Imagination & Technique

“Today there is a much finer line between composition and improvisation. That’s one of my goals—to play something compositional in an improvisational setting.” It’s a skill that has come slowly for Don. “The key is developing your imagination and technique to be able to play what you hear in your mind. You let your mind create the music. I always have a melody running in my head—I just choose if I want to let it in.”

Payne’s compositional style is a product of his influences: his mentor Percy Heath, longtime friend Ray Brown, and decades of studio experience creating bass lines on the spot. “It’s easier to do than to talk about. I like to look at the chord progressions, which give me ideas on how to build lyricism into my bass lines. That’s my goal: creating a melody in the form of a walking bass line. I often play roots and 5ths where they are supposed to be, and then I make my choices in between. Each accented note is a chord tone, which helps to give the feel of progression. I also love to play sequential phrases. I don’t plan them; they just come from understanding.” Don asserts that the time doesn’t have to be played if everyone knows where it is. “It’s about the space in between beats. You can leave a half a bar, or even three quarter-notes, with nothing. I just like to have fun and let my bass part evolve.”

To Electric & Back

Born in 1933 to a sharecropper family in a small Texas community, Payne started playing trumpet soon after his family moved to Southern California. He picked up his first upright bass in high school, and two weeks later, he joined the school orchestra. After returning from a two-year army stint, he met Modern Jazz Quartet co-founder Percy Heath, who nicknamed him DP. “Percy told me that I had a great feel for the bass. I would spend hours sitting in front of him watching him play, and I never forgot some of what I heard. Learning by sitting in front of a great is very different from learning through books and articles.” Payne got his first real break playing bass on the soundtrack for the TV series Peter Gunn. Some time later, trumpeter Don Cherry hooked him up with jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, and Payne soon got the job playing on Coleman’s first album, Something Else. “I loved being in that band,” Payne says. “It was part of the evolution of the jazz arts.”

Six months after recording Something Else, at age 25, Payne got a call from Tony Bennett’s musical director. A few days later, he packed up his car and took Route 66 to New York. Within the week, he played his first gig with Bennett’s 18-piece band, which was headlining the Copacabana with Count Basie’s Band. “They were great times,” Don muses. “I kept meeting new people, playing with them, and getting gigs as a result. The gods were smiling on me.” One of his new friends was Scott LaFaro, who house-sat for Payne when he played out of town.

Payne toured Brazil with Bennett in 1961, and after returning to New York, he met bossa nova stars Astrud and João Gilberto, who were playing some dates in town with Stan Getz. Soon afterward he was recording the bossa with Astrud and Getz, performing at Carnegie Hall, and touring Europe. Back in New York, the bossa craze caught the ear of jingle producer David Lucas, who hired Payne to play for a bossa commercial. At Lucas’s urging, Payne bought his first bass guitar, a 1962 Fender Precision, which was the tool de rigeur for session work. Once again, Payne was at the right place at the right time, with the right sound. “We were the only ones in the States who could play the bossa,” he explains. “The phone never stopped ringing. Within a year, I played commercials for five different airlines, Coke, and Pepsi.” Payne was pulling down a six-figure income—a huge sum for a musician in the ’60s. The electric bass opened up new avenues for Payne, including the emerging fusion of jazz and rock. Don also played and recorded with pop stars like Janice Ian (“At Seventeen”) and Harry Chapin (“The Cat’s in the Cradle”), and he also played with the house band on Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America show.

In the ’80s, studio work underwent a major technological upheaval with the introduction of the drum machine and the proliferation of keyboard bass lines. Payne saw his studio work drop off by as much as 50 percent. Disenchanted, he and his family moved to Southern Florida. Four years later, he was playing golf with Ray Brown, who asked how his upright playing was coming. Don hadn’t played the upright bass for decades. “Ray looked me right in the eye and said, ‘I know you. You’re a wonderful bassist, and I hate to see you wasting your life.’ He told me, ‘The acoustic is back and there is a ton of work. Take my word for it—if you’re not happy, you can put the motherfucker back!” Payne went home, picked up his double bass again, and never looked back. It was 1992. “I discovered that I had a whole new style and approach. I’ve had no rest since.”

These days, he shuffles between concert and club bookings in South Florida with the Patti Wicks Trio, and a quartet with Dave Hubbard and vocalist Nicole Yarling. In 2000 he started his own label, Recycled Notes Music Co., and a year later he produced Rhapsodic Echoes. He hopes to soon create an instructional CD, and he is also putting together a concert for the Gold Coast Jazz Society, titled The Great American Songbook, to be held at the Broward County Performing Arts Center. “I am interesting in leading the band in collaboration with some my close colleagues,” Don says. “And playing the music that I enjoy.”