While they didn't wear cap 'n' gowns and pick up diplomas together, there's a class of contemporary New Orleans trumpeters that is hugely influential in the world of jazz. This would include Wynton Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Irvin Mayfield, Wendell Brunious and the astounding Nicholas Payton.

With his Trio, Payton returns Friday and Saturday to the Side Door Jazz Club in Old Lyme. An amazing and provocative artist, writer and thinker, Payton is always reinventing himself, constantly experimenting with the malleable parameters of what some folks call jazz. (Payton prefers to call the genre of music he and others practice "Black American Music" - and has written with virtuosity on his reasons for doing so.)

Payton's latest album is called "Numbers," released on his own Paytone label. It's a project in which Payton and the Virginia band Butcher Brown set up and recorded live, vamping in full-funk mode on snippets of material the trumpeter had been stockpiling for years. As he describes "Numbers" on his web site, Payton says, "It's like (myself) and Butcher Brown took a time capsule back to 1973 and played a gig for the people demonstrating what's happened in music for the past 40 years." That's pretty damned intriguing.

- RICK KOSTER

Nicholas Payton, 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Side Door Jazz, Old Lyme Inn, 85 Lyme St., Old Lyme; $38.50; (860) 434-0886.