As a leading voice in American popular music, Nicholas Payton is a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, producer, arranger, essayist, and social activist who defies musical and artistic categories. The two-time Grammy Award-winner joins the Bill Charlap Trio as a special guest with vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater on Sunday, Sept. 1, 2024 at the John Coltrane International Jazz and Blues Festival in High Point, NC.
A CALLING
The New Orleans-born Payton has followed his calling since growing up under the tutelage of his parents — acclaimed bassist Walter Payton and Maria Payton, a pianist and vocalist. Already a prodigy before entering the first grade, he began playing trumpet at age four and started performing professionally at age 10. Before the age of 20, he was already in demand by everyone from Danny Barker and Clark Terry to Elvin Jones and Marcus Roberts. Payton released his first album, From this Moment, in 1995 on the famed Verve label. He received his first Grammy nomination in 1997 for the album Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton, and for the category of Best Instrumental Solo, which found him winning the award that year. Nominated a total of five times, Payton won his second Grammy Award last year for his collaboration with drummer Terri Lyne Carrington on the album New Standards Vol 1.
Payton has released over 20 recordings as a leader, pushing musical boundaries and showcasing a variety of contemporary and traditional styles. He and pianist Bill Charlap recorded together in 2005 on the Blue Note Records release, Plays Gershwin: The American Soul. In addition to Payton’s work as a performer, he is an equally respected composer, having written The Black American Symphony an orchestral work, which the Czech National Symphony Orchestra commissioned and performed. He led a live concert performance of Miles Davis’ renowned Sketches of Spain with the Basel Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland.
#BAM
“Pretty much all the music that I play is centered in Black culture, Black music. And that’s why I’ve eschewed jazz and came up with the terminology, Black American Music, because I want to be connected to the whole of it,” Payton says about the genre. As a leader, Payton’s seminal writings and discussions on the problematics of the term and associations of “jazz” have inspired musicians, researchers, music listeners, and thinkers alike. As such, he termed Black American Music, or #BAM for short, to represent the breadth of improvisational musical creations created by Black people in the U.S., regardless of genre. His introduction of #BAM into the lexicon of popular music discourse landed him an entry in the New York Times‘ “The Decade in Jazz: 10 Definitive Moments” in 2019.
Through his mission-driven work and art, Payton continues to creatively move boundaries, while inspiring and remaining inspired by the pioneering lineage of Black American Music, of which he is a part.
