{"id":6300,"date":"2017-02-10T23:34:07","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T23:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=6300"},"modified":"2017-02-10T23:34:07","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T23:34:07","slug":"nicholas-payton-emancipation-proclamation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2017\/02\/10\/nicholas-payton-emancipation-proclamation\/","title":{"rendered":"Nicholas Payton's Emancipation Proclamation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1d380a883828c999-nicholaspayton1\"<\/a>Through more of a decade writing about the lives and careers of musicians born and raised in New Orleans, I’ve been fascinated by how the best of these artists have not been weakened by their experiences since the floods that resulted from the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, nor by the indifference and outright racism that persists in their native city.
\nRather they’ve grown bolder.
\nNicholas Payton, more than any other musician I know, speaks truth to power, and to anyone who will listen. He can be relentless, which I’ve come to regard as one of his charms.
\nAs I wrote in an earlier post about Payton:<\/p>\n

Payton is an intense and restless soul, and his thoughts and feelings spill forth with self-assuredness and defiant pride through both his music and\u00a0his online posts<\/a>. His music should probably raise more eyebrows than it does because, aside from its integrity and range, it generally doesn\u2019t respect the party line heeded by many so-called jazz musicians. Payton\u2019s blog posts\u2014in which, among other stances, he refuses to wear the term \u201cjazz,\u201d and instead favors the acronym BAM (for Black American Music)\u2014perhaps shouldn\u2019t raise as many eyebrows as they have. At least, these missives can\u2019t\u00a0be dismissed as rants, which they\u2019re not, or even radical, which they\u2019re also not. The musicians involved in Chicago\u2019s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) said pretty much the same things 50 years ago.
\nI\u2019ll not get into a long catalog of what Payton has written online and what was then written about him and what he then wrote in response (though it\u2019s easy enough, and illuminating, to follow that chronology). Yes, it\u2019s about race as much as music, as it should be: Yet whereas, say, the comments appended to articles in the Times Picayune of Payton\u2019s hometown discusses race in a lowest-common-denominator who-can-hate-more style, Payton channels his own feelings (sometimes, yes, rage) into the sort of truth-telling that black trumpeters born and raised in the United States have long done. Amstrong and Miles Davis weren\u2019t enamored with the term \u201cjazz\u201d either.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review<\/a> of Payton’s brilliant new 2-CD release,\u00a0\u201cAfro-Caribbean Mixtape\u201d (Paytone\/Ropeadope):<\/p>\n

This new album lends more graceful expression to his argument\u2014for an enduring black aesthetic that bows to jazz masters without implying servitude, and that embraces African influence across several genres. Words prove critical here, too. In the mix\u2014sometimes buried, other times clear\u2014are sampled snatches of spoken-word sources, manipulated by the turntablist. On \u201cJazz Is a Four-Letter Word,\u201d the voice of Max Roach (from a 1993 interview that Mr. Payton found on YouTube) describes an unbroken line of ingenuity from Charlie Parker to Michael Jordan to Michael Jackson. On the title track, Greg Kimathi Carr, head of Howard University\u2019s Afro-American Studies Department, explains \u201cAfrican ways of knowing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI use these audio clips the way the great beatmakers use their samples,” Payton told me in an interview. “I have a repository at my disposal, and I know what\u2019s in there.\u201d The music itself was formed in similar fashion. \u201cI stopped writing songs 10 years ago,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I hearmotifs or melodic fragments, I record them into voice memos and I stockpile ideas.\u201d
\nPayton combined these elements the way he might have made a cassette mixtape for a friend decades ago\u2014\u201cselecting the best moments I could find in my mental databank,\u201d he writes in his liner note, and \u201cconsidering exactly where to pause a track if you wanted to beat match or make a transition between songs seamless.\u201d The album begins with the sound of a tape reel fast-forwarding and then finding its place.
\nHere’s my full review below:THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
\nFeb. 7, 2017
\nEmancipation Proclamations
\nNicholas Payton\u2019s new album fuses the traditions of his hometown, New Orleans, with modern jazz, hiphop, mixtape and spoken-word cultures.
\nBy LARRY BLUMENFELD
\nNew York<\/em>
\nEarly in a recent performance at Dizzy\u2019s Club Coca-Cola, within Jazz at Lincoln Center, a casual listener might have assumed Nicholas Payton to be a keyboardist with a fondness for Fender Rhodes electric piano and a way with a slow tempo. Minutes later Mr. Payton lifted a trumpet to his lips with his right hand and began to blow, while playing keyboard with his left, and a fuller profile began taking shape. Soon\u2014his horn now gripped in both hands\u2014Mr. Payton revealed the strength, agility, sweetness and bite upon which he established a career more than 20 years ago.
\nOn trumpet, Mr. Payton can ignite a room with a fiery solo or silence it with a tender passage; he did both at Dizzy\u2019s. Yet these days his music doesn\u2019t rely on those abilities or that horn.
\nMr. Payton arrived on jazz\u2019s scene cast as a gifted neotraditionalist. He has spent the decades since departing from that mold. His new release, \u201cAfro-Caribbean Mixtape\u201d (Paytone\/Ropeadope), out Friday, is his clearest and boldest expression of an aesthetic he\u2019s long pursued. It\u2019s sprawling (two CDs with more than two hours of music), involves more than a dozen musicians, and yet sounds focused and personal.
\nThat cohesion is due largely to tightly interlocked elements: the flexible, quicksilver rhythmic dialogue between Joe Dyson\u2019s trap set and Daniel Sadownick\u2019s hand percussion; the layers of texture woven by Mr. Payton and Kevin Hays, who both play keyboard and piano on several tracks; and the dance of accents from bassist Vincente Archer and turntablist DJ Lady Fingaz.
\nThere\u2019s also a strong conceptual through-line. Beginning in 2011, Mr. Payton has raised a fuss online with blog posts rejecting the term \u201cjazz\u201d as limiting, or worse; he proposed the moniker, \u201cBlack American Music.\u201d This new album lends more graceful expression to his argument\u2014for an enduring black aesthetic that bows to jazz masters without implying servitude, and that embraces African influence across several genres. Words prove critical here, too. In the mix\u2014sometimes buried, other times clear\u2014are sampled snatches of spoken-word sources, manipulated by the turntablist. On \u201cJazz Is a Four-Letter Word,\u201d the voice of Max Roach (from a 1993 interview that Mr. Payton found on YouTube) describes an unbroken line of ingenuity from Charlie Parker to Michael Jordan to Michael Jackson. On the title track, Greg Kimathi Carr, head of Howard University\u2019s Afro-American Studies Department, explains \u201cAfrican ways of knowing.\u201d
\nStill, nothing seems academic. The album flows, moving joyously from, say, Mr. Payton\u2019s trumpet playing, supporting by a string quartet, on \u201cJewel,\u201d to the disco-tinged funk of \u201cJunie\u2019s Interlude.\u201d Some tracks ride easy grooves, others move fitfully within densely constructed soundscapes. There are compelling examples of Afro-Cuban rumba and, yes, modern jazz, but these all seem like momentary means toward a larger and unified end.
\nMr. Payton\u2019s wide-ranging liner note cites a paternal ancestor in his native New Orleans, who is said to have played with Buddy Bolden and to have formed Henry Payton\u2019s Accordiana Band \u201cbefore anyone was thinking about jazz.\u201d His own problem with the word \u201cjazz\u201d is the sense that someone else is trying to box him in. \u201cAfro-Caribbean Mixtape\u201d is a work of great rigor and discipline, steeped in jazz tradition and yet utterly unbound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Through more of a decade writing about the lives and careers of musicians born and raised in New Orleans, I’ve been fascinated by how the best of these artists have not been weakened by their experiences since the floods that resulted from the levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, nor by the indifference and outright racism … <\/p>\n

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