SOUNDTRACK: NICHOLAS PAYTON TRIO-Tiny Desk Concert #801 (November 2, 2018).
I feel like the Tiny Desk hasn’t had a good old-fashioned jazz trio on in a while. With the Nicholas Payton Trio you get drums, upright bass and Payton on organ, trumpet and sampler.
All three compositions in this set are from Payton’s 2017 album, Afro-Caribbean Mixtape. “It is often said that New Orleans is the northernmost region of the Caribbean,” says Payton on his website. “Africa is the source of all rhythms. The Afro-Caribbean Mixtape is a study of how those rhythms were dispersed by way of the Middle Passage throughout Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, then funneled through the mouthpiece of New Orleans to North America and the rest of the world.”
The first song is “Kimathi.” I love the simplicity of the organ that he plays while the rhythmic precision of his band mates keeps the song going. Drummer Jonathan Barber is going pretty nutty (albeit gently) on that minimal kit and bassist Ben Williams is playing nonstop. And then around four minutes, Payton switches to trumpet, playing a melody and then echoing it on the keys.
Just to impress even more, while playing a melody on the keys, he holds a note on the trumpet for 25 seconds.
Payton dazzled the audience, simultaneously playing his trumpet and a Fender Rhodes. It’s his signature, resonant sound. Payton’s genius virtuosity captivated both faithful fans and anyone in the NPR crowd just discovering his music for the first time.
The nine-minute song is an incredible start. It’s followed by “Othello” a song that starts off so quietly that Barber plays the cymbals with his fingertips. Even Payton’s trumpet feels subdued on it.
This song has vocals (from Payton) which I like less than a good instrumental. While this seems like it would fit well in a smoky night club, it’s too slow for my tastes.
The final song “Jazz Is A Four-Letter Word,” comes from the title of a book Max Roach was working on before he passed away. The song features samples of Roach speaking. There’s a great bass line and gentle keys as Roach speaks. I feel like Payton singing the title is a bit redundant since the samples are so effective (if not a little overused).
Racial constructs are notably relevant in the last tune, “Jazz Is A Four-Letter Word,” which was inspired by the autobiography of drummer and activist Max Roach. You can even hear Roach’s sampled voice, fused into the infectious groove, a narrative of black consciousness on display. Ideology aside, the music was on point and the audience couldn’t help but sing and clap as the trio took us out on a soulful rhythmic vamp.
The middle of the song is great as the tempo picks up and the bass is just walking all up and down the fret board as Payton jams along. And although I initially dismissed Payton singing the title, the end sing-along is pretty cool.
[READ: December 10, 2018] “Chaunt”
“Chaunt,” the story tells us, is a place. A place where there was an old chapel–more rubble than chapel now. It was a place that Jane Click’s son Billy and his friend Jerome rode their bikes to all the time.
The boys say that the place is full of animals and not made-up animals, either. Not an elephant or a lion or a polar bear, not exactly. “They were waiting, but they weren’t waiting for us.” The boys watched the animals and then the animals became motionless “but still animals. All the animals you’d ever hope to see.”
It’s a weird story. But it’s also a horrific story because we find out pretty early on that these two boys have been killed. They were riding their bikes home from Chaunt and were both struck by a car. The driver was not found at fault (which I think is impossible) because he couldn’t see them in the dusk.
If that weren’t bad enough, people were not kind to Jane either. Jerome’s family threatened her and threw bags of trash on her doorstep. And the community blamed her for allowing two boys to ride their bikes to Chaunt unsupervised.
So as the story opens (I’ve summarized out of order), she is heading to The Dove, or Dove as it is called. And that’s when things get confusing (yes, right from the beginning).
It’s unclear to me if Dove is really a place or if it a headspace for Jane Click. There are others at Dove, but they are all equally peculiar. There’s Theodore, dressed motley, but with no smell at all. And the place is apparently run by teenagers, like the leader with a tattoo of a spider on her throat or the boys who shaved their heads and eyebrows.
The rest of the story is in Dove and is just one bizarre scene after the next, with Theodore being nice to her and the other being mean to both of them. Really I have no idea what happens from the mid-point on–if it’s all in her head or if the whole story is bonkers. And I’m not even sure I know what happened in the beginning. The middle was painfully clear though.
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