Nicholas Payton Looks to Direct the Culture

Interview, News, From the Magazine, Nicholas Payton, Marquis Hill

By Marquis Hill I Jan. 31, 2020

During his concerts, Nicholas Payton frequently plays keyboards and trumpet simultaneously.
(Photo: Michael Jackson)

I saw you perform a tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue around 2008 at the Chicago Theatre. I remember that you sang, played piano and played a little bit of trumpet. My friends were kind of upset that you didn’t play more trumpet. What was your thought process about incorporating Rhodes, vocals and the sampler into this new record?

As an artist, I want to use as many different mediums of expression to get my ideas across. So, the Rhodes playing, comping for myself, it came about because as my style developed and changed and I started playing more and more funny notes and different ideas that might trip up different keyboardists, it became increasingly harder to find people to comp for me. A lot of times, I’d want that rub: “Don’t try to fix my notes by making my notes fit inside the chord. Do your thing and let me sometimes make these rubs against the chords, because that’s actually what I’m going for. You’re ruining my Picasso and putting my eye where it needs to be—on the face—where I want it displaced.” I never get in my own way, playing for myself. I started as a multi-instrumentalist.

On Nick@Night, I played harpsichord on “Beyond The Stars.” It’s [Anthony] Wonsey on the rest of the album. Then on Dear Louis, I played Fender Rhodes behind Dianne [Reeves] on “On The Sunny Side Of The Street.” I played drums on “I’ll Never Be The Same.” So, I was kind of plotting, little by little, to eventually do the things I’m doing now. It became full-fledged in about 2006, after the flood in New Orleans, and the city was in a very depressed state. I wanted to help revitalize the community and bring back some life, particularly the night life, which ended early because of curfews and whatnot. This club I used to play at, Snug Harbor, they made their hours earlier, so late night there really was no place to hang. I was like, “Why don’t we do a midnight set after you do your 8 and 10 [o’clock] sets?” There was this partition that sort of divided the music room from the bar. “Take that door down, let everybody in for free. I want a place that the community can come and hang and musicians can come and sit in on the second set and have a jam, like in the old days. Bring more of this communal spirit back to the city.” And that’s the gig where I really started comping for myself on keys. I also used effects—all kinds of delays and choruses—because that broadens the scope of the texture of what I can do on the Rhodes.

And the whole [concept of] standing in front of the band flatfooted, playing trumpet, has been done so much it puts me now in a different category, where I’m at the precipice and the vanguard of creating culture and creating an idea. Dozens and dozens of motherfuckers have played their ass off, playing trumpet in front of a band. How many people have sat behind a keyboard and comped for themselves and played the trumpet? A lot of my fans and promoters and bookers are like, “Why is he doing this? I want to hear him play more trumpet.” But the funny thing about it is, I wasn’t playing less trumpet solos. I’m still taking the trumpet solo on pretty much every tune. It’s just that now, as opposed to standing on the side of the stage doing nothing, I’m still working.

Getting involved in the music.

This way it allows me to create the vibe, and it’s just easier for me to connect with my rhythm section. You can telegraph a certain amount of shit on the trumpet to give your band a focus and center. Miles is a master of that—playing a note a certain way to make the pianist play something. You’re using the band as an instrument through yourself. But when I’m actually on the keys, on a chordal instrument, I can create those textures on the spot. I can orchestrate my own music and re-orchestrate it every night. It gives me more control. I feel like I’m giving more of myself, and people are hearing more of myself. And I’m not playing any less trumpet. I think it’s taken about 10 years for people who swore they’d never book me to accept it. Sometimes, that’s the problem with being ahead of your time, because the model doesn’t exist. So, like being the one who has to kick the door down sometimes, you’re not looked at or celebrated in your time.

I can’t impress enough that as artists, you have to soldier for your vision. It took 15 years for people to recognize Monk for the force he was. But if you give up on yourself, give up on your ideas, you don’t give your concept a chance for people to come to it, especially if it’s something new they haven’t heard.

I see university students—trumpet players—doing the whole thing. It’s definitely become a thing you’ve created, part of the culture.

It’s like BAM [the Black American Music movement initiated by Payton]. When it started, I was talking about these racial issues and the music of suffering, and I was met with a lot of vitriol—a lot of promoters not wanting to deal with me because they thought I was an angry black man, even though my reputation doesn’t speak to that at all. Ask a promoter, “Does he show up on time?” I show up on time. I’m dressed well. I play my ass off. I check all the boxes. What’s the problem?

Unfortunately, even though this music, and so-called jazz in particular, has always spoke truth to power, has always been counterculture, has always been underground, now I feel like we’re in an era of artists who are afraid to speak up, afraid of losing gigs, afraid of so many things that it’s become dangerous. The whole point of the art is to break down status quo, to put people in touch with themselves. At the moment in which artists feel they can’t express themselves for fear of losing their livelihood, that negatively impacts the culture, because the whole point of the culture, the whole point of the music, is to serve as a light.

When black people were transported here during enslavement, they were not allowed to speak their native languages, their native tongues. So, they developed a new language—the work song, the field holler. And those things became the blues. And because of places like Congo Square, which was maybe the only place in America, one of the few, where the enslaved Africans were given a space on Sunday to practice their drumming rituals, dance, singing, playing instruments, so forth—that energy is what creates, many decades later, Louis Armstrong, who becomes the world’s first pop star. Really, the music is the first civil rights movement. Many years before—all due respect to Martin Luther King—this music was the first time post-colonization where black people were put on the same level as Beethoven and Stravinsky and Picasso and a lot of the white purveyors of art. Now, they had to look at Duke Ellington in the same light as they do Mozart. So, these were the first people to begin the process of rehumanizing, in a sense, these black people who had been dehumanized.