Music preview: Nicholas Payton Quartet with CNSO

 

His most recent recording, Bitches (2011), is a solo effort with Payton on vocals and playing all of the instruments, including synthesizer, drum machine, bass, drums and trumpet. Guest vocalists on some of the tracks are of the highest order, including Esperanza Spalding, Cassandra Wilson and ChinahBlac.

 

The album was released by In+Out Records in Germany, and is a mélange of contemporary R&B, soul, funk and love ballads. Payton wrote the songs chronologically to tell the story of a failed romance; the deeply personal lyrics explore his feelings about the dissolution of his marriage. The album explores the universal issues of relationships with a subtle biblical theme running through each song, in a mythological but not religious sense.   

 

With Payton's pop instrumentation, there would be no chance of ever hearing these songs on a jazz radio station, and jazz audiences would be surprised to hear a full concert of these songs at a jazz club.

 

Meanwhile, Payton, who was born in 1973 in New Orleans, is getting more attention these days, due to his open dismissal of the term "jazz" and his insistence on identifying himself as a writer and trumpeter or even a multi-instrumental musician and advocate of the term "Black American Music" (BAM) for what he plays.

 

Payton is after all a descendent of the New Orleans jazz trumpet tradition; in other words, following in the lineage of Louis Armstrong, he was playing with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band at the age of 9 alongside his father, who was the bass player in the group. Later, he studied trumpet with Ellis Marsalis.

 

Ellis Marsalis' son Wynton is the most acclaimed trumpeter in contemporary jazz, and Payton started off following Ellis' and Wynton's lead, preferring more traditional jazz for purists.

 

But then he broke from the ranks with his outstanding recording Sonic Trance (2003), which drew mainly from hip-hop, R&B, classical and rock. "Cannabis Leaf Rag 1 & 2" on that album are just two examples of Payton's experimental explorations in mind and sound, bridging the ragtime tradition of New Orleans to a newer form of psychedelia, which could be called stoned free jazz trance.

 

Sonic Trance, which was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Contemporary Jazz Album, was also a subtle homage to Armstrong, not by looking back to Satchmo's sound, but rather his place as "America's first pop star," and without forgetting that "Pops" was also an inveterate toker until the end.

 

By identifying himself, these days, as a postmodern New Orleans musician, Payton proudly acknowledges his heritage.

 

For his concert in Prague, Payton tells The Prague Post, "I was commissioned to compose and perform an original composition. It is a world premiere titled 'Black American Symphony.' "

 

The symphony is composed for jazz quartet and orchestra with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra taking the latter role. Payton's own group includes bassist Vincente Archer, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Daniel Sadownick, with Payton playing trumpet, Fender Rhodes and piano. For a section of the performance, the CNSO will also perform some classical pieces by Bernstein and Gershwin, and the conductor will be Steven Mercurio, though posters have been listing Chelsea Tipton II.

 

And why did jazz die in 1959? After all, Miles Davis' iconic cool jazz album Kind of Blue was No. 1 on the charts that year, and Dave Brubeck's Time Out was released the same year.

 

"1959 was the coolest year in jazz," Payton says.

 

But then the avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman made jazz "free," with his release of Something Else (1958) and Tomorrow is the Question (1959). It cannot be denied that jazz, quite suddenly, lost its status as the most popular music in America at about this point.

 

Over half a century later, Payton's attitude about this radical shift in the evolution of jazz or "Black American Music" as he calls it, is to let the funeral march begin in New Orleans.