Payton’s Place Varies Between Past, Forward

When the Newport Jazz Millennium Celebration stopped at the Irvine Barclay Theatre earlier this month, Nicholas Payton, at age 27, was its youngest headliner. The latest in a string of young trumpet lions from New Orleans, a lineage that includes Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard, Payton joined fellow trumpeter Randy Brecker, septuagenarian saxophonist Red Holloway, veteran pianist Cedar Walton, old-school guitarist Howard Alden and others who were examining 100 years of jazz history.

The highlight of the evening, however, was not a look back, but a look ahead. After intermission, Payton brought out his young quintet to play a pair of tunes from his latest Verve recording, “‘Nick @ Night.” Payton, who had earlier shown a certain brashness when playing music dating back 50 and more years, was now tearing it up on tunes that seemed to herald the next wave in jazz.

When he appears this weekend at the Orange County Performing Arts Center with an eight-piece band of New Orleans musicians--including his father, bassist and tuba player Walter Payton--the trumpeter will be looking back again, this time to pay tribute to Count Basie’s Hot Five and Hot Seven groups of the 1930s. It’s another reason to believe that Payton is all appetite when it comes to styles of music.

As jazz becomes more and more a repertory craft--witnessed by such jazz institutions as the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, the Smithsonian Jazz Orchestra and Marsalis’ Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, as well as in a host of centennial tributes to Ellington and now Basie--its creative edge, often found on the club bandstand rather than the concert stage, is slowly being diminished.

Payton is that rare musician who is happily dividing his time between both camps, embracing the jazz tradition as he did in a 1997 duo recording with trumpeter Doc Cheatham, as well as releasing cutting-edge sounds with his like-minded quintet.

“I don’t think of [the Basie project] as a repertory project,” Payton said by phone from South Carolina, where he was appearing last week. “I don’t like that word ‘repertory.’ It makes it sound like you’re performing a museum piece, or something that’s dead. This music will be alive.”

The Basie performance at the Performing Arts Center will stick close to its inspiration, in arrangement and instrumentation.

“We’ll be playing that classic material more or less in the style of the times,” he said. “But the solos, like always in jazz, will be up to the individuals.”

In May, Payton is scheduled to go into the studio with a 12-piece band for a slightly different Basie project, this one featuring his new arrangements of classic Basie material.

In the meantime, Payton is celebrating the recent release of his fifth album for Verve. Though originals have been a part of his program since his first Verve release, “From This Moment,” in 1994, Payton seems to have found his compositional footing with “Nick @ Night” and its emphasis on involved, slower tempo numbers and ballads.

“I think I’ve matured quite a bit in my writing. Although I’ve always written tunes, I think I’m beginning to find my niche. . . . I think my writing is becoming more facile about getting in touch with things musically. The tunes have more immediacy.”

Payton’s status as trumpet terror and his major-label association provides him an advantage most emerging musicians don’t have: a working band of his own. The value of that was apparent at the Newport date when Payton, saxophonist Tim Warfield, pianist Anthony Wonsey, bassist Ruben Rogers and drummer Adonis Rose, all stand-out artists in their own right, showed tightness and a musical empathy missing from the all-star jams on jazz standards that surrounded their performance.

“You can’t get the kind of rapport, the kind of communication that we have going in a jam session or performing with pickup musicians,” he said. “Another great thing is that Tim and Anthony, all of them, have other projects going and make their own recordings. They bring all those experiences back to the band, and that keeps things fresh. There are no shackles here, everyone has the freedom to experiment. They can take things as far as they want.”

Though he more and more has taken on the role of front man in the jazz world, Payton, who benefited from associations with Cheatham, trumpeter Clark Terry, Marsalis, Preservation Hall Jazz Band trumpeter and bandleader Wendell Brunious and others, said he’ll always search out the veterans from whom he can learn.

“I’ll always see myself as a student,” he said. “I don’t want to get complacent or stagnant. The idea is to keep learning and to constantly forge ahead.”

As a further sign of his broad tastes in jazz, Payton said that after his upcoming Basie recording, he’d like to concentrate on the electric band he occasionally features in and around his hometown of New Orleans.

“It’s a fusion band influenced by hip-hop, African rhythms, different kinds of stuff,” Payton said. “It’s not the same old thing.”

* The Nicholas Payton Octet appears Friday at the Jazz Club in Founders Hall, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Also Saturday, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. $36 to $42. (714) 556-2787.