Ken Colyer Trust Band with Joe Payton at Café Brasil, New Orleans, LA

Tom Stagg informs us in the CD booklet, “This session was recorded during the annual Ken Colyer Trust visit to New Orleans and was listed as a ‘dance’ in the Trust Itinerary. The location chosen was the legendary Café Brasil on Frenchmen and Chartres, an ideal setting for such an occasion.” Neither the Trust nor the Café Brasil exists today, the Trust having dissolved not long after accomplishing its mission: to publish the Colyer autobiography When Dreams Are in the Dust. The café was a bar that also served food and featured live jazz as well as other types of music, but following Katrina eventually it closed in 2006, not to reopen. The New Orleans Trust Band was composed of some of the U.K.’s best musicians and on this recording had local musician Joe Payton as guest on string bass. I was heretofore unfamiliar with Payton, and I did not get much of a chance really to assess or appreciate his playing as, unfortunately, he is so under-recorded here. Stagg informs us he was a “firm and steady bass player with a fine singing voice,” so we’ll go with that. Certainly his vocals can be heard and he delivers them well. Sadly at the age of just 51 he succumbed to a heart attack some 12 weeks or so after this gig. Another musician no longer with us is the leader here, Norman Thatcher, who also was felled by a heart attack, his while on vacation in Turkey in 2012. Thatcher