[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 149 (Thursday, September 14, 2017)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1225-E1226]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        HONORING NICHOLAS PAYTON

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 14, 2017

  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, trumpeter and composer Nicholas Payton will 
be honored this year by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation at 
the Jazz Concert that will take place during the 47th Annual 
Legislative Conference. Mr. Payton will perform at the concert with 
bassist Ben Williams, who will present his Protest Anthology. The 
concert will take place on Thursday, September 21, 2017, at the Walter 
E. Washington Convention Center, in Washington, DC. Mr. Payton will 
also receive the 2017 CBCF ALC Jazz Legacy Award for his contributions 
to jazz and world culture. To acquaint you with his accomplishments, I 
am pleased to share the following biographical information from Mr. 
Payton's website.
  Like a master chef possessing a deft sense of proportion, taste and 
poetic flair, this forward-looking heir to the traditions of New 
Orleans blends an array of related musical food groups--Bebop, Swing, 
the Great American Songbook, New Orleans second-line, Mardi Gras 
Indian, Instrumental Soul, Rhythm-and-Blues, Urban, Hip-Hop, and 
various Afro-descended dialects of Central America and the Caribbean--
into a focused sound that is entirely his own argot.
  On his latest recording Afro-Caribbean Mixtape, propelled by 
keyboardist Kevin Hays, bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Joe Dyson, 
percussionist Daniel Sadownick, and turntablist DJ Lady Fingaz, Payton 
seamlessly coalesces his interests, drawing on a global array of beats, 
melodies and harmonic consciousness to serve his lifelong conviction 
that music is a process by which the practitioner uses notes and tones 
to map identity and tell a story.
  Payton states, ``I've incorporated elements from all the things I've 
written and spoken about for years. It speaks to the moment politically 
in an overt way that my other albums don't. On a musical-conceptual 
level, I think it's my greatest work thus far.''
  Payton's aspiration to reclaim and redefine Black American Music 
fundamentals is a fulfillment of his birthright. He grew up across the 
street from Louis Armstrong Park, historically known as Congo Square, 
situated deep in the Treme, the neighborhood home base of many seminal 
New Orleans musicians and artists. In the 19th century, on Sundays 
only, enslaved Africans were allowed to gather in the public space of 
Congo Square to openly express African culture through singing, dancing 
and the playing of drums. Payton's mother, Maria, is a former operatic 
singer and a classically-trained pianist, who at 70, still performs in 
church; his father Walter, a bassist-sousaphonist and music educator 
was a mainstay on the Crescent City music and recording scene. He would 
take his young son to gigs. He gifted Nicholas a trumpet when he was 
four.
  ``Our house became a rehearsal space for whatever band my father was 
in,'' Payton recalls. ``We had a big living room and a grand piano, and 
other instruments. Trumpet appealed to me most of all the instruments I 
saw around, and I got one for Christmas when I was four.'' In just his 
childhood, Payton also became a proficient practitioner of tuba, 
trombone, woodwinds, piano, bass and drums. Before the age of 9, he 
sat-in with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band, a unit formed at the turn of 
the century that specialized in traditional repertoire. By 11, he 
received his first steady gig in the All Star Brass Band, a group of 
peers led by Trombone Shorty's oldest brother, James Andrews, who were 
deeply influenced by the rhythmic and harmonic extensions of various 
bands. Mardi Gras Indian music was in his back yard, and he played no 
small number of rhythm-and-blues and hip-hop sessions. ``I played all 
sorts of music,'' Payton says. ``I did everything.''
  As a small child, Payton took as role models the ``kool kats'' who 
attended his father's wee-hours rehearsals: drummers James Black and 
Herlin Riley; saxophonists Fred Kemp and Earl Turbinton; trumpeter 
Clyde Kerr, Jr.; and pianists Ellis Marsalis and Professor Longhair.
  Not long after joining the All Star Brass Band, Payton started 
digging into his father's record collection and came across Miles 
Davis' Four and More, with George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter 
and Tony Williams. ``I put on the second side first, and from the 
moment I heard Tony's 8-bar intro on sock cymbal, I was like, `I want 
to play music for the rest of my life.' I listened to that record every 
day, to the point where I learned all the solos. I wasn't trying to 
transcribe them. I'd just listened to it so much that I learned all the 
music, every bassline, everything.''
  ``After that, I listened to Freddie Hubbard, Red Clay, and then I 
went to Clifford Brown. Then I went to Louis Armstrong, who I wasn't 
really into at the time. Even though I was playing in brass bands, I 
saw myself as doing something more modern. Wynton Marsalis and Terence 
Blanchard were my hometown heroes. I wanted to go to New York and play 
with Art Blakey, and do what they did. But Wynton told me, `All that 
stuff you're checking out is cool, but you need to check out Pops.' I 
was like, `Man, I don't want to listen to that Uncle Tom music.' I 
thought about the handkerchiefs and bucking eyes, the things that were 
shameful and debilitating to Black people, and I didn't want any part 
of it. But through Wynton's influence, I started investigating 
Armstrong, and found Pops was the catalyst for all of this other stuff 
that I love and listen to. I developed a simpatico.''
  On the strength of his New Orleans upbringing and various concert 
appearances playing Armstrong repertoire on Jazz at Lincoln Center 
engagements with Marsalis, Payton--who had already established bona 
fides as a consequential modernist trumpet voice as a member of Elvin 
Jones-led ensembles on various tours and albums (Youngblood, Going Home 
and It Don't Mean A Thing)--was soon branded as ``the second coming of 
Armstrong.''
  With the 2001 Armstrong homage, Dear Louis, Payton said ``farewell to 
a perspective on playing music in terms of a repertory view of the 
masters,'' and hello to the notion ``that I would solely create music 
from my perspective as a young man in this world today.'' That 
perspective, he adds, ties directly to his formative New Orleans 
experiences.
  In 2014, Payton changed the name of his label from BMF to Paytone and 
released a trilogy of albums--Numbers, Letters, and Textures--that 
showcase the fruits of his decision a decade earlier to eschew the 
practice of writing tunes in favor of ``creating moods, distilling the 
compositional element to its most essential thing.'' He said: ``If a 
melody comes into my head while walking through an airport, I'll hum it 
into my Voice-Memo. If I dream a melody at night, I'll walk to the 
keyboards in my bedroom and play it into my phone or recorder. I 
stockpile these ideas, and quite an accumulation of motific themes have 
built up.''
  Payton's ability to infuse early 20th century repertoire with 
idiomatic authority and life force elicited a comment from the late 
trumpeter Adolphus ``Doc'' Cheatham, who shared bandstands with the 
seminal pioneers of the 1920s and beyond, and was 91 when he recorded 
the Grammy-winning Doc Cheatham & Nicholas Payton in 1996. Doc 
described Payton, ``He is the greatest of the New Orleans-style trumpet 
players that I've ever heard. And every time I hear him, he sounds 
better and better. I haven't heard anybody like him since Louis 
Armstrong.''
  Mr. Speaker, Nicholas Payton is a living jazz treasure and I urge all 
members to join me in commending him for his magnificent contribution 
to American and world culture.

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