Freda Payne Plays Catalina on 26 September in a Tribute to the Ladies of Jazz

Freda Payne will perform at Catalina Jazz Club in Hollywood on Saturday 26 September, in an evening built as a tribute to the women who defined the American songbook.

The programme, The Legendary Ladies of Jazz, draws on the repertoire of Nancy Wilson, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Dinah Washington, Gloria Lynne, Dakota Staton, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt and Ella Fitzgerald — performed by an artist who shared stages with that generation rather than studying it from a distance. Conceived, written, directed and produced by playwright Don B. Welch, it is built as a theatrical evening rather than a straight concert, with Payne telling the stories of knowing these women between the songs. Musical direction is by Josh Nelson, leading a five-piece band.

Opening is Thomasina Gross, whose Eartha Kitt tribute has made her one of the more distinctive interpreters working that material — a deliberate pairing, given that Kitt is among the women Payne honours later in the evening.

Why this room, and why now

Catalina is not a nostalgia room. It is one of the rooms in Los Angeles where a jazz audience still turns out on a Saturday night for a name it trusts, and it programmes accordingly. Payne has sold it out before, along with Blues Alley in Washington, Yoshi's in Oakland, and Vibrato here in town.

The timing is its own argument. Payne has had a visible 2026 — cover star of both Decree Entertainment Magazine and Courageous Woman Magazine, and a best-dressed standout across Oscars week. A woman photographed on carpets in March is now stepping onto a stage in September with a programme that requires her to actually sing the Vaughan and Fitzgerald book. Those are not the same skill, and very few people at any age can do both in the same year.

The wider point

We have written this week about Madonna leading the VMA nominations four decades into her career, and argued that the correct reading is durability rather than nostalgia. This is the same argument at a different scale.

An artist with two gold records, a number one in Britain, more than twenty albums, and Broadway credits does not need a Saturday night in Hollywood to prove anything. She is taking it because the work is the point, and because a tribute programme of this kind is genuinely difficult to sing. That is the distinction between an artist being celebrated and an artist still practising.

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