Nicholas Payton

Trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Nicholas Payton was raised in New Orleans, a town chock-full of trumpet players, and while an innovator himself, he followed in the footsteps of a mile-long line of tradition-based players including Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, and of course, Wynton Marsalis. Payton is the son of Walter Payton, a well-known bassist on the Crescent City jazz scene. His mother played piano. Raised as he was in a musical family, Payton often spent upwards of ten hours a day practicing trumpet in his youth. He began playing trumpet as a four-year-old, after asking his father to get him one. He began accompanying his father to shows at clubs in his youth and had the chance to hear many great trumpet players. "I had a chance to hear some great trumpeters like Wendell Brunious, Leroy Jones, Clyde Kerr, Jr. and Teddy Riley," Payton recalled in a 2003 interview, and he recalls seeing Wynton Marsalis when he was in high school. "I got to hear a bunch of people play trumpet in a town that has been noted for trumpet players since Buddy Bolden. For me, trumpet fit my personality. It suited my voice. You're able to express a wide range of emotions on the instrument," he said. The turning point for the young Payton came when he was 11, when he heard a Miles Davis quartet album that was in his parents' record collection. With the opening notes of the recording, he knew then he wanted to be a trumpet player and play jazz. He began performing publicly as a ten-year old and began playing in the streets as a year later. He worked everywhere from jazz funerals to weddings to bar mitzvahs, and played on the streets for tips, and though he knew he wanted to play jazz, "you can't make a living in New Orleans being a genre-oriented musician. A lot of the guys...