Nicholas Payton: Exploring Sound through Textures, Letters and Numbers
Nicholas Payton: Exploring Sound through Textures, Letters and Numbers
At 44 years old and with a grammy to his name, trumpeter Nicholas Payton already has near legendary status in the jazz world. Payton is also notorious for publishing outspoken and sometimes controversial intellectual pieces, like “On Why Jazz isn’t Cool Anymore”. I’ll stick to discussing Payton’s music here and maybe go into his ideas about music and society another time. An examination of Payton’s life and work reveal a man who places a great deal of importance in the honest expression of one’s own ideas and beliefs, be them creative or intellectual. Payton’s individuality is evident even on his earliest albums, however Payton has released a string of more conceptual albums in the past few years which I personally find especially interesting.
It is necessary to note at this point that Payton does far more than just play the trumpet. In addition to running his own label (Paytone Records), Payton is also an impressive keyboardist (he is often seen playing keys with one hand while playing trumpet with the other), and has varying levels of skill on the bass, drums, tuba, trombone, clarinet and saxophone.
Payton’s 2016 album Textures is a collection of keyboard tracks that Payton improvised while watching the artist Anastasia Pelias paint. Each track on Textures is named after a different texture (‘Sticky’ and ‘Fuzzy’ being examples). Going back one year to 2015, Payton released the album Letters, which features 26 tracks, you guessed it, one for each letter of the alphabet. Beyond their quirky concepts, the music on Textures and Letters is interesting and unpredictable, but of serious quality. Interestingly, Payton’s trumpet is almost absent from both albums. Instead of doing what he is best known for, Payton allows his own creative ideas to literally dictate what instrument he plays. Payton does not always bother to adapt an idea so it can be expressed via a certain instrument (like a trumpet).
Now I’d like to focus on Payton’s 2014 album, Numbers. I could honestly write about any of Payton’s albums, as they are all interesting (I hope that’s now obvious), but I’ve wanted to write about Numbers for a while. Numbers began Payton’s recent string of more conceptual albums, and as with the others, Payton’s trumpet is almost entirely absent (save for the song ‘Two’).
Full album stream of Numbers:
Payton plays Fender Rhodes on Numbers, while teaming up with musicians from the exciting Richmond, Virginia based jazz outfit Butcher Brown. I listened to Numbers long before checking out the dope music of Butcher Brown, but their own self-description of “Garage punk jazz funk on the low end of the dial” sums up their style pretty well I would say.
Butcher Brown live performance
Butcher Brown tone down their intensity a bit on Numbers but nevertheless showcase some impressive playing and obvious group chemistry. With Corey Fonville playing drums, Devonne Harris playing some keys and bass, Keith Askey on guitar and Andrew Randazzo on bass, Payton could hardly find a better group of technically impressive but adventurous musicians to accompany his rhodes playing. Payton describes playing grooves he’d had locked in his head for years to use as jumping off points for the album. Payton and the Butcher Brown crew explored these grooves in jam sessions, eventually using the best ideas to flesh out the songs which would ultimately appear on the album.
'Three' from Numbers
To my ear, many of the tracks on Numbers resemble complexified hip hop grooves. Some tracks are closer to straight-ahead jazz than others, but much of the album hovers around a lower tempo, with semi-hip hop drums, and settles into dreamy jazzed grooves which progress just enough to differentiate themselves from the shorter, simpler, more robotic loops which typify (sampled) hip hop beats. I’m talking about tracks like 'Three' in particular here. Equally, while the music winds forward with imaginative progressions, it feels restrained too. The longer melodic tangents that one commonly associates with jazz are rare on the album. Numbers finds a chill but interesting niche to sit and luxuriate in, somewhere between the world of looped jazzy hip hop and jazz itself. Some parts of the album feel almost lethargic (tracks 'Two', 'Four', 'Seven', 'Eight', 'Nine', the list goes on) while other parts get quite energetic (tracks 'Five' and 'Six'). In addition to containing traces of hip hop, the jazz on Numbers is diluted by forays into funk and other sounds.
'Seven' from Numbers
Numbers was Payton’s album at the end of the day, but Payton’s playing in no way dominates the other musicians on the album. Each track originated from Payton’s own musical ideas, but Payton also claims he wanted to step back from the role of band leader. With just rhodes, guitar, bass and drums on the album, Numbers feels open and balanced the whole way through. The instruments carefully share the space with each other, achieving a rich sound through intelligent energetic shifts and subtle harmonizes rather than flashy showmanship. Even in the higher tempo tracks, the musical phrases seem to breathe. Numbers feels like the product of methodical planning to achieve balance, while still expressing a soulful and visionary fluidity of movement.
'Eight' from Numbers
Many people have noted the strange ‘in between’ world which Numbers inhabits musically. The relaxed grooves on numbers are complex enough to act as stand-alone pieces, yet ‘incomplete’ or open enough to welcome a solo instrument or vocalist to join in over the harmonies which have been laid down by Payton and his band. Payton admits that this was not his original goal, noting “When we tracked, I played mostly Rhodes and just a hint of trumpet with the idea that I would go back and overdub [trumpet] solos. After I lived with the material for a while, I came to love it just the way it is.”
'Ten' from Numbers
'Twelve' from Numbers
Regardless of Payton’s original intentions for Numbers, the album presents an interesting fusion of jazz whilst being an achievement in balance. The genius of Numbers ultimately came from Payton’s decision to leave the subtle harmonies to speak (or inspire) for themselves. It’s a relatively easy listen, an inviting collection of sounds to simply listen and relax, or even play along to. As Payton himself said of Numbers: “It’s a bed of sex wrapped in 500-thread count sonic sheets.” So climb on in.
Article by Matthew Douglas
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