New Orleans-born trumpeter Nicholas Payton is one of the most technically gifted and musically adventurous jazz musicians of his generation — a player who came up in the Young Lions tradition and has spent his career determinedly pushing beyond it toward something larger and more personal.
Biography
Payton grew up in a musical family in New Orleans, began playing trumpet at four, and was sitting in with the Young Tuxedo Brass Band at nine. By his early twenties he was recording for Verve, winning a Grammy for his collaboration with nonagenarian trumpeter Doc Cheatham, and establishing himself as the finest trumpet voice to emerge from New Orleans since Wynton Marsalis. His subsequent career has been marked by restless evolution — from acoustic post-bop to electric fusion to hip-hop influenced explorations — always underpinned by a New Orleans sensibility that he describes as the deepest and most permanent element of his musical identity.
Discography
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