Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
In Memoriam: John Hammond Jr., 1942–2026
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
Nicholas Payton looked very zen in this photo used for a feature in the January 2024 edition of DownBeat. His departure from Berklee College of Music was anything but.
(Photo: Dana Distortion)We live in divisive times. Earlier this year, we learned that the gifted composer, bandleader and trumpeter Nicholas Payton was fired from his gig as the brass department chair at Berklee College of Music after two conservative media outlets wrote scathing articles about Payton’s perceived anti-Semitic remarks about Jews.
If you’d like to look them up, feel free to go online and search Nicholas Payton, Jews and anti-Semitic. You’ll find the articles and plenty of social media chatter. We’re not giving it the space here.
At the same time, Payton started a beef on social media with pianist Connie Han. He reposted a former bandmate’s trash talk about the pianist not being able to swing and worse, presumably because she’s Asian and a woman. It was part of a back and forth between the two artists with Han saying Payton “does not deserve his position at Berklee.”
All of this led to a petition on change.org demanding Payton’s dismissal from Berklee. At one point, we learned that the petition had more than 5,000 signatures.
Well, he was fired in mid-April after getting promoted in the fall of 2024. One thing to note, he made plenty of inflamatory online comments that pre-date his promotion. That’s how Nicholas Payton rolls. And beefs and brashness are not uncommon in jazz history (or Black American Music as Payton has rebranded his work).
Did Payton cross the line? I think so. But I’m an old white guy who married a Jewish girl and raised his daughter in the faith. Take what I say with a grain of kosher salt.
Should he have lost his gig? I don’t know. Maybe there’s more to this than has come out. But I’d like to say no. At an institution of higher learning, where the marketplace of ideas should be championed, this could have been a teaching moment. What if there was an opportunity for deep discussion and debate? How about a series of discussions in front of an audience of students and faculty? After all, Nick Payton is not alone in his viewpoints. It would be interesting and instructive to hear where he’s coming from. Bring in other viewpoints, including Connie Han, to hear where they are coming from, too. It’s an opportunity to separate fact from fiction, a chance to learn, maybe even change some minds.
While all this was going on, DownBeat had scheduled a feature on Terri Lyne Carrington and Christie Dashiell’s reimagination of Max Roach’s classic, 1960 protest album We Insist! That feature about We Insist 2025! appears on page 30 of our July 2025 issue.
Here’s the rub. Carrington also teaches at Berklee and led the founding of the Berklee Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice back in 2018. As we know, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives such as this are under attack as well. She has concerns about the safety and future of this vital organization in the current political climate.
It’s a bit ironic. At a glance, you’d think these two would be on opposite sides of a very tall fence. But here they were, working at the same institution. Payton has been featured with Carrington’s band Social Science. He played on Carrington’s Grammy-winning New Standards Vol. 1.
People and situations aren’t easily explained on social media. It’s easy to be provacative hiding behind a cell phone. It’s easy to cancel viewpoints you don’t agree with. It’s damned hard to have real conversations and come to mutual understanding in our very complex world. DB
Hammond came to the blues through the folk boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which he experienced firsthand in New York’s Greenwich Village.
Mar 2, 2026 9:58 PM
John P. Hammond (aka John Hammond Jr.), a blues guitarist and singer who was one of the first white American…
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