by Susan Kepecs
Three prodigious players at the top of today's bop – saxman David Sánchez, vibraphonist Stefon Harris and trumpeter
Nicholas Payton – bring their Ninety Miles Project to the Wisconsin Union
Theater at Music Hall Thursday night (Nov. 29). Ninety Miles refers to the distance between the tip of South
Florida and the Castros’ big, music-wondrous island, and the project indeed was first conceived as a bridge between US and Cuban musicians. Puerto Rico-born Sánchez, Harris, and trumpeter
Christian Scott joined up in Havana with Cuban composer / pianists Rember
Duharte and Harold López-Nussa, plus a rhythm section of their paisanos. But the project’s name is deceptive. Even on the eponymous 2011 album, recorded at very epicenter of clave, the son-y-rumba rhythmic key is more implied than literal. The Ninety Miles Project isn't Cubop,
the raw, powerful mix of rumba and bebop forged in New York by Dizzy Gillespie with
two Cubans, trumpeter Mario Bauzá and volatile percussionist Chano Pozo, when
Havana was Mobster Heaven and the US sat at its WWII-era height of global
hegemony. What Ninety Miles plays isn’t
mambo / cha-cha-cha bailable Latin jazz in the Eddie Palmieri, Poncho Sánchez,
Tony Castañeda sense. Instead, the Ninety Miles Project puts out lovely new-century bop with a bright pan-Latin
tinge.
Nicholas Payton replaced
Scott on trumpet after the Cuba session.
The rest of the current, US-based lineup: venezolano Edward Simon on
piano, Henry Cole on drums, Sánchez’ fellow borinqueño Ricardo Rodriguez on
bass and Cuban timbero Mauricio Herrera on percussion.
Simon is an established
leader in his own right; Rodriguez, Herrera and Cole (whose debut album was
released last year), rising players all, are compiling impressive credits. But Ninety Miles’ trio of top-tier frontmen is the
reason this is a milestone show. Sánchez,
who headlined the Isthmus Jazz Festival in 2009, is a master at coaxing the far-flung
ritmos of Latin America and Africa into his Afro-Boricua, bomba-based post-bop. Sánchez’ approach to rhythm is remarkably
subtle, which lends mystery to his music – but if you close your eyes and feel
the beat you can usually find the roots from which it springs.
Vibraphone virtuoso Stefon
Harris, who started out playing classical and has worked with the great bop
pianist Kenny Barron in multiple formats, can swing anything, from soul to
Stravinsky. Harris puts out some of the
most complex, and often lyrical, R&B / hip hop / post-bop fusions on the
planet with his own band, Blackout.
Nicholas Payton is one of
the most fiercely articulate New Orleans trumpeters working today. A prominent player of Marsalis-style neo-bop, Payton’s also turned out boss boogaloos and, recently, a musically open-ended
approach to R&B (his 2011 release, Bitches). He’s prolific as a writer, too, howling up
a hurricane of liberation opinion – he can out-Cornel West Cornel West – on his
blog, “The Cherub Speaks” (http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/). One of Payton’s top topics is his crusade to replace the once-pejorative term
“jazz” with the unencumbered descriptor “Black American Music.” While I don’t
agree with everything he has to say I think he’s right on this one, except for a critical glitch -- Payton's preferred term excludes the Caribbean parts of the Latin canon.
I interviewed Payton a few weeks back, about
the way he plays and his place in the Ninety Miles Project. Somewhat surprisingly, given the way he
writes, he wasn’t blustery at all on the phone.
Here are my questions, and his thoughtful answers.
CulturalOyster: The New York Times recently called you “jazz’s chief polemicist.” Anyone who’s taken a look at your blog would
agree, and Bitches is a little like
that – it takes very pointed aim at the artificial walls that tend to be used
to categorize what you call Black American Music. On the other hand, despite how overblown it
is, I really don’t see much that’s polemical about the black American music
argument – I think it’s mostly a truth-to-power issue, and I like to think
reasonable people will choose truth over power most of the time. Also, the bio on your website says you’re the
embodiment of all trumpet players who came before, and that long tradition is
evident in the way you play – to me you sound much more spiritual than – ok,
not a trumpet player, but – Archie Shepp angry.
So, how do you reconcile the dichotomy between polemicist and
traditionalist?
Payton:
I think life is riddles with dichotomies. You negotiate extremes on a daily
basis, it’s what makes life dynamic. We
wouldn’t know good without bad, night gives us an appreciation and perspective
of the day…so we’re always negotiating the state of opposites and the gradient
scales that exist in between. I try to
break down the illusory walls that separate things that are in essence unified
but that people tend to divide. I try to
look for constants, and, as you said before, for truth. So, getting back to the black American music
issue, to me it’s not about a genre or a movement or anything else. Black American music is what it is. The term jazz, that was slapped on after the
music was developed. It doesn’t really speak
to what the music is, and it’s a very
disdainful word if you look at its etomology.
The whole motive for what I’ve been saying is that “black American
music” isn’t a gimmick, it’s not a name – it’s just the truth.
CulturalOyster:
You came to the Ninety Miles Project after the original recording in Havana, on
which Christian Scott played trupmet. What
do you bring to that table that changes what we should expect, if we’re basing
our expectations on the album?
Payton:
By virtue of there being a different energy and personality, the music
changes. Scott and I are both trumpet
players from New Orleans, but we have very different personalities, very
different experiences. I bring the things
that make me me to the table. That said, in New Orleans we often liken
ourselves to the northernmost part of the Caribbean. New Orleans is the entryway through which
those Afro-Caribbean rhythms came to North America. And in places like New Orleans and Cuba,
where musicians are some of the most respected and prominent people in the
community, and where music and dance are so intertwined, the rhythms are in the
air. You can feel that energy as soon as
you set foot in these places. If you’re raised
in the New Orleans tradition you have an affinity and a very natural and
organic connection to Afro-Caribbean music. So Scott and I both provide natural links to how
Afro-Caribbean rhythms were translated to the the North American area – but the
way we do that is a very individual thing.
CulturalOyster:
Right, the cross-currents in the Ninety Miles Project are historic – the line goes
straight through from the New Orleans connection – Jelly Roll Morton’s “Spanish
tinge” – to Cubop, to the ongoing influx of players from Latin America and the Caribbean in New
York today. Can we pinpoint what Ninety Miles is doing, or is this really all one thing, moving forward through new
generations?
Payton: I
don’t think we can pinpoint it – since I’ve been in the band it’s definitely
taking a different shape than when the project started. With all due respect to Cuban music it’s not
an Afro-Cuban project. The lines have
become very fluid and pan-diaspora, it’s a lot of different kinds of languages all
steeped in the traditions of the
Americas – and it’s about how that primal, rhythmic DNA has taken shape in the
form of the music today. Even within a
solo at times we find now that the groove becomes very pliable, it might go
from funky to kind of traditional or go into 4/4 swing, so the lines blur on a
nightly basis when we perform. It’s
really cool for me since that’s where I am with it, going back to your first
question about breaking away from the idea of separate genres.
CulturalOyster:
Sounds like it’s time for a new recording.
Payton: We
haven’t nailed down any specifics yet, but we’re talkin’ about it!
