28 April 2025
By Geraldine Wyckoff
Contributing Writer
It could truthfully be said to expect the unexpected when contemplating Nicholas Payton’s musical directions.
“Always,” Payton quickly agrees with a laugh.
The renowned 51-year-old, Grammy-winning, New Orleans trumpeter, flugelhorn player, pianist, keyboardist, vocalist, composer and educator, has studied and absorbed decades of musical styles having begun blowing trumpet, his main instrument, at age 4.
Payton has coined his music with a simple and a wonderfully specific descriptive phrase, Black American Music – best known as BAM. It explains a lot about how he imaginatively incorporates his early musical experiences in brass bands and traditional jazz while being equally comfortable injecting hip-hop as well as modern jazz and other styles that fit the bill into the mix.
“Hip-hop is part of the spectrum of BAM,” Payton explains. “I’m a child of the hip-hop era. When hip-hop turned 50 (in August 2023), I did too, a month later in September. So hip-hop is always present in some way or form just as New Orleans is a part of everything I do; it’s inseparable, it’s part of my fabric.”
For his set on Saturday, May 3, at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival as well as his Sunday, May 4, performance
at Cafe Istanbul, Payton will be reunited with two of his long-time music associates, notable bassist and vocalist, the Grammy-winning great Esperanza Spalding, and drum master Karriem Riggins, who enjoys ties with the hip-hop world. Payton has tried to get the trio, dubbed Triune, together since the last time they played for social activist’s Angela Davis’ 75th birthday in 2019. He’s excited that it’s finally happening again.
“Her virtuosity speaks for itself,” Payton declares of Spalding, who is heard on an outstanding vocal duet with the leader on the tune “Freesia” from his 2011 album, “Bitches.” “Outside of that,” Payton continues, “there’s this X factor that she has – star quality, not celebrity power. She’s channeled and tuned it into who she is and is able to convey that on the highest level on her chosen instruments. That’s very powerful. She changes lives without even trying. That’s something that musicians that I’m drawn to share… their energy, the light that they walk around with.”
Payton met Riggins back in New York circa 1996 when he went to hear pianist Mulgrew Miller’s band. Afterward the young drummer played an after-hour jam session. “I thought, this little cat from Detroit, he’s got something, so I kept my eye on him,” Payton remembers of his encounters with Riggins. “Subsequently, I met Common through Karriem,” adds Payton, considering it as his initial steps onto the national hip-hop scene.
Riggins is heard on two of Payton’s fine albums: 2003’s “Sonic Trance” and 2021’s “Smoke Sessions. “Every time I play with him is magical,” Payton declares, adding that with the three of them together, “I’m quite confident it will be powerful. As individuals everyone has such a strong voice.”
It might seem odd that Nicholas Payton is rarely heard playing trumpet live in New Orleans while his horn reigns around the world and shows up on recordings both as leader as well as a sideman on multiple artists’ output. Payton explains his horn’s absence in his hometown by simply saying, “I know my worth.”
Savvy jazz aficionados and those lucky enough to walk into the Ponchartrain Hotel’s old school style Bayou Bar, where Payton plays quite frequently with a quartet led by bassist Peter Harris, experience another side of his brilliance, minus his horn, and Fender Rhodes as he stretches out on the baby grand piano. Payton does so purely for the love of the music and his command of the instrument continually expands. He displays his old soul tendencies by throwing in quotes from other tunes even as the energy rages. “Melody is really supposed to be the true springboard for invention and creativity,” he offers.
“I think we have a very special chemistry between Peter, Ricardo (saxophonist Ricardo Pascal) and Jamison (drummer Jamison Ross) that’s quite rare,” Payton expounds. “The more we play the more telepathic it gets.”
What is particularly appreciated by local jazz fans is that the quartet’s playlist includes material from some of New Orleans’ great masters, including composer and drummer James Black.
“Peter designs the sets and for me, personally, it’s the music I grew up hearing so those are my standards and my foundation,” Payton offers. “James Black in particular. Next to Wayne Shorter, he is my biggest influence in composition – a lot of my compositions’ DNA comes right out of James Black who lived around [the] corner from us in Treme, and would come over to play our grand piano,” says Payton.
He also mentions the works of pianist and composer Ellis Marsalis and those artists heard on Harold Battiste’s AFO label whose material is also featured by the group.
Like his father, the late bassist and sousaphone player Walter Payton, as well as many other gifted working musicians, Nicholas stepped deeply into academia when, last fall, he became the chair of the Brass Department at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. “It’s not a desk job,” Payton assures, explaining that his focus will be on such elements as shaping curriculum, scheduling lessons and hiring faculty. “I ultimately get to be the one who determines what information is dispersed and what our students should be equipped with when they graduate. I still have a professional career and my playing is a big part of why I got the gig.”
Early on, Payton, who attended the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) and the University of New Orleans, also received instruction on classical piano from his mother Maria who was a pianist and vocalist.
“I don’t remember a life without Jazz Fest,” says Payton, who through the decades, has most often been a denizen of the Jazz Tent. His trumpet has also been heard at the Fest’s traditional jazz mecca, the Economy Hall Tent, paired, as it was last weekend, with clarinetist Dr. Michael White in tribute to Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and the legendary trumpeter’s superb Hot 5 and Hot 7 bands.
Payton made his first “appearance” at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival when he was just 4 years old performing with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band blowing on a toy kazoo-trombone that his parents purchased at the Fair Grounds. He sat in for the entire set though luckily, he assures, there was no microphone. By age 9, he was sitting in with the band for real.
Whether blowing trumpet or at a keyboard, Nicholas Payton’s calm demeanor can often veil a sudden surprising twist to a phrase, a humorous quote of a familiar melody, an abrupt change of tempo or increase or decrease in intensity or volume. “Always” expect the unexpected from the BAM man.
This article originally published in the April 28, 2025 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.