On Sonic Trance, Nicholas Payton brings his considerable
instrumental chops as well as a vivid imagination to bear
on jazz music. On this jazzy magical mystery tour, the New
Orleans trumpeter borrows elements from modern electric jazz,
Miles Davis, world music, reggae, hip-hop, electronica, ragtime,
mariachi music, R&B, and pop music and cooks them up into
a sound that manages to evoke all these genres and more while
somehow sounding entirely fresh.
Payton and his band, which includes Tim Warfield on tenor
and soprano saxes, keyboardist Kevin Hays, bassist Vicente
Archer, drummer Adonis Rose, Daniel Sadonwnick on percussion,
and Karriem Riggins providing samples, take us through a huge
variety of sounds, styles, textures, and colors, but somehow
manage to make it all hang together. In interviews Payton
has cited the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper as highly
influential on his approach to this album, and it’s
easy to see what Payton means. It’s not that he’s
copped anything directly musical from the Fab Four, but rather
that he’s taken the idea of varying the music immensely
and creating a program of music that is pulled together by
a loose thematic idea. In this case, that thematic idea is
the sonic trance—literally a dreamlike state in which
we passively allow this stream of music to enter our ears
and knock around in our heads.
Unlike many other recent “jazztronica” and hip-hop
influenced recordings, Payton here is very much within the
jazz tradition, albeit a very modern tradition. It takes jazz
as the basis and adds to it rather than taking another genre
and grafting jazz onto it. “Blu Hays” starts off
with a sound that sounds a bit like Ornette Coleman, but eventually
it settles into what can only be described as a very straightforward
post-bop sound. On the other hand, “Cannabis Leaf Rag”
takes a slightly altered segment of Scott Joplin’s “The
Entertainer” and juxtaposes it with a hip-hop beat and
some scratching that sounds like an old 78 RPM record in the
hands of Grandmaster Flash. “Shabba Unranked”
slyly points out the similarities between reggae and dub toasting
and jazz scatting. “Stinkie Twinkie” sounds like
something off a Matthew Shipp Blue Series release, with Payton’s
echoplexed trumpet rebounding around a piano vamp that rides
just underneath a hip-hop beat that occasionally explodes
into bop-like bomb dropping white heat. “Fela 1”
and “Fela 2” have much of the vibe and groove
of Kuti’s Afro-beat/highlife jazz sound, but they also
bring in a variety of other elements. On the first version,
Payton employs a wah-wah pedal in a very Miles-like manner,
while the second version relies on other elements, such as
Warfield’s soprano work.
One could go on—there are over 70 minutes of mind-bending
music here—but words are a poor substitute for music
of this imagination and caliber. What is wonderful to hear
is Payton coming into his own here. While he certainly already
had the credentials of a major jazz artist, Sonic Trance
is the sound of Payton arriving somewhere completely new.
There is nothing awkward about this transition, however. Rather,
it is a sound that Payton seems completely comfortable with
and it is one that brings together his sense of adventure
and humor (witness some of the song titles—“Two
Mariachis on the Wall,” “Shabba Unranked,”
“Cannabis Leaf Rag,” and “Stinkie Twinkie”),
his mastery of the trumpet, his New Orleans heritage, and
his love of other genres besides jazz. It is a completely
mature and intelligent piece of work. And, best of all, it
sounds really, really good.
