re right.”
Q Will you lay out your arguments for what you object to in the word “jazz.”
A Jazz is the white appropriation of black American music. It’s a caricaturization of the music that Bolden and King Oliver and Armstrong and others created, and the first documented jazz recording was by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. And as for “Dixieland” — we know the connotation that “Dixie” has to the Confederate South and slavery. And “jazz,” the word itself, is of dubious origin at best. The first documented printed use of the word is tied to baseball. It had to do with some kind of English or pizzazz that you put on the ball. I think it was, like, 1913, and was published in the San Francisco Chronicle or some place out there.
And a lot of the early musicians refuted the title. They didn’t want the association with the word. And even cats like Louis Armstrong said, “We didn’t call it that.” It was not called that in New Orleans. It would’ve been “blues” or “ragtime.” And the first band that made a record and called it “jazz,” that was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. It was minstrelsy. The cats were making animal sounds and a mockery of this beautiful music made by the likes of King Oliver and Louis Armstrong.
I don’t consider those cats (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band) to be historically significant in terms of the true expression of the music. It’s kind of like Miley Cyrus’s shenanigans today, where black people appear almost as props. She wants to adopt a black sound, but all the imagery is stereotypical, and what they think is a Negro sound, without really dealing with the people. And the people become objects, and you don’t deal with the cultural part.
The most important part to me is the black part. And that’s not to say who can and cannot play this music. But without addressing the community part and who created the music — that’s wrong.
Q When you say “the music,” what are you referring to?
A Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong was the world’s first pop star. He was the Michael Jackson of his time. There hadn’t been a star that had existed like that before, because his artistic rise sort of happened at the same time as the rise of the phonograph. So here was the new kid with the voice, coming along at the same time as this new technology — sort of like what happened with the music video and Michael Jackson. It exponentially increased the potential of Louis’s voice getting to as many people as possible.
Yet when these cats started going on the road and traveling, they still had to go to the stage through the back of the kitchen. People were still riding in the back of the bus, if they could get on the bus at all. They had to stay on the black side of town and in boarding houses; couldn’t stay or dine as equals at many of the establishments. And in many cases, they played where black people otherwise were not allowed, like the Cotton Club.
Black folks were not looked at as human beings, and when this great art was created by masters like Ellington and Armstrong and Count Basie, they ran into this white supremacist system.
Q The names you’re mentioning are the names of musicians generally described as jazz musicians. So, again, are you talking about jazz, or so-called jazz, as you would say, or are you talking about all types of black American music?
A I’m talking about it all, because I don’t make the distinctions. And I don’t think the musicians make those distinctions. Those were categories placed on the music by promoters and marketers.
Q What did your father think of the word “jazz”?
A He never really discussed it. And to be honest, for most of the older musicians, that was never a discussion. They never discussed “jazz” or “let’s play jazz” or “this is jazz” or “this is not jazz.” If anything, at a certain point when I was coming up, he was more open-minded that me. I had a more purist view of what jazz is, and I had to ask him, “Why are you playing all this other music on your gigs, stuff that’s not swinging?”
But before that, when I was coming up, I didn’t like jazz, because I thought it was old music. I wanted to listen to Run-D.M.C.
Q I want to ask you what your mission is as a musician.
A For me, life is bigger than music. Music is just a conduit, and one way in which I express that artistry. I also express it through my blog and how I speak. It’s a holistic approach.
But I would say that I was placed in an ideal position from the start. I don’t want to say, “The spirits chose me,” but my upbringing was very ideal for what I do: born in New Orleans, where this music came through, to two musical parents in an environment that was just very musical. We had rehearsals at the house. Our house was the place where everyone rehearsed. We had a grand piano and a large living room, and so it was sort of ideal.
The greatest musicians were in my living room. I was 3- or 4-years-old, and here’s Professor Longhair in my living room. I used to love to sit under the piano and hear the music — Ellis Marsalis, all that force.
I didn’t know I would be a musician. It’s just a thing that I did. I loved being around musicians. I loved being around the music. My parents might go to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, and I’d be up. The cats were rehearsing.
Q Were you playing, too?
A I was a kid. I wasn’t really playing. But there is a story of them having a rehearsal one time, and they were listening to some record and they couldn’t figure out one chord. And I had this little toy piano, and I went over to it and laid my hands down on the keys, and played the chord. And how do you explain that?
Q I read that Marvin Gaye and Miles Davis are your two favorite musicians. Why Marvin Gaye?
A He’s a true artist. Like Billie Holiday, he wore his heart on his sleeve. Whatever he was going through, he put that into his music, fearlessly. A very vulnerable artist, perhaps so much so that it contributed to his demise in many ways. We know about him historically — that he tended to the self-destructive. But there’s such an honesty in what he did, which to me is the hallmark of any great artist. It’s about their lives. When they sing a song, that’s what they’re giving you; it’s bigger than the music. It’s about his wife, or someone who was leaving him, or his stressed relationship with his father.
Q I was looking through your Twitter feed. The other day, you tweeted something about preferring Miley Cyrus to Janis Joplin.
A I don’t like either one, but I can at least sit through a Miley Cyrus song. I can’t sit through a Janis Joplin song for a minute. It just disturbs me. The voice — I just don’t hear it. I just hear an unseasoned, untrained voice.
Q In the same string of Tweets, you say you really like Amy Winehouse.
A Yeah. To me, and this is just my opinion, she is what those other artists are trying to get to. It’s not contrived when she does it. I really feel it when she does it. She is a really great blues singer, without trying to be that. She was one of the great phrasers and interpreters of our time, and I don’t think she’s been totally given credit for doing that.
Q You’ve also had a bunch of critical Tweets and blog essays about hip-hop and sampling. You wrote that “hip-hop is a predatory art form … a bastion of cannibalism. … If they’d had sampling back in the day (in Africa), motha… woulda never learned how to play the drums.”
Was this in response to all the discussions about “Blurred Lines” and Robin Thicke ripping off Marvin Gaye?
A I had written about it before, but the current news certainly sparked more conversation. I’ve talked about the flatness of beat-making — this idea now that we have these “beat makers” who are not musicians; they haven’t been musically trained. This is not me looking down at them. I do think some incredible people who have not been trained have done some wonderful things. But after a certain point it becomes limited or limiting. If everybody’s a sampler, then who is creating?
Yes, there is an art to that. J Dilla — Jay Dee — represents the best of those who are able to do that, like Andy Warhol with collages, or Romare Bearden. But everybody is not him; everybody is not a Jay Dee. Everybody does not have the ears that he had.
But even Jay Dee — if those earlier artists had not created the music that he then sampled, what would anyone have to sample? We’re kind of putting the cart before the horse when we glorify the sampling over the actual performers. It’s become backwards.
Q Tell me about recording your “Black American Symphony.”
A After I performed the symphony the first time, I said, “Well, I want to record it,” and it just so happened that my label was in place, so I could release it. I’m just a strong believer in — it’s the power of energy and thought, and what you conjure in terms of just sheer will is amazing if you put your mind to it and if you focus intensely on bringing that to life. I just don’t worry about things too much. Like, failing is not an option. It will happen when it’s time.
Q Will you describe the piece?
A The “Black American Symphony” basically is one that I wrote in the wake of the #BAM movement. It was my symphonic interpretation of creating a work that would use a construct largely associated with the European aesthetic, but without relying on the European language. Instead, I used what Dvorak called “Negro melodies.”
I wanted to use an orchestra, but to have all the language and the aesthetic be of one that’s African and black in nature. And it’s been interesting doing it, because I’ve come away with a much deeper understanding of the black American aesthetic. Because these are not pops orchestras that I was dealing with. These were musicians trained in playing the European classical repertoire.
If I didn’t know the differences before, I definitely know them now.
Q Between black and European aesthetics?
A They’re different languages….
I was modifying the harp part for my symphony, and the harpist told me, “Yeah, you know I’m not used to playing” — she said the word — “jazz harmonies.” And that struck me, because here’s someone who plays Debussy and Ravel — same kind of sharp-nine sounds that they say Duke Ellington took from Debussy. Yet this harpist says, “I’m not used to these chords.”
That interaction really illustrated that European harmony is not the same as black harmony. Same notes in some cases, but a different language, a different function.
Q Well, how did it turn out?
A I’m happy with the result, but it took some work.
Q And you hope to release the recording later this year?
A That’s the plan. It’s being mixed now. “Sketches of Spain,” the other one, is out this month.
Q “Sketches of Spain” also is with a symphony orchestra?
Or is it with a big band playing Gil Evans’ arrangements?
A We did Gil’s arrangements exactly, same instrumentation that Gil used, so I didn’t rearrange the material. We just reinterpreted the grooves, and the improvisations are different. I first did this at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009.
Q How is your label doing? Are you making any money?
A Greater than I imagined. In a couple of months, I’m already in the profit zone. That would never happen on a major label.
Q Your label’s logo is the Sankofa bird. Will you explain what that is?
A Sankofa is a Ghanaian concept of going back to get the best things of the past, to bring things to the now, to lead a better way to the future. And the symbol is a bird reaching back and getting an egg, and this is really the essence of everything I’m doing.
Everything that I say and play is with extreme respect of the past and the masters and the lineage and the ancestry. And the idea is to get the best things, maybe even learning what some of the things are that we shouldn’t do. The idea is to take the best of what works and give them voice now without being so reverent that we don’t stay current — where we become so deferential that we don’t allow for time and change and movement. The idea is to use these things to leave the world in a better state for our children and those who come after us. It’s essentially why I blog, too. It’s for my child. The end result is not necessarily for right now. It’s for now, and it’s for the past; for me, this concept of time is a continuum.
For Africans, that separation of time doesn’t really exist. You’re always connected to ancestry.
Where to find Nicholas Payton
Web site: http://www.nicholaspayton.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/paynic
Nicholas Payton
Date: Wednesday June 22, 2016
Time: TBA
Nicholas Payton is widely considered one of the greatest artists of our time. Hailed as a virtuoso before he was even out of high school, his unbridled talent has earned him praise and accolades, as well as insured his place in history.
“Payton’s clarion trumpet, as well as his genre-defying solos, stood at the center of the music making… Payton bent notes beyond recognition… No descriptive label or category could be affixed to Payton’s solos, which were as brashly original as they were technically imposing.”
The son of bassist and sousaphonist Walter Payton, he took up the trumpet at the age of four and by age nine was sitting in with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band alongside his father. He began his professional career at ten years old as a member of James Andrews’ All-Star Brass and was given his first steady gig by guitarist Danny Barker at The Famous Door on Bourbon Street. He later enrolled first at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and then at the University of New Orleans.
After touring with Marcus Roberts and Elvin Jones in the early ’90s, Payton signed a recording contract with Verve; his first album, From This Moment, appeared in 1994. In 1996 he performed on the soundtrack of the movie Kansas City, and in 1997 received a Grammy Award (Best Instrumental Solo) for his playing on the album Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton.
After seven albums on Verve, Payton signed with Warner Bros. Records, releasing Sonic Trance, his first album on the new label, in 2003. Besides his recordings under his own name, other significant collaborations include Trey Anastasio, Ray Brown, Ray Charles, Daniel Lanois, Dr. John, Stanley Jordan, Herbie Hancock, Roy Haynes, Zigaboo Modeliste, Marcus Roberts, Jill Scott, Clark Terry, Allen Toussaint, Nancy Wilson, Dr. Michael White and Joe Henderson.
The new millennium marked further progression in Payton’s career, defined by an expanding devotion to wide array of projects. In 2004, he became a founding member of the SF Jazz Collective. In 2008, Payton joined the Blue Note 7, a septet formed in honor of the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records. In 2011, he formed a 21-piece big band ensemble called the Television Studio Orchestra. In 2011, Payton also recorded and released Bitches, a love narrative on which he played every instrument, sang, and wrote all of the music. In 2012 the Czech National Symphony Orchestra commissioned and debuted his first full orchestral work, The Black American Symphony. And in 2013, Payton formed his own record label, BMF Records, and the same year released two albums, #BAM Live at Bohemian Caverns, where he plays both trumpet and Fender Rhodes, often at once, and Sketches of Spain, which he recorded with the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.
From 2011 to 2013, Nicholas was a Distinguished Artist and Visiting Lecturer at Tulane University and belongs to a growing group of race scholars and activists committed to social justice. Members of this movement suggest that racism is not simply a response to color, but that it additionally describes subtle legal behaviors by which the dominant culture continues to marginalize people in order to sustain a poor, minority class. In the case of American society, evidence of this can be framed as institutionalized racism and white privilege, a topic that Payton has sometimes written about in several essays to his website.
Payton’s writings are provocative for other reasons, too. One of his most notable pieces to date, On Why Jazz isn’t Cool Anymore, describes the effects of cultural colonization on music. The article quickly earned his website 150,000-page views and sparked international press attention and debate.
The DuPont Clifford Brown Jazz Festival
Each year, the City of Wilmington and its residents remember a most brilliant trumpet player, unforgettable composer and dynamic entertainer whose name and legacy we celebrate though the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival. A legend, our legend, whose work offers us a moment to laugh, dance, sing, eat, love and experience the ultimate joy music brings to us always.
DO THE M@TH
Interview with Nicholas Payton
When Payton was in New York playing with Lenny White and Buster Williams at the Blue Note I visited him at his hotel. Thanks to Kevin Sun for transcribing the interview.
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Ethan Iverson: We were just talking about New Orleans a little bit. I’d like to hear about what it was like growing up there.
Nicholas Payton: Well, first, my parents: My father Walter Payton played bass and sousaphone. His first recordings were playing electric bass in a lot of the early New Orleans R&B stuff. That’s him on Lee Dorsey’s “Working in the Coal Mine” and Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is.” He also played on a couple of tracks on the thing Allen Toussaint produced for Labelle. Then, at a certain point he decided he didn’t really want to play electric bass or do that kind of thing; he wanted to exclusively play straight ahead and upright bass.
My mom was a former operatic singer and a classical pianist. Being a vocalist herself, she loved a lot of vocalists like Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae, so I heard a lot of that growing up.
We had a big space, particularly a big living room and we had a grand piano, so our place was where cats came to rehearse for whatever band my father was playing with.
As early as two years old I remember looking at guys like Ellis Marsalis at the crib. Professor Longhair, he once came by the crib and I remember sitting under the piano while he was playing. I was being immersed.
Long before I had decided to be a musician, as a toddler, as soon as I could crawl up on stuff, be it drums or the piano, I was playing music. One of the first musical memories that my father used to recount all the time that he was in a rehearsal with a band and they were trying to take a tune off the record. They couldn’t figure out what this chord was, and I had this little toy piano and, apparently, I walked right up to it, put my hand down, and they were like, “That’s the chord! That’s it!” And from then on it’s been all music.
EI: I know you play drums and I think it’s impossible to talk about this music without talking about the drums. Tell me about the drums in New Orleans.
NP: I got to see all the greats. Everyone from cats who may not be familiar to a lot of people outside of the New Orleans scene like John Robichaux, who my father played with in The New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra.
If you’ve ever seen that film Pretty Baby with Brooke Shields, which was kind of a big deal, it was the ’70s and she was maybe 12. There was a nude scene because her mom, I think, basically prostituted her out so it was this whole thing surrounding that, but my father’s actually in that movie as part of this ragtime orchestra. They played a lot of music that more or less predate jazz, with instrumentation that was of the period: trumpet, vocals, trombone, clarinet, violin, piano, bass, and drums — the kind of bands that used to go on the riverboats. I think Louis Armstrong might have had some history in one of those types of bands, and another great trumpeter from New Orleans, Thomas Jefferson, used to play in one of those types of bands. Jefferson was actually referenced in the Miles Davis autobiography — great player, sort of in the post-Armstrong style, and my father had a regular gig with him at this place called the Maison Bourbon…
…But getting back to drummers, there’s John Robichaux; there’s this great cat, Ernie Elly, who’s on the album I did with Doc Cheatham; Herlin Riley, who I remember being one of the guys I idolized as a kid sitting on the floor, being in awe of him. Shannon Powell, another great drummer who worked many years with Harry Connick Jr. and for a little bit with Diana Krall. Then there are guys who I’ve met over the years who I was too young to remember when they were living there, but moved abroad, like Zigaboo Modeliste and Idris Muhammad.
There’s a strong connection between the trumpet and the drums, and obviously some of the most noted musicians who come out of New Orleans play either of those instruments, and many former trumpet players switch to drums, like Herlin. A lot of people don’t know that he played trumpet before drums. Also someone else who was very important to me who lived right around the corner from us when we lived in the Sixth Ward, also known as Tremé: James Black. He was also a trumpeter who switched to drums.
EI: I guess both those instruments are parade instruments.
NP: Definitely.
EI: When I think about these great New Orleans drummers, there’s some way about how they sit behind the drum set that still sounds to me connected to a parade.
NP: Well, it’s the dance element.
We can go as far back as we want up through The Meters and beyond. Even when I was coming up playing, my first gigs were basically playing in brass bands.
I frequently criticize jazz for its moving away from that element; not being as connected and producing generation upon generation of musicians who aren’t connected with that because once you’ve come up in bands where you see the direct correlation between how music makes the body respond, makes the body move, that’s something you carry with you.
To me, it doesn’t matter how much I’m stretching out or how avant-garde the context is; that dance sensibility is always implied. It’s always here, in my mind.
It’s one of the central differences I’ve found between Black and European music. I’ve always suspected this, but it became more prevalent to me when I started working with symphony orchestras a couple of years ago. In 2012, I wrote my first orchestral work, the “Black American Symphony,” and the first thing, when I wrote it, I was like, “I know I’m going to be dealing with symphony orchestras and they’re not used to playing Black music.”
Even though times have changed where many of the people in the orchestra have most certainly heard Black music or probably grew up with that sensibility, but in practice actually playing it is a different story.
The first thing that I noticed, one thing was that I was always under the assumption that you could just put fly shit in front of a classical musician and they’ll just read it. [snaps fingers] They’ll just read anything, and the first thing I noticed is, like, not really, you know—a lot of ghosting and fakery going on in fast orchestral passages. After we rehearsed it a few times or whatever, they got it together, but it wasn’t this immediate thing that I just thought you could put anything in front of them and they’d just read it right off the page.
The other thing I noticed is the thing with time, how a lot of classical music is very languid and it flows, but the forward motion that’s in Black music — I found that they weren’t accustomed to that.
These are just generalizations; of course there are exceptions. Still, a lot of them just didn’t have the experience of doing something that I take for granted. Where I come from, you can just put a chart in front of somebody and count it off.
There were a lot of time issues. It wasn’t even a rhythmic thing as far as swinging, because my whole thing was I didn’t want that kind of feel. I’ve heard a lot of instances where bands who swing play with orchestras and try to make the violins or the people who are not used to swinging swing, and it’s wack.
So I used the orchestra more as colors and pads and said, “Okay, we’ll deal with swingin because that’s part of the idiom we’re used to dealing with.”
EI: I haven’t had the experience of having a full orchestra read something that I wrote, but I’ve been around a lot of classical musicians trying to play something with an American beat and it’s always worse than expected.
NP: I’m really shocked.
EI: Even basic even-eighth note syncopations won’t lay right.
NP: And triplets! Triplets really messed them up, and I thought, “Well, it’s a triplet.”
EI: It’s funny because they can probably play five in the time of four, but really playing three in the time of two will hang them up, right?
NP: Yeah, that really kind of messed me up. This was right in the wake of the #BAM movement. I was inspired by a quote by Dvorak, this story of him being brought over here by a conservatory to teach and his whole vibe was, “Well, what do you have me here for? In your music of the native and the Negro melodies, you have everything you need for a school of music. You don’t need my input.”
That really inspired me. I know William Grant Still did the Afro-American Symphony, but to me, not to discredit the work, it was coming out of the European school so it didn’t really embrace the things I would imagine a Black American symphony sounding like.
My whole thing was to use the orchestra, but to use it and to create and to sort of revel in this idea of writing Negro melodies and so forth. Another thing that I found interesting, because all too often people try to say, “Well, Black musicians used European harmony and took all this…” and one of the first calls I got after I sent the music to the orchestra was the harpist, who wanted to get together with me to go over the parts. She made a comment that resonated with me; she said, “I’m not used to playing this.” In her words, she said, “I’m not used to playing these jazz harmonies.”
Now, to me, I’m using the sharp nine chord and these things that people say that Duke Ellington took from Debussy and all this, so I’m like, “Wait a minute now.” If she’s used to playing this literature from your Stravinskys and your Debussys and all the people they say we took the harmony from, then these chords shouldn’t really be all that strange to her. So it made me think about how you can have a series of notes—you can even have a dominant seventh chord—it’s the same notes, but its functionality in terms of how that functions in the music, could be totally different. It’s like using a word that looks the same in another language but it doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing.
EI: Your point about Duke Ellington I think is so dead on because there’s no harmony that Duke uses that doesn’t sound like Black music, especially when you hear him play the piano. Ellington playing chords on the piano, it’s completely Afro-American, you know what I mean?
That’s definitely a big misconception in the literature about Ellington borrowing from a Delius score or something. Of course everybody is inspired from different places, but the problem is a long-term glorification of the European side.
Like when they say Strayhorn was more sophisticated than Ellington, or that Strays was a more advanced composer…
NP: I hate that.
EI: Those same folks never point out that Strays needed to learn a lot about aesthetics from Ellington. Strayhorn wrote a corny piano concerto in high school; he knew more about musicals than jazz; in the first decade of writing for Duke he had a lot of meaningless decoration that Duke had to pare down in order to give it the right feel.
NP: Well, that doesn’t fit the narrative, that’s why they never say it.
EI: I regret to say, I wish I could ask you more about your symphony. I haven’t heard it yet, but I will hear it at some point.
Maybe we could go back some more. Nicholas, you were very talented very young, and you were also very recognized very young. I’d like to hear about the ’80s and the ’90s, who your peers were and how all that happened. I mean, in a way it’s recent history, but I don’t think it’s a story that’s understood very well yet.
NP: You’re absolutely right.
I started playing trumpet when I was four. I wanted a trumpet. I saw in my own living room some of the greatest trumpet players in the world. My big four, the first and most influential cats for me, were Teddy Riley; Clyde Kerr Jr., who I would later study with at the New Orleans Center For The Creative Arts; Wendell Brunious; and Leroy Jones.
Out of all the instruments, the trumpet just appealed to me, something about its role and its prominence in New Orleans music in particular: the penchant and the style and the swagger which the New Orleans trumpet players played with, and its leadership role — just the whole energy of trumpet players. Something about those dudes was kind of cool to me, and I loved the instrument for its wide range of expressive possibilities because you could peel the paint off the wall or it could be this beautifully melodic, warm instrument. I just liked that range of expression.
So I told my father I wanted a trumpet, he bought me one for Christmas that year, my fourth year, and it was a pocket trumpet, like Don Cherry used to play.
I was pretty much playing by ear. I remember my maternal grandfather, who also played piano, would come over a lot and I would always ask him to play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” It was weird because I liked that section where it went to the IV chord at the end, so sometimes I would just lay out and let him play, and I would come in right there. He’d keep looping it and I’d come in right on that IV chord. And pretty much just playing by ear at that time.
I think it was around this time or maybe a little before that I became cognizant of wanting to hear specific songs. The first thing I really remember wanting to hear and hear a lot of was Grover Washington’s “Mr. Magic.” It must have been annoying to my family to play “Mr. Magic” over and over again. But they indulged me, and I remember just standing in front of the record player watching it spin. That Grover piece was very mesmerizing to me. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but actually I was transcribing, either humming along with what I heard or playing along with it.
And my development pretty much remained the same until about eight years old. At that point my father thought it would be best for me to study with a formal trumpet teacher, so my first lessons were with a cat by the name of Johnny Fernandez — they called him, in New Orleans, “John-KNEE” — and I only have a very vague memory of him. Then I studied with another teacher at Xavier University, where both my parents went and where my grandfather went, by the name of E. Diane Lyle — I still think she’s around in the Pennsylvania area — and that’s when I started working on etudes, trumpet technique, literature and stuff like that.
At first my playing had been for fun and at my leisure, but now my father was paying money for me to go to lessons every week, so I had these things I had to practice. Then it just became too much of a task, so I found myself sort of rebelling against music because it ceased to be fun. I remember we’d get into this little thing of my father being like, “Well, just practice for half an hour and I’ll give you a dollar,” or something like that. I’d fuck around for a half an hour and then I’d just be done.
It was also at eight that I joined the school band. To play in the school band we played written music, so I had to read. My father taught me to read and I learned to read basically in one day through him, taking those songs that I had picked off the radio or the albums, writing them out with the fingerings underneath so I began to recognize what I was playing — what I already heard — through sight, through fingerings, and through the notation. That’s how I learned to read music, and I started to play in the school band.
We had a great elementary school band, which my father was the teacher, so much so that we rivaled a lot of junior high and high school bands. Such was the prowess of my father as a teacher, a great teacher. Maybe about a year or so I was in the band and then I graduated; I think I was on third trumpet and maybe moved quickly to first, and then around nine or ten I found that I wasn’t clearly as much better than everybody else. I had kind of a jumpstart on people, but once my other peers were playing for a little while they started getting a little better, and, in some cases, they were probably better than me.
That was kind of a blow to the ego a little bit, and that coincided with the tuba player in our band leaving and my father, not having a replacement, asked me if I wanted to play tuba. There was only one tuba and it was like, “Cool, now I don’t have to battle with all these trumpet [players]. Now I can just hold down the bass and be the tuba player.” I stopped playing trumpet for like a year or two, and I played tuba in the school band and even made the all-city band playing tuba for two years.
However, I did my first professional gig on trumpet. My father played with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band and at Mardi Gras, when I was about nine years old, my father asked me to come along with him and bring my pocket trumpet. The cats asked me to sit in and I played with them the whole parade.
At the end of the parade, all the guys chipped in a couple bucks apiece and paid me a salary. I just thought this was the greatest thing. I came out here to have some fun and hang out, and you mean they pay you to do this? And that put a seed in my head, like, “Man, this is the best thing in the world,” and then maybe like two years later I started doing gigs and started playing trumpet again.
Cats in my neighborhood had heard that I was playing and everyone knew my father, so I started getting called for some of these brass band gigs. There was a band in my neighborhood called the All-Star Brass Band, which was led by James Andrews, who’s the eldest brother of Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. He came by my house one day and asked my father if I could join the band. And my father said yes, which was kind of weird because James didn’t even ask me, so it was this strange kind of arranged marriage.
But it was cool with me, so that was when I started gigging seriously then, going out every day. This was like the summer of maybe ’85. I had just graduated elementary school.
I loved the music; as I said before, the musicians were super cool to me, especially the trumpet players. I just loved their energy and the way cats were and how they had this lingo with each other that no one else really spoke…
…but I hated jazz!
Something about it that I didn’t like. It had nothing necessarily to do with the music, but just some idea connected with it that turned me off. Most of the music that I was really into at the time of 9 or 10 was hip-hop. The first albums I bought were Jackson Five records. There was also this popular hip-hop female artist named Roxanne Shanté who was a big thing at the time. There were all these fake Roxannes who came out to kind of piggy back off the original Roxanne’s coattails. The original Roxanne was was Roxanne Shanté, but then another chic came along called, The Real Roxanne; I had a girlfriend named Roxanne at that age, Sting was singing about “Roxanne,” so it was all these Roxannes going on around this time.
I didn’t have any so-called jazz records and I wasn’t really into it. A funny thing: this was also around the time that there was this meteoric rise of Wynton and Branford Marsalis. I had remembered them as a kid: My father used to play at the Hyatt Regency on a Sunday brunch with Ellis Marsalis, and I remember seeing these two young guys and they had these huge afros, playing. That just kind of struck me because the rest of the cats in the band seemed pretty old, but there were these two young dudes wearing dashikis and afros.
EI: They were actually in dashikis? Wynton and Branford? In dashikis?!?
NP: Shit, man, back then Ellis had an afro and wore dashikis. You can find pictures of them if you research it. They look of-the-era!
Then they went away and I didn’t know them too much after just seeing them, then I started hearing all this stuff. They were very controversial and polarizing at that time.
EI: Even in New Orleans?
NP: Yeah, like some cats really loved them, some cats thought they were really bad for the music. Wynton and Branford talked a lot of shit, so that put a lot of people off, and my general vibe was, “Yeah, I don’t like these guys,” for whatever reason.
So I’m in this brass band and for the first time in my life I’m now going to my father’s record collection. I was like, “I want to hear some of this stuff. I’m playing trumpet now. Let me check this shit out.”
So the first record I pulled out—I’m thumbing through the albums and my father had thousands of albums: Miles Davis. “Okay, he plays trumpet, let me check this out,” so I put on Four and More. I put on side two and I think the title track “Four” is on, and from the first moment I heard Tony William’s intro on the sock cymbal it was like I was hearing this stuff for the first time. Like I had never heard swing before and I was like, “Damn.”
It really fucked me up, and at that moment from Tony’s high hat — before I even heard Miles — I was like, “This is what I want to do. I want to be a musician the rest of my life.”
I wore that record out. I played it every day. Again, before I even knew what transcribing was and before anyone had told me that this was a means of developing a vocabulary, I started playing all the solos, not only Miles’s solo, but I would go into George Coleman’s solo, Herbie’s. I knew every bass line, every snare drum hit. I knew everything about that album.
EI: Wow, man. That’s a bunch of up-tempos to try to get into! That’s a hard one to play along with by ear, Four and More.
NP: Yeah. Also Miles’ chops were up on that one, he goes up to like a high A at one point on this thing. No one told me I couldn’t do it and nobody told me it was difficult, and because of that, there was no judgment. I just played it and I would just pretend that I was in the band. I would stand up and I would put a suit on sometimes and pretend I was Miles and then pretend I was George Coleman.
Then another thing that struck me when I was looking at the album: I was like, “Wait a minute, there’s Miles and George Coleman and Herbie Hancock, but this guy played this kind of acoustic music?” Because at this time I associated Herbie with “Chameleon” and “Rockit,” and “Rockit” was huge among kids my age because we were breakdancers. I was like, “Wow, so this guy played this.” That kind of opened up something for me in my mind, like maybe these things that I think are different as far as Hiphop and Jazz and all this — maybe there’s more of a connection here than I’ve been able to see thus far.
Then another album I was listening to heavily was Freddie Hubbard’s Red Clay, which again had a funky vibe to it and electronics with the Fender Rhodes piano. I think a lot of my interest in the Fender Rhodes had to do with my upbringing because when I was a child Heavy Weather by Weather Report was a big album and “Birdland” I just heard everywhere. All the cats were playing it, it was a huge hit, so I started listening to Heavy Weather and I had an immediate connection to not only Wayne Shorter, but also to Jaco, so much so that my father bought me an electric bass and I started learning Jaco’s solos and bass lines and so forth.
Those three records were my really early listening, and then after my father saw that I had a considerable interest in straight ahead, he bought me some records. The first albums he bought me were Lee Morgan’s Sidewinder; Branford’s Royal Garden Blues; maybe Think of One, Wynton’s album; and Fathers and Sons, the album where one side is Von and Chico Freeman and the other side Wynton and Branford. James Black on drums, Ellis on piano, and Charles Fambrough’s on bass. Also, Art Farmer’s Live at Boomer’s, was another one of the albums.
EI: With Clifford Jordan and Cedar? That has some fast tempos on that, as well.
NP: Yeah, pretty hardcore. I definitely didn’t take any kind of primer or introductory road.
EI: You know, I had Royal Garden Blues young, too. It’s a great record, it really had an impact.
NP: Still to this day probably my favorite Branford record, my personal favorite.
EI: Yeah, it has the vibe.
NP: I’m sure he would disagree, but it’s a masterpiece. The thing I like about it is there’s no pretense. And normally an album like that with a different band on every track and is conceptually all over the place, doesn’t work, but something about it is very cohesive. So that was a very pivotal album for me.
EI: Yeah, I think everyone just plays so good on it. Branford always sounds great, of course, but some of that early Branford is just so fresh
NP: There’s just so much abandon there. I’ve had arguments with Wynton — even at that time — because those are some of my favorite records. Not only from a nostalgia standpoint, because it’s sort of the first stuff I was listening to and what was popular at the time when I became serious about listening to straight ahead — but even still to this day because it’s like, I don’t know, before maybe they developed a conception of what jazz is supposed to be or whatever.
They just went for it.
Some of the stuff Wynton was doing on the trumpet nobody had ever played. And some cats criticized them for being corny or, “Oh, he’s too technical, he’s too this and that,” and I know he got a lot of flack from the older cats. Particularly Freddie and Miles and Woody were hypercritical, but I’m sorry — all due respect to the masters, but I know they had to hear this young dude and be like, “This motherfucker is scary!”
And I’m sure he intimidated them to some degree. And we also have to take into consideration that they were all at Columbia Records until Wynton came along. At a certain point, George Butler was sort of catering to all these other guys and when Wynton came along it was kind of like, “Forget you guys, I’m putting all my money on the young star.”
EI: Well, you know I love Woody Shaw, and the Woody Shaw CBS records are killing, especially the trumpet playing — but if you put on Black Codes, it just trumps the Shaw CBS records on some basic level about band vibe.
NP: See, I like Black Codes, but my favorite has always been Think of One.
EI: Interesting.
NP: A lot of people don’t say this.
EI: It’s like the one right before Black Codes, right?
NP: I think maybe Hot House Flowers comes in between…
EI: But it’s still the cats, essentially, with Tain and Kirkland.
NP: Right. I have a lot of theories about the direction of that album and the juxtaposition of those, Think of One and Black Codes. I think Black Codes is a great album, don’t get me wrong, but by then the band conception became codified. A lot of what I used to love about what Wynton and Branford and Doc Tone and Phil Bowler — be it Phil Bowler was on bass or Ray Drummond was on bass or Charles Fambrough — was that when they burned out, they could go anywhere. When they played “Knozz-Moe-King,” it could go anywhere. There was no set chordal structure and it was almost like they were picking up where the Miles ’60s quintet left off.
Now, by the time it got to Black Codes there are real chord changes on the forms and prescribed meter changes, whereas before it was just completely open, what we’d call “burnout.” “Burnout” is the term for a style of spontaneous composition where the musicians collectively create a sound based on minimal or no chordal sketches. Usually high energy, but can also be sultry and romantic.
They’d just burnout, and that’s what I loved about them. Later, they had a system of cues, but the way those cues functioned became different, then by the time it got to the quartet, particularly at Blues Alley, it became really codified. It became worked out, prescribed: “When we do this, we’ll turn around whatever and then Tain will play this and then we’ll do that.” In fact, I read your interview where he kind of expounded upon that concept and he was like, “No, they were doing this wrong or doing that wrong,” while that other band, to me, he didn’t have that much control over.
EI: Well, also because Kenny Kirkland was a little older. He had been around the block.
NP: And a lot of people forget that Branford is Wynton’s older brother. I mean, the conception a lot of times is that Wynton was the serious one and Branford was the jokester so it made it seem like Wynton was his older brother and Branford was sort of like the young spaz. But yeah, Think of One I love. Also Hot House Flowers. Wynton’s playing on there is superb, and those arrangements by Bob Freeman are great too.
EI: I don’t know if you’d agree with me here, but one of my theories is, like, that burnout stuff owes a little bit of debt to the Dave Liebman-Richie Beirach world. Kirkland played with Liebman in the ‘70s, and they sort of took that Coltrane model but put some of those more crunchy, whatever, “Eb triad over E” chords and made that more the base, rather than the Coltrane modes. I hear this faint echo of that in that burnout music.
NP: It’s out of Coltrane and it’s out of Miles. I would say, at least how it manifested in Wynton’s band, more on Miles’s side of things. You can actually see in Tain’s playing at a certain point, like on Think Of One, Tain is definitely leaning more towards Tony, then later it became a thing of him embracing Elvin and maybe Jack [DeJohnette]. This is just my theory.
Still to this day, I think J Mood was a really fabulous record, and different. It’s a very romantic and intimate record, perhaps with the exception of maybe “Skain’s Domain,” which again is codified burnout. But “Melodique,” Marcus’s tune “Presence that Lament Brings,” it’s a very melancholy album, and that made a strong impression on me.
EI: Wynton plays with restraint, considering he can play everything.
NP: It was kind of a change for him at that time. It was interesting because years later when I would join Marcus Roberts’s band, when I made my first record, the vibe of my record I wanted to be very melancholy. I wanted Marcus to be on it and play sort of like he did on J Mood, when he was still heavily influenced by Herbie and Kenny Kirkland, in particular. I wanted Marcus to play in that style and he flat out told me, “Well, man, if that’s what you’re looking for then you need to call somebody else, because I’ve worked years to get that stuff out of my playing.”
EI: Interesting.
NP: So I went to Mulgrew Miller instead.
EI: Marcus was so good so young. J Mood is his first record, I think. He comes out of the gate so strong.
Anyway go back to your personal history. We left you off with brass bands.
NP: I played with James a number of years in the All-Star Brass Band. I started doing gigs with a lot of other people. It was through that band that I went on my first tours, went on a cruise ship, and that’s where I met Clark Terry. At the time, when I met Clark, I was playing trombone because basically James was the leader. He’s a trumpet player, he said, “You can make this gig, but I don’t want two trumpet players on this gig. If you want to make this hit, you gotta play trombone,” and I had never really played trombone, but I wanted to make the hit so I got my trombone chops together and made the gig.
Our first gig on the ship, we’re playing and Clark Terry and Al Grey come and sit right in front of the band, and we’re like, “Aw, shit. This is Clark,” because another big album for me at this time was Clark’s album Clark After Dark, which, in my opinion, has always been my favorite Clark Terry record. It’s not a very popular record amongst a lot of people, but certainly has always been one of my favorites.
EI: Who’s on that again?
NP: I think it’s like an orchestra, European cats if I’m not mistaken.
EI: Okay, it’s not one I know.
NP: Yeah, check it out. His playing is really beautiful, mostly ballads.
So I was like, “Man, this is my big moment to meet Clark,” so after we finished I walked straight over to him. Before I could make it over to him, Al Grey intercedes and is like “Oh, what you got there, young man?” and he picked up my trombone out of my hands and he moved the slide around and said, “You’ve got to work your slide. Come to my room and I’ll teach you how to keep your trombone in better shape, dut duh-dut duh-duh.” He just kind of held me captive there and by the time I was able to break away, Clark was gone and that moment was lost.
The funny part about that whole cruise was every time I would see Clark, I would try to talk to him, but Al Grey would always be there and, after a while, he’d start to get annoyed because I wouldn’t be taking him up on his offer to take a lesson with him or whatever. My whole memory of that cruise is Clark avoiding me and Al Grey getting continually peeved with me because I wasn’t serious about playing the trombone.
Fast forward to a couple months later: Clark came to New Orleans, and we wanted to have this big jam session at this place called The Shop, which was this warehouse that we used to shed in. This time I had my trumpet in tow, and we jammed, and when I first started playing I could see Clark’s eyes light up from the other side of the room. When we finished, he came up to me and he was like, “Man, I didn’t know you played trumpet! I didn’t know you could play like that! I just thought you were some sad trombone player whose arms were too short to reach sixth position.”
And from that moment on he took me under his wing and was like a musical father of sorts, invited me to play gigs and just a really, really great mentor.
A lot of my first early record dates in New York were through Clark. The first major label album I was on was with this cat, Amani A.W. Murray, who was noted at the time because he was this 12-year-old kid who could play Bird solos. He was on like maybe David Letterman, he was on “Showtime At The Apollo,” these TV shows playing Charlie Parker solos. He was making his debut album for GRP, which was a huge label at that time, and the band was Billy Hart on drums, Bob Cranshaw on electric bass, and Benny Green on piano.
Shortly before that, I got invited to play in Marcus Roberts’s band. He knew me through Wynton. I actually met Wynton when I was 12. He called the house to speak to my father and I picked up the phone — this was post-me not liking this arrogant young cat — so I started listening to his records. Keystone 3 with Art Blakey was an album my father had and that was another one I’d listen to nonstop, the Messengers band with Billy Pierce, Bobby Watson.
EI: There’s that tune they played I really like, “Wheel Within a Wheel?”
NP: They did play that in that band, but that’s not on that album. Yeah, that’s a great Bobby Watson tune.
I was really into the Messengers at that time and particularly because I saw that Wynton and Branford were in that band and Duck [Donald Harrison] and Terence [Blanchard] followed them, so in the back of my mind it was, to me, “Get your chops together, get your shit together, go to New York, and play with Art Blakey.” This was a thing that had already started crystallizing in my mind. I wanted to be in the Messengers like Wynton and Terence, so I was listening to a lot of the Art Blakey stuff. I started listening heavily to Wynton and Duck and Terence.
Speaking of ’80s music and how it’s not really been dealt with historically: That first Blanchard/Harrison album on Concord, New York Second Line, is where they began to bridge this gap between the burnout and this New York/New Orleans sound that Branford and Wynton had become known for. But Duck and Terence fused the second line and the Mardi Gras Indian thing with it, which gave it a whole other coloration to it. They were pioneers in that thing. It’s something I don’t think Donald Harrison gets properly credited for.
They did a version of the “Saints” on that second album, Discernment, and not many people talk about it. You know those are great records, the Columbia records, and then they did several for Columbia, Black Pearl, like “Ninth Ward Strut” and all this stuff. I mean, very, very unique albums. I don’t think there’s been anything in music like what they had together before or since — very special band, very special energy they had. And there was something exciting about the competitive spirit, like not only between Wynton and Branford and Duck and Terence, but their competition with each other, to one up one another, because I think by the time Wynton started fusing that New Orleans thing into his music was like Black Codes. That was the first song that I can recall that he recorded that hinted at a New Orleans groove, a lot of those tunes were influenced by one of our mentors I spoke earlier of, James Black. That thing of putting a bar of ¾ in there, that was a James Black compositional element from way back in those records he was doing in the ’60s on A.F.O. Records with Ellis Marsalis.
EI: Right. Yeah, there was so much energy in all that 80’s music and it really had its impact. It became one of the ways to play ever since. I was just reading Robert Glasper talking about making the Kendrick Lamar record, saying that the direction was Branford and Kenny Kirkland for a tune, you know what I mean? Total ‘80s reference.
NP: I heard that as soon as they did it. Before they said it, I said, this is Mo’ Better Blues. I just got it in the voice over and the way, even the feel, the bounce, it had.
Now, there’s a difference between the bounce of the ‘90s and the ’80s swing because the ’80s swing didn’t really have a bounce to it. My feeling about it is cats didn’t really learn to swing yet. Some did better than others, but a lot of those cats were first generation musicians who were just getting exposed to swing with the exception of Wynton and Branford. A lot of these musicians who were playing didn’t come up in the tradition of hearing it in households, really, or being connected to swing music. In some cases it took a few years before cats started getting their swing feel together and by the ’90s now, that coinciding with the New Jack Swing era, where there was this hard bounce to the music.
Branford’s band in particular seemed to captivate that feel in a certain way. Bob Hurst has that bounce. There was a hump to it, and by the time you got to like your Rodney Whitaker, who played with Duck and Terence, then when he went on to play in Roy Hargrove’s band with Marc Cary and Greg Hutchinson and Ron Blake, that album Of Kindred Souls, in particular, there’s a hard edge to it. There’s a certain bounce on the swing that, you know, that was when cats were eschewing the pickups, bass players were digging in harder, there was this pro-black message. Public Enemy had just done whatever. KRS-One was doing his thing, you know, Malcolm X the movie had come out with Spike Lee, and all these things sort of fused together. You had these hard beats with Teddy Riley, what he was doing for Keith Sweat and Blackstreet and Michael Jackson, and this imagery that ’80s music had where, particularly from a male perspective, there was this effeminate kind of R&B sort of thing that Michael Jackson and Prince had with the Jheri curls and the wet hair and the androgynous vibe.
Now to counterbalance that, we saw this hard-edged thing that kind of got introduced through a woman: Janet Jackson. She had the kneepads on and the jeans, and she’s in a basement with leaky pipes, and what was this sort of soft, R&B androgynous element became this very masculine bravado that became reflected not only in the imagery but in the style of the music.
And like I said bass players started unplugging, Wynton and Branford started putting on their albums that Delfeayo produced that they were not using the “dreaded bass direct,” and bass players were getting calluses on their fingers, and things started to change a bit.
Wynton took Reginald Veal from Duck and Terence, and he got Herlin in the band and started embracing New Orleans in a more obvious way.
The thing I’ll say about J Mood also, which I hadn’t really heard many people or any people talk about, is that that’s an essentially New Orleans record. Chordally and that melancholy, I think what attracted me to it is that it reminded me of the type of harmonic language that I heard in cats like James Black, who to me was like the Wayne Shorter of New Orleans. He was the compositional guru, he was the one who I first heard implement polychords and unusual root movement. Their harmonic movement was very similar.
Eventually, I started to study Wayne Shorter’s music. I realized how similar it was to James Black’s music. First of all, they favored sus chords and polychords and a lot of movements in half steps and thirds, either major or minor thirds. The way the chords would move, that just creates a certain type of harmonic energy. And that record in particular, that kind of pathos and melancholy I associated with J Mood.
Now, I was hanging out with Wynton a lot at that time, but I hadn’t seen him play live yet with his band. The first time I saw his band live was in ’88 and……the first tune they played was “Majesty of the Blues.” Now, Majesty of the Blues I don’t think had come out yet, Blues Alley was the last album that was out, so we were all expecting to hear him burning out again, and when we heard the first tune, “Majesty of the Blues,” it was a shock.
It was a momentary disappointment, but at the same time it was unlike anything we had ever heard. There was something…I’m trying to describe the feeling. It was an ominous sort of thing taking place. It was familiar because of the New Orleans and the Herlin and Veal connection in the rhythm section, but there was this other layer to it. And I think particularly because I was expecting him to burnout, hearing that coming off of Blues Alley was like…I’d liken it to maybe what people felt like when maybe they first saw like Miles when he was playing Bitches Brew, like, “What the fuck? What is this?”
Even if you loved it, it was like a complete culture shock.
EI: For me, too. At my stage in my development I didn’t really know that much about Black music or New Orleans music, frankly. I mean, I had my record collection there in Wisconsin, but what did I know? Anyway, I really rejected it at the moment. I’ve since gone back and listened to The Majesty of the Blues and it’s actually more creative and edgy than I remembered it. But to go from Blues Alley to Majesty of the Blues was a hell of a thing, for sure.
NP: That was a big jump, a huge jump: and to see it, to have that expectation of that’s what you’re going to see and to hear that live…it was a cool feeling, though. And to Wynton’s credit, he really made me respect and develop more of an appreciation for my connection to Armstrong.
Because when I was trying to play…you know, I started with Miles and Freddie and all this stuff, I wasn’t trying to hear the Hot Fives and the Hot Sevens, you know, playing in brass bands and stuff like that. It’s interesting to some degree, maybe like vicariously, it was good that I met him at that time because he perhaps missed out on some of that. He was like, “Don’t miss out, don’t do like me and piss away your teenage years thinking Louis Armstrong was an Uncle Tom.” And because I had so much respect for him and he was saying this, it made me look at Armstrong differently, like, “Well, okay. If he’s saying this, then there must be something to it.”
But what was weird was that the connection was like this: It went from almost being ashamed of Armstrong to being like this was some language that I had known for years, and all I had to do was change my mindset and it would come. And almost as instantly as I changed my thought about who Louis Armstrong was and what he represented, I began to get comparisons to him, playing-wise. The funny thing was that I didn’t really listen to him that much; I might have transcribed one Armstrong solo. Even to this day I don’t consider myself an aficionado of his recordings, but there was something on a cellular level that I just got.
And it’s one thing to feel that, but also guys like Doc Cheatham and Jonah Jones and Sweets Edison and these people who knew Armstrong told me that they felt Armstrong’s spirit in what I played. Jonah Jones once said, “Man, you’re better than Armstrong!”
I don’t think I would go that far, but it was important to get that affirmation from guys who, particularly in Doc’s case, too, who was mentored by Armstrong. When Doc Cheatham moved to Chicago, all the other cats were kind of mean to him, but Armstrong and King Oliver embraced him. He would sub gigs for them and what not.
Part of this circle: I first met Doc on a cruise ship. I was playing with Clark Terry at the time. I went from being snubbed by Clark to being in his band, and when I introduced myself to Doc after his first set and I told him I was from New Orleans, he just lit up and instantly began telling me all these stories about Armstrong and Oliver. Not even hearing me play a note, he invited me to come sit in the whole second set with him. That was the beginning of a relationship I had with him from the late ’80s for the rest of his life.
EI: This is of course all New Orleans again. New Orleans is still probably one of the best places, if not the best place, where you can get an idea of the spectrum of the music—from the brass band to the latest dance moves, right?
NP: Yeah, we even had our avant-garde free movement in Kidd Jordan and also one of my mentors I spoke of earlier, Clyde Kerr Jr. They did an album in the early ’80s called No Compromise! It’s killing because it’s interesting to hear concepts that we sort of associate with Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry but with this underlying New Orleans undercurrent.
To me, what’s always been unique and important about Ornette is that he brought the music back to its New Orleans polyphonic roots at a time when, post-Bird, the music became sort of codified. Whereas people used to improvise within a concept of free rhythmic and melodic thought, Bird had developed this system that people had interpreted as a paint by numbers thing so if you have a set amount of chord changes, we don’t really have to think or improvise anymore.
His rhythmic inflections and the shapes of his lines is to me what is most important about Bird. Yeah, the notes are beautiful and they have their place, but what set Bird apart from his predecessors was not the notes. If you look at cats like Don Byas, Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, in many instances they were perhaps more harmonically daring in some ways.
EI: There can be more extensions on the chord, at any rate.
NP: And it hadn’t become a codified thing because Bird had a certain way he liked to move from note to note, whereas before cats didn’t have that guide so it could kind of be anywhere. So when it became a thing of cats getting so drenched in the harmonic or the intellectual aspect of it, I think lines started to lose shape and they just became lines.
What Ornette made cats remember is, “That shit’s not really important,” you know. Like, we don’t even have any fucking music. I can have 10 cats here and we can all kind of play, you know, polyphony, and just create with reckless and wild abandon within a blues context: melodic structures, play shapes, as opposed to playing things that are only shapes that a musician can hear because they understand harmony. Normal people can’t hear that. What’s exciting about bebop to the average listener is the shape of a line. [scats rapid, shaped line] When you bring this excitement somewhere, you don’t know where it’s going to go. Once it becomes something where you actually have to understand how a scale works over a chord to be able to hear the shape, then, to me, that’s not really a shape anymore. So I think that’s what Don Cherry and Ornette reminded cats of.
EI: Well, there’s such a vocal quality in the playing, right? And certainly it’s the blues. The thing about Bird and Ornette is that they’re always playing the blues.
NP: Exactly.
EI: It doesn’t matter what the context is or even the content, as you are saying. It’s got this cry of the blues is in there.
NP: And essentially that’s what all Black American music should have, at the very least, regardless of your stylistic preferences. It should be a given that you’re a blues player. And I think the music at a certain point got away from that.
EI: No doubt!
NP: And we’re still suffering from that to this day.
EI: Let’s go back to the ’80s because you talked about Wynton and Branford a little bit and then about Blanchard/Harrison a little bit. So then, who’s next? What’s the next stage of the development? You mentiond Roy Hargrove’s Of Kindred Souls…
NP: Yeah, I touched on that a little bit. Ralph Peterson’s V, that album he did with Terence and Steve Wilson and Geri Allen and Phil Bowler—that’s a very pivotal record. Donald Brown’s albums! The importance of Donald Brown’s compositions can’t be stated enough. The Early Bird Gets the Short End of the Stick is a very important album that people don’t talk about.
And I’m almost afraid to open this box, for missing cats: Ralph Moore’s Images, which Terence was on. Charles Fambrough’s The Proper Angle. Billy Pierce as a voice, the impact that he had on saxophonists, Branford in particular. I don’t think we’d have a certain amount of the language were it not for cats like Billy Pierce and Donald Brown and James Williams.
EI: I finally was checking out some James Williams at last. He was a blind spot, but Noah Baerman gave me a mix CD of prime James Williams that made me realize that he was really a gospel player at heart. This unlocked a piece of the puzzle for me.
NP: Again, gospel is the blues. It all comes back to the same communal spirit of Black music, which is central and fundamental.
“Jazz” becomes problematic, because jazz sits outside of that perspective. Traditionally, from the beginning — from the earliest jazz with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band! — we see it sitting outside and being a caricature of the music, as opposed to an acknowledgment of the community. You read statements of Nick LaRocca basically promoting a very white supremacist idea that he had, like his shit was better than this Black stuff, even though, like, “Yo, you wouldn’t even be doing this if it weren’t for King Oliver and people like that.”
EI: Ok, hold that thought, we’ll get back to that, but before we do…
NP: It’s hard to discuss that without maybe perhaps being politically offensive — but since when the fuck do I care about that?
EI: No, I’m in, but while I have my chance I’d like to finish up on that scene with Donald Brown and Ralph Peterson’s V and some of the other guys we’re talking about. Is there a way to characterize the feeling the musicians had about it at the time? You observed it, you knew the cats.
NP: Ok, back to Wynton. As I said, this energy from Wynton doing his thing and the burnout became codified on Black Codes. That was like the swan song of Branford and Kenny leaving. I mean, he had to change; he couldn’t continue. It’s like after Trane and Cannonball and Red Garland and Philly Joe weren’t with Miles anymore, Miles had to figure out something else to do. It wasn’t about a style; it was about these musicians bringing this to the music. They are the progenitors of a certain idea and without them, you can kind of force it, but it’s just not really quite right, so you gotta figure out something else to do.
I think Wynton tried to find other sax players for which he had that connection, but he never really found that telepathic kind of thing he had with Branford. From outside of just being a musical kindred spirit, this was his older brother. They shared experiences. That’s even different than Miles and Trane having a connection; you can have a connection with somebody, but when somebody’s your fucking brother? You can’t trump that. And it’s something that’s intangible because even years later after all the scuttle went down and they played again on “Cain & Abel” from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, they still had that thing where they were finishing each other’s sentences.
As a side note Wynton’s sound had changed. Black Codes is, I think, the first album where he played the Monette. The Bach has a distinctive tone to it; when I think of Bach, I think it’s a real trumpet sound. The Monette, while a brilliantly designed instrument, is a Monette. It is the difference between a flugelhorn and a trumpet: it’s not the same type of sound, it’s not the same type of instrument. A Monette is its own instrument.
My idea of the Monette is — because it’s kind of a reedy thing as opposed to brass — I think Wynton was able to find that sound he had in oneness with his brother. It was that sound, the Monette sounds like a trumpet and the saxophone together in one horn, and that’s kind of how I looked at what the Monette was.
EI: This is some real trumpet stuff now. We talked about Wynton, Roy, Terence: How does Wallace Roney fit in this?
NP: Fuck that motherfucker — he don’t fit in at all.
EI: [Incredulous laughter, waits…] And Roy? You have anything more to say about Roy?
NP: I think Roy and I met Wynton around the same time, even though Roy’s a couple years older than me. Roy was someone I heard about through Wynton. He would kind of taunt each of us, you know. He’d tell me, “Man, there’s this cat in Fort Worth who you gotta watch out for,” and years later I’d find out Wynton was telling Roy the same thing about me. It actually felt like a long lost brother by the time I met Roy because I’d been hearing about him for years. Wynton had an ear to the streets and knew who all the young cats were across the country, so we’d just hear a lot about each other through him.
It was also in the late ’80s when Ellis Marsalis had moved back to New Orleans to start teaching at the University of New Orleans. Also on the faculty was Harold Batiste and another New Orleanian who had moved to Virginia with Ellis to study with him, and had moved back with him to teach, Victor Goines. Ellis moving back brought a lot of these cats, young musicians who had studied under or had been fans of Wynton, like Jeremy Davenport, a lot of St. Louis cats—Peter Martin, David Berger, Chris Thomas, they all went to the same school, so there was this influx of a lot of cats to New Orleans through that program that Ellis had started at UNO.
I was hanging out with all of them and this was when I was like 16. I started playing with Marcus Roberts, and this was around the time I first met Brian Blade. He was studying with Johnny Vidacovich over at Loyola, and we used to have these Sunday jams at this club called Tipitina’s on Sunday afternoons, a matinée.
I remember when Blade first came down, we were all vibing him because he was this kind of meek cat with these little round glasses. He still has that kind of meek persona. He got on the drums, he hadn’t really put it together yet, and cats were kind of vibing him. I didn’t see him again for another three months and he went into some type of Jimmy Smith-in-a-warehouse with the B3 or like some Sonny Rollins-on-the-bridge shit, because when he came back to that session the next time, he sounded pretty much like how he sounds today, like that kind of force. It was like, “What the fuck did this cat do? Like, what happened?” Of course he’s developed since, but he already had that sound that’s associated with Blade now.
We started playing together a lot. We were a part of Victor Goines’s quintet. In fact, we made an album called Genesis: myself, Blade, Peter Martin, Chris Thomas, and Victor, obviously. There’s a video of part of the band on YouTube, but Peter wasn’t on it. It was Glen Patscha on piano and Roland Guerin is on bass. I was a few years younger so I didn’t begin going to college with them until like two years later, but we did a lot of playing and hanging. That was the first time that, for me, I felt connected with people close to my own age who were playing outside of a New Orleans brass band thing. Up until that time all the cats pretty much around my age were playing brass band music or trad music. No young cats were playing outside of NOCCA, where we learned Bird tunes and stuff like that, but no one around my age was playing things other than brass band repertoire or traditional New Orleans music.
I felt a sense of camaraderie with these cats closer to my age who were into a lot of the things that I was into. We used to watch “In Living Color” and shit. This was like the first generation of cats younger than Duck and Terence and Branford and Donald Brown and all these guys. We had been listening to their music and we were the first cats under them coming up, so we shared this spirit of being the first generation of cats who were influenced by that body of work and playing that music. That was a really special and fertile time in the New Orleans scene. We were all broke as hell, you know, but it was music all the time. I remember going to gigs and Brian Blade had this VW Bug, and we’d stack all his drums in there. I’d be on the floor under shit, with Thomas’s bass — I don’t know how we got all that shit in his bug — going to do a gig. We were lucky if we made five dollars, but it was all music. We listened to records all day, we jammed all day, and we’d play gigs, and I learned a lot in that period.
A lot of us started working with Marcus Roberts at the time. Chris was already in the band, Herb Harris was the tenor player, Scotty Barnhart was on trumpet, and the first drummer in the band was Billy Kilson. A lot of people didn’t know that there was that connection between Kilson and Marcus; Kilson only did a couple gigs with us and then he left Marcus’s band to go play with Dianne Reeves—Marcus was pretty pissed about that—and then Blade came in the band.
EI: Say something about Marcus Roberts.
NP: Whew! Obviously a force, and I admired him on records for years. There was such an intensity about him, and you could see that even when you would watch videos at the time, like when he played: very little body movement, animation to what he was doing. It was super, super serious, and when he would do interviews there was this very super-concentrated-type thing. When I joined his band, that was, to this date, the hardest situation that I’ve ever been in. He was so hard on us.
EI: Like in what way?
NP: I mean, we rehearsed from like twelve noon to like three in the morning.
EI: Really?
NP: Yeah, and there was no music. Marcus is blind, so we would learn parts by ear, and he was coming out of Wynton, so when he started writing the long form, through composed stuff in the spirit of “Majesty of the Blues” we’d be learning these parts, note by note, piecing them together. In a sense it was good, because by the time we would finish learning a tune I knew everything about that tune. Listening to him play, I knew the tenor part, the bass part, the drums, you know. But we’d be in rehearsal, we’d start at noon, it’d be seven o’clock, and somebody would be like, “Uh, Marcus, we’ve rehearsed for seven hours. We’re kind of hungry.” He’d be like, “Okay, somebody call for pizza so we can shed ’til it gets here.” [laughs] We’d take a little break and then we’d go back to shedding.
It was like that every day. But also, besides the endless hours, he was mean! He was fucking mean. Talking about paying dues!
When I met up with him, we were rehearsing in Tallahassee, where he lived, and we were staying at Scotty and Herb’s house. He said, “Catch a bus and I’ll reimburse you,” so I took a 14-hour bus from New Orleans to Tallahassee and I got there and we rehearsed for like a week, might have done a gig after that. Then at the end of the week I needed bus fare to get back home, so I’m like, “Yo, Marcus, I’m going to need to get the bus fare home, and you said you’d reimburse me,” and he kind of brushed me off.
I remember I told my father, “Dad, yeah, Marcus don’t want to pay me. He told me he’d reimburse me.” He said, “Boy, you better get your money or don’t come your ass back home!” [laughs]
So I was like, shit, I had to man up, and I went back to Marcus and I was like, “Marcus, I’m gonna really need you to reimburse me,” and he reluctantly reached in his wallet and said, “You ought to be paying me.” [laughs]
But he gave me the fucking money, though.
Shit like that. We’d be playing, we’d be doing a gig somewhere at a festival, and he’d feature everybody on something and he’d introduce such and such, “Scotty Barnhart’s going to play this and Herb’s gonna play that,” And he’d get to me and he’d be like, “Yeah, we’re gonna feature Nicholas Payton now. He’s only 16 years old and he doesn’t know what he’s doing, so forgive him, y’all. Here he is: Nicholas Payton!”
EI: No…
NP: And, you know, I’m supposed to go play after that! But, man, I remember at times being so fucking pissed because we’d be in rehearsals and he’d basically be having us feeling like we weren’t shit — he’d say things like, “You can’t play, I don’t know why you’re here” — and after a while I just started feeling like, “Why are we here. We’re so sad, like, why are we here? There must be something you like about us, so why are we here?” Years later I thought about it, and I think a large part of it was because Wynton was his first gig and he didn’t really have any other experience. I think he got hazed really bad in Wynton’s band. That was his rite of passage, so he thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.
EI: I’ve heard that there’s always hazing with Wynton’s band—
NP: …hoooo!
EI: Branford’s band too, right?
NP: Oh, yeah, man, big time, like college fraternity, like really fucking with you. And while I grew up in a ’hood where cats rib all the time, there’s a different power dynamic when it’s your peers and y’all just talking about each others momma or whatever else than a cat that’s like five years older than you and you listen to their records and shit…
EI: And you really want the gig, besides.
NP: Yeah! I think I got from my dad putting it in my head, like “Don’t let no motherfucker — I don’t care how much you revere them — don’t let them fucking talk to you any kind of way.” And so I would kind of talk back or I wouldn’t take the shit or I would stand up, and they didn’t like that.
But, to Marcus’s credit years, later, maybe like 10 years later, I went down to see his band at the Vanguard, and he pulled me to the side and he was just like, “Man, I’m really sorry for how I treated you. I was a young man, I didn’t know what I was doing.” And I respected that.
EI: Right, he was young at the time. Later he knew better.
NP: Those were some hard years, man. And a lot of cats didn’t make it. A lot of cats fell by the wayside because this was a lot of cats’ first gig and they thought if this is how it is then why should they stick around?
I’ve always saw both sides. On a certain level perhaps you should be more encouraging to young cats, and then on another level if you don’t have the emotional fortitude to withstand some hazing, then maybe you can’t be out here, because there are a lot worse things you’re going to have to deal with in this music business than somebody hazing you or telling you you ain’t shit. People going to be telling you that to some degree for the rest of your musical career, so if you don’t have the wherewithal to wade through it, then maybe it’s not for you. So I kind of feel two ways about it, but I saw a lot of my friends and a lot of cats who I thought would be major contenders wave the white flag and do something else.
EI: I’m not sure if I’m right about this, but when I think about when the music existed in a time when there was segregation: The cats who were going to play in a band, they were representing something bigger than just the music. They really had to prepare. It was a very serious thing to play in one of the bands that would actually have a gig and tour and be presented to the culture as a whole. It seems to me like that’s one of the reasons that music was so good in those eras.
NP: You were playing for your life.
EI: You were playing for your life.
NP: You were playing for generations.
EI: Exactly.
NP: “We’re all counting on you.” Yeah, it was that kind of pressure. It was a life or death kind of thing. You’re representing ancestry, you’re representing a lot of people, and you’re breaking down doors. And for musicians, long before there was a Civil Rights Movement, you were going in places that Black people were not allowed unless you were serving, so there was a lot resting on you at that particular time.
Like I said, there was a bit of that energy coming back in the music in the ’90s because there was this resurgence of the Black Power edict. Coming off post-Reagan and post-War On Drugs, post-crack infiltrating, there was a certain vibration in the air and the music meant something larger than a gig or just playing. You were representing, for Black people and fight the power and all these things; the swing had that feeling in it. It had that same burn or that same edge as Coltrane’s “Alabama,” or it was another ’60s in a sense.
EI: This might be a stretch, but is some of that hazing from Wynton or Branford might be connected to that feeling, like, “We’re taking on the big guns here; we need the biggest guns we got,” you know what I mean?
NP: I would like to believe that, but honestly I think it had more of a root in insecurity. But there was also a resurgence of Black Power, though.
You can look at interviews and read what cats were saying then about Black culture and about Black people versus what they’re saying now — if they’re addressing it at all. It’s just interesting to me to see the juxtaposition of where certain musicians were then and what they were speaking of versus now. A lot of the same people aren’t even addressing the cultural aspects of it anymore, so that’s interesting to me.
Although maybe at a certain point, you just get tired. There’s a line in Kendrick Lamar’s thing, at a part of the interview where they create this thing where he’s talking to Tupac and he’s talking about, “Yeah, you have this window,” and (I’m paraphrasing), “You catch a black man and up to a certain age, the teens and twenties, and after that you just lose that fire.” You lose that fight. You lose that thing that makes you feel like you want to challenge the status quo.
EI: Let’s talk about your own activism.
NP: For me, contrary to a lot of popular belief, it doesn’t come from a space of railing against something just for the sake of it. It’s not that these things were not important to me at a time, but as I’ve grown older and saw the changing of the guard and a lot of your Ray Browns and your Elvin and Hank Joneses — the people who I worked with who kept shit in check a certain way — the generation that followed, my generation, the generation or so after kind of dropped the ball.
And I’ve seen the milk and honey years of the Young Lions, and record deals, and a certain type of fee structure, and things that took years to build come crumbling down in such a short amount of time — things that were not acceptable, that people fought for them to be not acceptable, are acceptable now, like musicians undercutting one another. You should leave this shit better than what you found it. We shouldn’t turn this over to the cats who are under us in worse shape. In extreme cases those cats died for us to have the opportunities and the privileges we have.
Unfortunately I’ve had to — and I say “had to” because I don’t really have a choice — step out in many instances alone or be a sole voice in something, when I think that should be mitigated by my peers. A lot of them are like, “I ain’t touchin’ it!” so I’ve had to bear the brunt of a lot of shit because it’s not being spread out between a lot more people.
Even if we don’t agree, even if you don’t like the way I do it, whatever, then wage your own movement — but there should be a sense of solidarity where it can be like, “Well, we aren’t going to pay you because we don’t agree that it’s Black music or whatever,” then they shouldn’t be able to go to you and be able to take the gig for less, or get you to take it and make that concession. Whereas at one time there might have been instances — and not this utopian thing where we all fight together or whatever, I mean, a lot of those older cats hated each other and fucked each other’s wives and cheated each other out of money, so it’s not a thing of being morally perfect — but there was a time when there was even a code of ethics among criminals, certain things that people wouldn’t do, a certain moral code that I find is little to non-existent now.
As I said, I’m the only one speaking to certain things, because a lot of other people are too worried about losing a gig or something. But you ultimately do lose when you start to see the fee structures going down. It gets to the point where you can’t live anymore. When that next generation under you comes and starts undercutting you, then what are you going to do? And when the frame of reference gets shorter and shorter. My generation and maybe a little before is one the first generations where I felt that cats wouldn’t give other cats their due.
For instance, I was always the youngest cat in a lot of the situations. I remember how strange it felt to me when there were cats coming up who started sounding like me and started playing like me. And I didn’t consider myself old yet, but I guess when, by a certain amount of years, I had developed a sound and a body of work and a concept — particularly when I was working with my quintet — there were people who looked up to us. To these high school and college kids, we were their Miles Davis or whatever, in the same way that Wynton and Terence was for me. But then to see a lot of these young trumpet players come out here — cats who I gave a lesson to, cats who I turned onto records, they were always at my gig, I would get them in for free — then they come out here and pretend like I had nothing to do with their development at all.
And I think it does a disservice to the music because a lot of the critics, they don’t know, they can’t hear. Like when I hear some of their records that are lauded as this, that, and the other, I’m like, “Man, I played that on such and such a record,” but these critics, a lot of them, their frame of reference is even shorter, so they don’t know that on such and such a record this was done, or that one.
But we see it happening with the generation that preceded me with your Billy Pierces and your Donald Browns and those cats not properly credited. And it just spirals, so then with each successive generation there’s less homage and credit paid. I shudder to think about those cats who pretended like I didn’t exist: Now, what do you think is going to happen to you? So yeah. It just really becomes cannibalistic and incestuous and doesn’t serve the music at all.
EI: I think your voice is an important one and that you’re having a really positive influence on what people are thinking. I’ve seen how people who were so certain of themselves five years ago are maybe now not as certain, and that’s positive.
NP: I agree, and it was funny to me when I started seeing it. When some cats who had a staunch position against me started to echo some of the shit I said I was like, “Oh, okay.” That’s just how it is.
EI: I think jazz education is one of the biggest problems in term of honoring a black aesthetic in the music. The history of jazz education has been somehow very uninterested in the blues. At the beginning there was the Stan Kenton-supported Lab Band from North Texas, and the next coup was Gary Burton and Berklee world. These are the iconic starts of jazz education. It’s not that there isn’t good Kenton or Burton music of course, but at the same time preserving a black aesthetic was almost what they didn’t want to do.
NP: Exactly. It’s funny: it’s not even a thing of so much like we’re gonna ignore it, but there’s gonna be a missive to try to erase it.
EI: Get rid of it.
NP: Yeah. You don’t have to love Black music, but do you have to hurt it? That’s another level of commitment right there!
But you know, man, I often think the white cats who have benefited and had their lives changed playing Black music, they know better. They know because they were able to go in ’hoods that they probably couldn’t if the elders didn’t say, “Yo, this white dude is cool,” invited you on the bandstand, invited you into the culture. The white cats should be more vocal than anybody. You should be louder than me because you owe your life, you owe your livelihood — literally, whatever riches or whatever things you’ve established — and it’s no secret that if you look at fee structure of artists, typically white cats get better offers than black cats. (There are some exceptions, obviously.)
EI: I’ve tried to argue this with a few people and it doesn’t always go over, but now’s the right time to bring it up. Affirmative action can have flaws, but to me the cats who really should have done some affirmative action were Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan or some of these lauded white old-school jazz motherfuckers who then were millionaires and only hired white guys and played for rich white people.
Not that Brubeck or Mulligan weren’t great, or that I wouldn’t love to have a conversation with them and try to learn something. And I’m painting in broad strokes. Those two in particular are not even very similar musicians and don’t think they were similar people, either.
It’s just very odd, you know, the trajectory of many of those kinds of careers at some point when they were really established.
In fact, Miles talks in his book about being disappointed in Bill Evans. Now Bill was one of the cats, although Bill Evans wouldn’t have been one of the cats if it hadn’t been for Miles Davis, right? But after Miles consecrates him Bill sort of goes off into his white trio world and that whole other thing. You just wonder how the music could have been different if Bill had made some consistently more affirmative action-type choices. That’s what Miles hints at, anyway.
NP: I feel like you owe it. You owe it to the Black community.
EI: Well, you’d think so.
NP: Come on, man. At least talk to it.
Okay, I see it both ways: hire who you want to hire, play what you want to play, and play what you’re comfortable in: I get that. I, for one, have never — if cats have been all black in my band, it’s never because I said, “I’mma have an all black band.” I just hired who the fuck I wanted to play with. I’m not gonna hire a Brotha who’s less talented than a White guy on the same instrument just because he’s Black. I’m just not gonna do that.
So, again, I don’t fault people on a certain level for hiring people they feel culturally or personally connected to. Fine. Have an all white band, play music that is heavily-laden with European concepts and light on the Black aesthetic, go ahead.
But if you’ve earned status as a millionaire or become rich off of playing something you know is Black music, I feel you should be louder than any Black person about the injustice that Black people have to go through. Not only to play this music — just to be human.
And I don’t want to say accepted as human because I don’t give that level of power to any man to decide who’s human and who’s not. That’s a whole other discussion to get into, human rights or civil rights, I just don’t get fighting for, begging for, I just don’t get the whole “Black Lives Matter,” “Hey, system, recognize us as human.” Fuck asking somebody to recognize you as human — I don’t give a fuck what you think. I’m not going to let you talk about the ancestors and just say what you want to say, but I’m not begging or asking you to see things a certain way.
Once I even called out Dave Douglas and Joe Lovano after they were getting lauded for the Sound Prints thing for Wayne Shorter. One day, I was just like, “You know, you guys should be talking about these things I’m talking about.” They have a band playing and profiting off of the music of a Black musician.
This is regardless of what Wayne Shorter thinks about it. I don’t know him to address or talk about race. That’s fine. He doesn’t have to.
EI: He’s from Newark, for Christ’s sake.
NP: I mean, you know he knows what that means!
But Dave and Joe are smart guys; they should be speaking to this shit more than me.
If you benefit from being invited into Black culture and being taught and groomed by Black masters, your debt, your bill, is bigger than mine at the end of the day. I mean, I’m already Black.
EI: Yeah, I hear you, man, I definitely hear you. I personally don’t think you need to explicitly address race if you are covering Wayne Shorter, but I also wish I had started considering this point of view sooner.
NP: I’m not saying Lovano and Douglas should address race solely because they profit from covering Shorter. I’m saying all White musicians who make a living playing Black music have a moral obligation to speak about racial injustice. By being silent on such issues, they are de facto supporting the supremacist and oppressive forces that enable privilege to them as White musicians while marginalizing people of color. And using Black culture to make financial gains without regard for the Black people who create it is racist.
EI: Again, this makes me think about jazz education, which is where the money is these days.
NP: Well, money is the whole thing. But I don’t expect them to figure it out in jazz education. That’s just what that is. I’m gonna let jazz education be what that is.
Now, if you’re gonna invite me into your school, I’m gonna talk about what this shit is and you can decide for yourself how comfortable or uncomfortable that makes you, and by this point if you’re asking me, you kind of have an idea of where my stance is.
But that’s the whole point of jazz — to skirt around the culture and find some other inroad to deal with the music and to deal with all of everything they love about it except the unsexy parts: the struggle, the ugliness.
That’s what “jazz” is. It’s a way of, “Let’s have fun, and let’s play this music, and let’s do this and let’s do that.” But when it comes to the real shit about what it is to be Black, they don’t want to deal with this other part of it.
You can’t go to a jazz school expecting enlightenment, because, if you just deal with the music and let it exist in its own habitat and its culture, you will learn this music is not designed for that Western pedagogy. It’s a different pedagogical system; it’s a different system of thought.
I’m not saying Black thought is better than Western or European thought. It’s different, though: In almost in every way it is diametrically opposed to those Western systems.
You can’t expect to transfer this information within that construct because, first of all, who decided that somebody is a professor? Who gave you your degree? Who said you were qualified to teach somebody? Did Clifford Brown say you were qualified? Did Max Roach say you were qualified? Who have you worked with?
So you have these people deciding in an education system, most of which probably don’t give a shit or care about jazz anyway. And, if they do, where do they get their ideas from? You don’t have the true masters.
It used to be that the true masters decided who was next. There was a clear lineage in place: whom begat whom. You play with this person, you’re alright. Who’re you playing with? You cut your teeth with them. You serve tutelage in several bands or several people before you struck out on your own. You pay your dues. That system doesn’t exist anymore and now we have these competitions that engenders a whole other kind of construct. You go to such and such a college, then you do this competition and we’re gonna lay $20,000 on you and then give you a record deal and kick start your career. That shit is outside of the culture. Also, we all know that a lot of these competitions are rigged.
They would never ask me to judge at the Thelonious Monk Competition…
EI: Well, when you look at the list of winners and finishers of the Monk competition, while some great players have gone on to have a career, it’s interesting that most haven’t. Perhaps it is because it’s, as you say, outside of the thing.
NP: A lot of cats who otherwise would have liked to be playing with their own bands or gigging as a means of full-time support found themselves having to supplement their income in other ways. Teaching is one of them, and that’s not to say there’s no joy or beauty to be found in the educational system, particularly if it’s cats who know better.
But even when they’re in those certain constructs, have you noticed that when you put a musician in some famed jazz school and then they’re artistic director, how long do a lot of the real cats last?
Because the games they have to play and the board meetings they have to go to and the lesson plans…all that shit is not conducive to disseminating the real information. There are certain things you have to do. There are certain games you have to play to be in that conversation, to get tenure, to have that job, to have that teaching position. So if you go in there espousing these issues that are upsetting within that construct, you might have a hard time or find yourself not lasting very long. It’s like politics: what you have to compromise to get yourself a position, once you arrive at that position, your original goals are no longer important. Now, you might say, “Well, if I’m in such and such a school, then maybe I might be able to mitigate some of the damages.” Well, what do you have to compromise to get a job there, to keep your job?
The things you can and can’t say to students —like, that didn’t exist. My dad used to cuss elementary kids out and throw erasers at them. You’d be in jail for that today. The older cats were 10 times less politically correct than I am. Their language was far more harsh, but a lot of people don’t know that side of folks.
With all my love to Clark Terry, you know, he had a very congenial spirit about him, but I’ve seen him cuss people out, call women bitches. Talks I’ve had with Ray Brown pulling my coattail, getting in my shit and cussing me the fuck out, you know, if he felt certain things I was doing weren’t cool. But it came from a different space; I wouldn’t call that hazing, and not that these old motherfuckers would be right all the time, but for the most part it came from a space of love, even if it was kind of jive.
Whereas some of the younger hazing is just jive for no reason or jive for insecurity, it was never about that with the older cats; it was always an issue of respect, from my experience, that kind of respect has died. It’s died with a lot of those masters who were here, who made sure shit was kept a certain way, so in many aspects to some people I might seem like an anomaly or a relic or something. But, I mean, I’m far nicer as a leader or even in general than a lot of the cats who people think are so clean-mouthed. I mean, these were some of the foul-mouth-est, misogynist-type motherfuckers, you know what I mean? I’m speaking about this not to disrespect anybody, but I think people need to know this because too much niceness sends a wrong message. “Such and such came to my school and they were the perfect gentleman.”
You know, they knew how to play the game. They knew how to do a certain thing, and a lot of these older cats came in an era where if you said or did some certain shit, you might not be here tomorrow, you know?
So I think it’s important at a certain point that the whole totality of how shit is gets documented. I’m crucified for saying “motherfucker” or for talking about pussy, but when you look at cats like Mingus and Miles — I mean, read some of their DownBeat interviews! I don’t say shit nowhere near as offensive as some of the things they said!
I think a perspective has been lost, perhaps, because we’ve created this sanitized view of jazz and what it’s supposed to be, particularly in educational centers.
I just think sometimes there’s no way to talk about something but how the fuck it is. That’s the way we were taught, that’s how it is. And that’s not to say that there’s not room for a message to evolve, but sometimes there’s no substitute for the well-placed “motherfucker.”
EI: Right, I’d agree.
NP: Sometimes it’s necessary to say that shit the way it is.
EI: You must know that interview with Lester Young where he shows that he is a true virtuoso of the word “motherfucker.”
Well, to close out, there are two musicians I’d like to ask you about.
You mentioned Ray Brown already. You knew Ray and worked with him, so I’d like to get some insight because Ray is kind of not my man, you know. Something about him bothers me.
Of course, he’s essentially an immaculate musician. But I think I like him best almost in the studio environment, when a string orchestra or big band going on and he gets to be the funky bass counterpoint to it. Then it’s beautiful. But in more of a playing situation I just find him a little uptight, like I’ll see him on a video with Kenny Clarke and it doesn’t even sound like he’s listening to Kenny Clarke, he’s just pushing on top next to Klook. There’s something that just bums me out about him as an ensemble jazz bass player sometimes.
NP: Yeah, I don’t know. I guess I don’t get that. I hear what you’re saying and I know, quite frankly, that some of his peers perhaps felt that way about him. But when I think of him I think of Negroidery and just nastiness on the bass. He’s top of the line to me.
EI: And it felt good playing with him, with the beat and everything?
NP: Oh, definitely. Did he play on top? Yeah. It still felt great though.
I know there’s some drummers in particular who just didn’t like to play with Ray. I think it depends; you know, certain musicians have a certain temperament with certain people and it’s almost like a parent can love all their children, but they’d be lying if they say they didn’t have favorites. And if you weren’t their favorite, you might get disciplined a bit more, you might get a bit more struggle in that relationship, you might get away with less.
And I’m not gonna think I can speak for Ray, but maybe if you weren’t a certain type of musician to him, or a drummer that he looked at a certain way, then there might be that fight with him. Me, personally, I’ve never felt that, and talk about just nastiness, as far as playing bass, I will cite this example, and I’ve turned a lot of cats onto this album: Gene Harris Trio Plus One, with Stanley Turrentine and Mickey Roker. Whew!
EI: I gotta get that.
NP: Man, like, if he never made another record other than that, that would be enough to seal this position in the canon of great bass players, in any genre, at any time.
But then you juxtapose that with… like I know years ago I read the interview you did with Mickey, and he didn’t even want to talk about Ray.
I’ve had bands like that. Like when I had my quintet: I remember we were doing some shows and we were out with Josh Redman’s band. We would just fuck with each other all the time. We would say the lowest shit you could say about someone to each other, and Josh’s band looked at us like we were crazy, like, “How can y’all talk about one another like that? And still be cool? How could you talk about his mother like that and you still have a job — like, how can you?”
But, man, all that shit went into the music. That’s why we played the way we did; that’s why there’s a certain urgency and a fire about us.
And we had our falling outs and our issues. There were times where Adonis Rose and Anthony Wonsey would get into it, and Wonsey might piss Adonis off and Adonis would be burning behind everybody and, get to the piano solo, he’d crash the cymbal and just fold his arms with the sticks and just let Wonsey have it. In fact, on my album Payton’s Place on “Paraphernalia” he does exactly that. They were fighting I don’t even know about what that time.
EI: It’s like Tony Williams laying out behind Herbie or George Coleman on My Funny Valentine. He was pissed at them.
NP: Yeah, all that kind of shit. But it’s like family; sometimes you get into it with your brother or your sister, “I’m not speaking to that motherfucker right now,” and all of that goes into the music. And I think the music misses that a bit, you know.
Not to say that you can’t have great music without dysfunction, but you look at most of the great bands, they’re bands full of leaders. Strong personalities. There’s gonna be clashes, there’s gonna be issues, somebody’s gonna fuck your girlfriend or wife because people are human. Some of this shit is morally reprehensible and I strive not to indulge it. But I do think there’s something to when bands were full of cats who, I don’t know, they might pop a cap in somebody’s ass or stab a motherfucker. Or the drummer walks around with an ice pick or a gun. What that music sounds like as opposed to now where everybody’s doing yoga and…
EI: …eating raw kale.…
NP: …and you know, juicing. Kudos to health, but you know what I’m saying?
EI: Oh, I hear you.
NP: There’s something about the spirit or the authenticity when people didn’t feel such a need to be politically correct. Like, shake the shit up.
Hey, if you’re really a yoga-loving person and you really juicing, if that’s authentically you, that’s fine. Like Mark Turner, like that’s who the fuck he is, but a lot of people are posing like Mark Turner or faking it. That’s who Mark authentically is, that’s him, whatever, that’s what I’m saying.
But other people are afraid to be themselves, and I think that’s reflected in the music.
People are being celebrated and exalted to this status without having passed through the lineage, or getting positions of prominence and authority within a jazz construct because that’s what jazz enables. It enables an environment where you can say, “This is the cat,” without them having to have to played with anybody or pay any dues or anything.
We just gonna say this is the cat because DownBeat says or because the GRAMMYs say or because whatever construct outside of the music says. It don’t have nothing to do no more with “Because Ray Brown said,” or “Because Art Blakey said.” Because they paid certain dues, because they’re tied to a part of the ancestral lineage. And anybody could be entitled to ancestral lineage; I don’t know why so many white people sometimes feel like I said they can’t be in the lineage, too. Never said that. Nowhere will you find me saying that, even though some white people always feel “Where am I?” in my talk.
That’s your insecurities, not mine. Plenty of white cats are a part of the ancestral lineage because when you really look at it from a genetic point of view, we all have African roots. But your ability to accept the way things are and to deal with your own shit affects how you connect to that. If, as a white person, if you’ve been endowed certain privileges, you have other steps to go through to get to that than someone Black. Life is unfair. It was unfair to my fucking ancestors on the ships.
EI: No one ever said you gotta play Black music to a white person. That’s their choice. The white person wants to play music that Black people originated, that’s the white person’s choice.
Elvin Jones. Let’s finish up with Elvin.
NP: [pause] Gangsta.
Just did the fuck what he wanted to do. Said what he wanted to say.
These are complex individuals, you know. They can’t be sized up at face value. Like you just see them and you know all their fucking labors? He’s from that era of Black men — him, Hank Jones — like when you listen to them talk there’s an aristocratic accent in their voices, you know what I’m talking about?
EI: Yeah.
NP: There’s a bit of a European-English-type of thing that they talked with. You can hear it in Marvin Gaye. It’s a certain era of Black, but they’ll fuck you up. Like you’ll listen to them talk and he seems meek and humble, but they’ll joog you in the back with a knife if you do something crazy, so don’t get it twisted.
I remember one of my first tours through Europe and I thought it was cool how on the plane they serve you a little wine with your meal, so I started collecting these wine bottles. I didn’t drink at the time, I just thought it was a cool souvenir, and I was gonna give them to people when I got back. Elvin had peeped me doing it for a couple days, but he didn’t say nothing.
So one morning it was an early departure somewhere, like six in the morning and he follows me into the bathroom and he’s like, “You got those wines?”
I’m like, “Yeah, they’re in my trumpet case,” so I crack open my trumpet case and gave him a bottle.
He was like, “You ain’t gonna have none?”
I’m like, “No, I don’t drink.”
And then he looked at me with the most disdain anyone has perhaps ever given me in my life, and he said, very deliberately, “Something ain’t right about somebody who don’t do nothing wrong.”
And that just hit me. Going back to this thing I talk about, this idea of perfection and being pristine and the whole “I don’t do this” and “I don’t do that.” Now, granted I was fucking 18 years old and there’s a lot of shit that I really didn’t do, but him saying that just really brought some things to home. Like, these were real motherfuckers.
And, in his case, because there’s no other way to put it: he was a real fucking Nigga.
Like that’s what the fuck he was, from Pontiac, Michigan, from the elements they grew up in. And being a heroin user at a certain point in his life, like the type of environments he would have to be able to negotiate when you’re involved in drug culture just to survive. What that makes you.
That shit goes into the music. That shit goes into your ride cymbal.
Now I’m not saying you have to shoot up and I’m not saying like you gotta live in the ’hood to have this certain kind of thing, but I’d be remiss to say that those parts of your collective experience doesn’t go into the music.
A lot of times we don’t have to go through that if someone has paid those debts for us, and we acknowledge them. It’s almost like a Jesus Christ-type of syndrome: they died for your sins therefore you don’t have to, so there has to be the respect there.
You could take the long way, and many people have, shooting up and doing this and doing that and getting your teeth knocked out and being whatever if you feel like that’s what you need to have your music be real. Or, you could just really respect the motherfucker and listen to who’s been through that, and know enough and learn enough to know like, “I can get all the advantages of his struggles and his sacrifice without having to have a motherfucker jack me up in an alley trying to get some heroin.”
I can’t stress enough that “jazz” sits outside of that. “Jazz” won’t tell you that. You might get kicked out of a school for talking about the content that I’m talking about with these people. These are the real stories and these are the stories that they’ve shared with me — and there are some stories that I would never tell because it’s just not my place to tell somebody else’s personal business that they shared with me — but there’s some things I’m beginning to feel need to be said, because this sanitized view that we have of the music is actually serving to kill the music.
These stories were told to me for a reason, and some of them need to be shared for the sake of the music.
EI: Please keep sharing your stories, Nicholas. I’ll keep reading you, and thanks for your time today.
Nicholas Payton: Black Keys
How the polarizing trumpeter, bandleader and blogger found his way to the piano bench
Published 01/23/2016
by Jennifer Odell
In his controversial 2011 blog post “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore,” trumpeter Nicholas Payton asserted, among other things, that he’s “not the same dude” he was a decade and a half ago. “Isn’t that the point?” he asked. “Our whole purpose on this planet is to evolve.”
That pronouncement hasn’t attracted as much attention as some of his other sentiments: “Jazz is an oppressive colonialist slave term,” for example, or its follow-up, “I play Black American Music,” which yielded the hashtag #BAM. But it resonates deeply, both in light of Payton’s evolution as a cultural critic and his changing focus from the trumpet toward the piano bench, where he’s settled in as a leader in recent years.
At the moment, Payton, 42, is settled into a booth at the New Orleans seafood haunt Frankie & Johnny’s, near his home in the city’s Uptown neighborhood. Clad in a Saints cap and a T-shirt featuring the logo of the band Trumpet Mafia, Payton considers what compelled him to veer off the path that earned him a Grammy and decades of critical acclaim.
On a basic level, he explains, it was a pragmatic move. But there’s also another advantage. After becoming increasingly adept on keys over the past few years, he began playing trumpet with one hand and either Fender Rhodes, piano or organ with the other, essentially converting his trio into a quartet at will. It’s a skill that has opened up a whole new realm of musical possibilities while expanding his voice within the context of his band. “The cumulative effects of opening that door add so much vibrancy to what I’m able to express,” he explains.
“I didn’t set out to do it as a gimmick or some kind of parlor trick, even though it does have that type of entertainment value, perhaps. I set out to do it out of just … function. I want to play these things that I want to hear. It’s easier for me to do that than to try to coax someone else to do it.”
***
Like his blogging, which touched a nerve in the music community when he divorced himself from the notion of “jazz,” redefining his artistic output in terms of “BAM,” the Rhodes and trumpet/keyboard combo add weapons to his arsenal of expressive devices. The results are reflected in three strong albums, #BAM: Live at Bohemian Caverns, Letters and Numbers, each of which built on its predecessor, adding new depth and dynamics to his repertoire. “When I play trumpet and piano or keyboards at the same time, there’s so much that hasn’t been done,” he explains. “To be at the cusp, at the vanguard of expanding technique for a voice that doesn’t have much of a recorded history? That’s a whole other realm. … It’s a new frontier.”
On 2014’s Numbers, featuring Payton almost exclusively on Rhodes alongside the Virginia-based quartet Butcher Brown, he left as much space as possible for interpretation, compiling pieces of music he’d already written but not yet used into 12 soulful, open-ended tunes designed with the idea that listeners might play along to the music. Letters followed the next year, reuniting Payton with his main trio bandmates, bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Bill Stewart, in a context blending hard-bop motifs with swinging grooves and shades of funk and R&B. The disc also found Payton performing at the top of his game on acoustic piano, organ and Rhodes, which he occasionally used to accompany himself on trumpet solos.
Payton’s committed himself to exploring new musical terrain for the better part of his career, which had already been prolific and wide-reaching, style-wise, despite his relatively young age. In that sense, his latest shift feels like a natural progression.
Initially branded a traditionalist-“unfairly so, but OK,” he concedes-Payton experimented with electronic effects and lyric-writing in the late ’90s, leading a band called the Time Machine that drew on funk motifs and an R&B sensibility. At that point he’d already snagged a Grammy for his 1997 release with Doc Cheatham, and was consistently putting out tight and fiery forays into hard bop.
By 1999’s Nick@Night, the trumpeter felt more confident in his grasp of what he calls “a certain tradition of straight-ahead,” and started experimenting with less orthodox instrumentation. “I was hearing something else, keyboard-wise,” he recalls, “so that’s why I have the harpsichord and the celeste, which are sort of like Rhodes and clarinet.” He was also pretty much ready to break out of the Young Lion mold.
In 2001 Payton released Dear Louis, an album he describes as “a farewell to the idea that I needed to uphold someone else’s idea of traditions.” It wasn’t a defining feature of the album, but Payton contributed some Rhodes to the record, as well as flugelhorn and vocals. “I’ve always loved the Rhodes. In fact, growing up in the ’70s, most of the music that I heard around me was Fender Rhodes, and that was the piano of choice then. A lot of clubs didn’t have acoustic pianos,” he says. “It just has such a warm, lush sound. You have to work really hard to make it sound ugly. And it has a great sustain. It has more sustain than a piano. And in a lot of contexts, I think it blends better with instruments than a piano.”
Payton’s arrangements on Dear Louis updated the tradition associated with Louis Armstrong, imbuing classic tunes and solos with a contemporary feel. In subsequent work with his B-3-centric band Soul Patrol and the hip-hop- and groove-soaked Sonic Trance, Payton continued to push the music forward without compromising the traditions that helped birth it. Sonic Trance also featured more of Payton’s multi-instrumental capabilities. While trumpet remained his primary focus, Payton played keys, flugelhorn, bass and drums, underscoring his growing interest in developing a wider palette from which to express himself. Still, he was sticking to trumpet in performance settings.
***
That started to change in the months after the 2005 levee breaches that devastated New Orleans. With musicians scattered across the country, venues struggling to stay open and power flickering on and off across the city, the New Orleans music scene was suffering. Payton wanted to help remedy that, so he proposed playing a series of free late sets at the club Snug Harbor on weekends. “That’s when I started playing trumpet and piano at the same time,” he recalls. It’s also when he came to terms with the difficulty of what he was trying to do.
“One of those nights, some guy [pointed out] I was playing in two keys at the same time. And I had never thought about it; I was just doing it. Then I started thinking about it and it kind of fucked me up. I had to relearn what I was doing instinctually,” he says. “At a certain point it was just a textural thing for me, and also a way to be more a part of the music the whole time. … Playing a melody, taking trumpet solos and standing on the side of the stage for a majority of the show … just felt boring after a while.”
Drummer Shannon Powell, who’s known and worked with Payton since he was a kid, remembers being astounded by his expertise on trumpet and piano at the Snug gigs. “Nicholas is a guy that constantly practices and sheds,” says Powell, who proudly claims he gave Payton his first professional gig, at the Famous Door on Bourbon Street, with singer, banjoist and guitarist Danny Barker, when the trumpeter was a young teenager. “I can hear some improvement every time I hear him play. That’s the way Wynton is. They’re both constantly shedding and trying to perfect their craft.”
Though Payton’s played trumpet since age 4-“something about the instrument spoke to me,” he says-he’s played multiple instruments for most of his life, just as he’s explored various styles of music. His father, the acclaimed bassist Walter Payton, alternated between bass and sousaphone, and worked with players ranging from Lee Dorsey to Aaron Neville to Ellis Marsalis to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The piano that Walter shared with Nicholas’ mother, a classically trained pianist, maintained a central position in the family’s home and remains a strong source of musical memory for Nicholas, who used to sit beneath it when musicians like Marsalis and Professor Longhair would work their magic on its keys. “This cat Eddie Collins would come around,” Payton recalls. “The late, great Ed Frank was another. He had one hand. He played with his right hand but he never missed [his left]. Seeing guys like that really impacted me.”
He was also drawn to Herbie Hancock, whose sound, touch and chordal voicings, among other elements, continue to influence Payton. “He’s one of those rare, quintessential-type pianists. You can put him in any context with anybody and he’s going to sound like himself. But he’s also going to uplift the music and serve the music,” Payton says.
His bandmates over the years get that what he’s doing runs much deeper. “I’ve been struck for years by Nicholas’ ability to play multiple instruments-drums, bass, etc.-at a high level,” keyboardist Kevin Hays writes in an email. “He’s such a remarkable musician and seems to be able to absorb any music he hears very quickly.”
Hays worked with Payton regularly from the early 2000s through Into the Blue, from 2008, which marked a turning point with regard to Payton’s instrument of choice as a leader. Prior to the session, Payton set up Pro Tools in his house and recorded demos of the material on each instrument. “There are people who can play an instrument, but they might just be playing a line or a written-out part. He’s adding some kind of flavor to it, too,” Vicente Archer says. “He’s hearing where the music can go. Hearing those demos, it was like, ‘Wow,'” he continues, laughing. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.”
Archer was one of multiple associates who suggested Payton record an album by himself. It seemed like “a novelty” to him, Payton says, until he developed the idea for the vocal R&B project Bitches, much of which was based on leftover demos from Into the Blue. Bitches came out in 2011, the same year Payton launched his “BAM” campaign, which heightened the exposure of his writing online. By then he was leading from the piano bench regularly and working toward launching his own label, BMF, now Paytone. All those elements indicated that he sought a greater degree of control in both his artistic expression and in the way others define it. “He’s not focusing on what people consider him to be famous for,” Powell points out. “Coming from New Orleans, if you get famous doing one certain thing people expect you to do that the rest of your life. People have a tendency to want to categorize musicians.”
***
Archer agrees that Payton has more control of the music these days. “We’re very elastic with the music, [with] form and harmonically,” he says. “It gives the songs even more of a breath of fresh air each time we play.”
In terms of artistic evolution, Payton is still open to new ideas and vocabularies. He recently completed work on Textures, an album created entirely with the software program Logic-no live instruments-that he recorded alongside the visual artist Anastasia Pelias, who painted while he worked, each artist riffing on the other’s compositions. Payton remains involved with more conventional music as well, having produced, played on and written most of the arrangements for singer Jane Monheit’s upcoming tribute to Ella Fitzgerald.
As for the resistance he’s encountered while challenging public and critical expectations-and there’s been plenty-recent recognition of his skill as a keyboardist has helped mitigate early complaints. “I guess I could have said, ‘Fuck it,’ and acquiesced to people’s expectations. But to me, you don’t ever get people to accept your artistry if you’re willing to cave because they want you to follow suit with whatever they expect you to do,” he muses. “You have to be willing to make sacrifices for the shit you feel strongly about.”
A STATEMENT ON ART, AESTHETICS, AND NICHOLAS PAYTON’S TAKE ON “JAZZ”
All,
The statement below is generally not only well said but for the most part (though not entirely) well thought out as well, but I think brother Payton has inadvertently (inevitably?) fallen into the ‘postmodern' trap of theorizing about “art” in essentially “modern” terms when what is needed (and still hasn’t been critically examined enough) is a POST AESTHETIC framing of this entire debate (and its generic and stylistic corollaries in literature, visual art, dance, cinema, theatre, and music) that acknowledges and yet actively repudiates the idea that “aesthetics” and “art” are synonyms for each other when in actuality they are antonyms (‘conceptually’ AND ‘philosophically'). For example compare and contrast what B.B. King, Hubert Sumlin, and Buddy Guy did with the electric guitar in the blues stylistic tradition and what Jimi Hendrix did with and against any and all traditional ideas of what constituted blues/rhythm and blues/rock 'n roll guitar and ensemble playing in the ‘modern/postmodern era. But Jimi went beyond all that into a post aesthetic critique and expressive dismantling of that tradition while providing a CREATIVE ALTERNATIVE to it. Miles Davis did the same thing in 1972 with his amazing groundbreaking recording ON THE CORNER. Sly Stone did the same with his woefully underrated and largely misunderstood masterpiece album entitled FRESH in 1973.
One day soon ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics' won’t be conflated in critical discourse and we’ll all be able to see the post aesthetic for what it really is and means: a new intellectual and social contract with and passionate creative/imaginative resistance to the institutional, theoretical, and structural forces of the ‘art market’ (which of course also includes ’theory’)…Payton was really on to something until he invoked the irrelevant trope of ‘New Orleans’ which is unfortunately rhetorically nestled next to ‘postmodern' in his analysis below. But I say (in the not at all hallowed name of the Post Aesthetic) FUCK NEW ORLEANS. And I mean that in the exact same way that Chris Cooper and the late great Elizabeth Pena (1959-2014) meant it at the end of John Sayle’s great film on Texas, race, class, gender, history, and ‘modern life’ LONE STAR (1996) when they say to each other FORGET THE ALAMO…What a truly unforgettable ‘post aesthetic’ and inspiring anti-origin myth moment that was...
Kofi
On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore . . . .
by Nicholas Payton
Posted on November 27, 2011
Jazz died in 1959.
There maybe cool individuals who say they play Jazz, but ain’t shit cool about Jazz as a whole.
Jazz died when cool stopped being hip.
Jazz was a limited idea to begin with.
Jazz is a label that was forced upon the musicians.
The musicians should’ve never accepted that idea.
Jazz ain’t shit.
Jazz is incestuous.
Jazz separated itself from American popular music.
Big mistake.
The music never recovered.
Ornette tried to save Jazz from itself by taking the music back to its New Orleanian roots, but his efforts were too esoteric.
Jazz died in 1959, that’s why Ornette tried to “Free Jazz” in 1960.
Jazz is only cool if you don’t actually play it for a living.
Jazz musicians have accepted the idea that it’s OK to be poor.
John Coltrane is a bad cat, but Jazz stopped being cool in 1959.
The very fact that so many people are holding on to this idea of what Jazz is supposed to be is exactly what makes it not cool.
People are holding on to an idea that died long ago.
Jazz, like the Buddha, is dead.
Let it go, people, let it go.
Paul Whiteman was the King of Jazz and someday all kings must fall.
Jazz ain’t cool, it’s cold, like necrophilia.
Stop fucking the dead and embrace the living.
Jazz worries way too much about itself for it to be cool.
Jazz died in 1959.
The number one Jazz record is Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue.
Dave Brubeck’s Time Out was released in 1959.
1959 was the coolest year in Jazz.
Jazz is haunted by its own hungry ghosts.
Let it die.
You can be martyrs for an idea that died over a half a century if y’all want.
Jazz has proven itself to be limited, and therefore, not cool.
Lot’s wife turned to a pillar of salt from looking back.
Jazz is dead.
Miles ahead.
Some may say that I’m no longer the same dude who recorded the album with Doc Cheatham.
Correct: I’m not the same dude I was 14 years ago.
Isn’t that the point?
Our whole purpose on this planet is to evolve.
The Golden Age of Jazz is gone.
Let it go.
Too many necrophiliacs in Jazz.
You’re making my case for me.
Some people may say we are defined by our limitations.
I don’t believe in limitations, but yes, if you believe you are limited that will define you.
Definitions are retrospective.
And if you find yourself getting mad, it’s probably because you know Jazz is dead.
Why get upset if what I’m saying doesn’t ring true?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I don’t play Jazz.
I play Postmodern New Orleans music.
Louis Armstrong and Danny Barker play Traditional New Orleans Music.
Ellis Marsalis and James Black play Modern New Orleans music.
Kidd Jordan and Clyde Kerr play Avant-garde New Orleans music.
Donald Harrison plays Neoclassical New Orleans music.
I play Postmodern New Orleans music.
I am a part of a lineage.
I am a part of a blood line.
My ancestors didn’t play Jazz, they played Traditional, Modern and Avant-garde New Orleans Music.
I don’t play Jazz.
I don’t let others define who I am.
I am a Postmodern New Orleans musician.
I create music for the heart and the head, for the beauty and the booty.
The man who lets others define him is a dead man.
With all due respect to the masters, they were victims of a colonialist mentality.
Blacks have been conditioned for centuries to be grateful for whatever crumbs thrown to them.
As a postmodern musician, it’s my duty to do better than my predecessors.
To question, reexamine and redefine what it is that we do.
They accepted it because they had to.
Because my ancestors opened the door for me, I don’t have to accept it.
Louis bowed and scraped so Miles could turn his back.
It’s called evolution.
It’s the colonialist mentality that glorifies being treated like a slave.
There is nothing romantic about poor, scuffling Jazz musicians.
Fuck that idea.
It’s not cool.
Jazz is a lie.
America is a lie.
Playing Jazz is like running on a treadmill: you may break a sweat, but ultimately you ain’t going nowhere.
Some people may say we are limited.
I say, we are as limited as we think.
I am not limited.
Jazz is a marketing ploy that serves an elite few.
The elite make all the money while they tell the true artists it’s cool to be broke.
Occupy Jazz!
I am not speaking of so-called Jazz’s improvisational aspects.
Improvisation by its very nature can never be passé, but mindsets are invariably deadly.
Not knowing is the most you can ever know.
It’s only when you don’t know that “everything” is possible.
Jazz has nothing to do with music or being cool.
It’s a marketing idea.
A glaring example of what’s wrong with Jazz is how people fight over it.
People are too afraid to let go of a name that is killing the spirit of the music.
Life is bigger than music, unless you love and/or play Jazz.
The art, or lack thereof, is just a reflection.
Miles Davis personified cool and he hated Jazz.
What is Jazz anyway?
Life isn’t linear, it’s concentric.
When you’re truly creating you don’t have time to think about what to call it.
Who thinks of what they’ll name the baby while they’re fucking?
Playing Jazz is like using the rear-view mirror to drive your car on the freeway.
If you think Jazz is a style of music, you’ll never begin to understand.
It’s ultimately on the musicians.
People are fickle and follow the pack.
Not enough artists willing to soldier for their shit.
People follow trends and brands.
So do musicians, sadly.
Jazz is a brand.
Jazz ain’t music, it’s marketing, and bad marketing at that.
It has never been, nor will it ever be, music.
Here lies Jazz (1916 – 1959).
Too many musicians and not enough artists.
I believe music to be more of a medium than a brand.
Silence is music, too.
You can’t practice art.
In order for it to be true, one must live it.
Existence is not contingent upon thought.
It’s where you choose to put silence that makes sound music.
Sound and silence equals music.
Sometimes when I’m soloing, I don’t play shit.
I just move blocks of silence around.
The notes are an afterthought.
Silence is what makes music sexy.
Silence is cool.
THE MUSIC OF NICHOLAS PAYTON: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH NICHOLAS PAYTON:
Nicholas Payton - Kimathi (Main Theme)
Nicholas Payton with the Ray Brown Trio -Bag's Groove
Nicholas Payton Group - Burghausen
Nicholas Payton - The African Tinge
The Nicholas Payton Trio — Pinocchio (Part I)
Nicholas Payton - Drad Dog
Nicholas Payton - 'Round Midnight
Nicholas Payton Quartet
Nicholas Payton Quartet with the Symphony Basel Orchestra
Nicholas Payton - Relexification (Midnight at Tyler's)
Jazz Is A Four-Letter Word — Nicholas Payton and Afro-Caribbean Mixtape
Nicholas Payton - The Egyptian Second Line
Nicholas Payton - The Backward Step
Nicholas Payton - Saeta
The Nicholas Payton Trio - Live in Chicago
Nicholas Payton - #BAMboula
Nicholas Payton - Numbers (2014) Full Album
Nicholas Payton - Call and Response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Payton
Nicholas Payton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicholas Payton
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Payton playing at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, May 5, 2007
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Background information
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Born
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September 26, 1973 (age 44)
New Orleans, Louisiana United States
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Genres
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Occupation(s)
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Musician
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Instruments
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Trumpet, electric piano
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Years active
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1990–present
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Labels
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Associated acts
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Website
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Nicholas Payton (born September 26, 1973) is an American trumpet player and multi-instrumentalist. A Grammy Award winner, he is from New Orleans, Louisiana.[1][2] He is also a prolific and provocative writer who comments on a multitude of subjects, including music, race, politics, and life in America.
Contents
Biography
The son of bassist and sousaphonist Walter Payton, he took up the trumpet at the age of four and by age nine was sitting in with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band alongside his father. He began his professional career at ten years old as a member of James Andrews' All-Star Brass and was given his first steady gig by guitarist Danny Barker at The Famous Door on Bourbon Street. He enrolled at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts and then at the University of New Orleans.
After touring with Marcus Roberts and Elvin Jones in the early '90s, Payton signed a contract with Verve Records; his first album, From This Moment, appeared in 1994. In 1996 he performed on the soundtrack of the movie Kansas City, and in 1997 received a Grammy Award (Best Instrumental Solo) for his playing on the album Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton.
After seven albums on Verve, Payton signed with Warner Bros. Records, releasing Sonic Trance, his first album on the new label, in 2003. Besides his recordings under his own name, other significant collaborations include Trey Anastasio, Ray Brown, Ray Charles, Daniel Lanois, Dr. John, Stanley Jordan, Herbie Hancock, Roy Haynes, Zigaboo Modeliste, Marcus Roberts, Jill Scott, Clark Terry, Allen Toussaint, Nancy Wilson, Dr. Michael White, and Joe Henderson.
In 2004, he became a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective. In 2008, he joined The Blue Note 7, a septet formed in honor of the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records. In 2011, he formed a 21-piece big band ensemble called the Television Studio Orchestra. In 2011, he also recorded and released Bitches, a love narrative on which he played every instrument, sang, and wrote all of the music. In 2012 the Czech National Symphony Orchestra commissioned and debuted his first full orchestral work, The Black American Symphony. And in 2013, he formed his own record label, BMF Records, and the same year released two albums, #BAM Live at Bohemian Caverns, where he plays both trumpet and Fender Rhodes, often at once, and Sketches of Spain, which he recorded with the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.
From 2011 to 2013, Payton was a Distinguished Artist and Visiting Lecturer at Tulane University and belongs to a growing group of race scholars and activists committed to social justice. Members of this movement suggest that racism is not simply a response to color, but that it additionally describes subtle legal behaviors by which the dominant culture continues to marginalize people in order to sustain a poor, minority class.[citation needed] In the case of American society, evidence of this can be framed as institutionalized racism and white privilege.
Payton's writings are provocative for other reasons, too. One of his most notable pieces to date, "On Why Jazz isn't Cool Anymore"[3] describes the effects of cultural colonization on music. The article quickly earned his website 150,000 page views and sparked international press attention and debate.[4]
Discography
- 1994 – From This Moment (Verve)
- 1995 – Gumbo Nouveau (Verve)
- 1997 – Fingerpainting: The Music of Herbie Hancock (Verve) with Christian McBride and Mark Whitfield
- 1997 – Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton (Verve)
- 1998 – Payton's Place (PolyGram)
- 1999 – Nick@Night (Verve)
- 2001 – Dear Louis (Verve)
- 2003 – Sonic Trance (Warner Bros.)
- 2008 – Into the Blue (Nonesuch)
- 2011 – Bitches (In+Out)[1]
- 2013 – #BAM: Live at Bohemian Caverns (BMF)
- 2013 – Sketches of Spain (BMF)
- 2014 – Numbers (Paytone Records)
- 2015 – Letters (Paytone Records)
- 2016 – The Egyptian Second Line (Paytone Records)
- 2017 – Afro-Caribbean Mixtape (Paytone Records)
As sideman
With Eric Alexander
- Summit Meeting (Milestone, 2001)
With Joanne Brackeen
- Pink Elephant Magic (Arkadia Jazz, 1998)
With Elvin Jones
- Youngblood (Enja, 1992)
- Going Home (Enja, 1992)
- It Don't Mean a Thing (Enja, 1993)
With Jimmy Smith
With Allen Toussaint
- The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch, 2009)
References
Skelly, Richard. Nicholas Payton at AllMusic. Retrieved September 16, 2013.
"On Why Jazz isn't Cool Anymore…". December 1, 2011. Archived from the original on December 1, 2011.
- "Someone Said Something Negative About Jazz As A Whole Again". December 3, 2011. Archived from the original on December 3, 2011.
External links
Official website
- "In Conversation with Nicholas Payton" by Ted Panken, (Jazz.com)
- Nicholas Payton: Live At The Village Vanguard – slideshow by NPR
