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Jazz explosion
Skilled musicianship allowed the members of Los Hombres Calientes to shape their phenomenal sound from the start. And their sound keeps expanding.
By PHILIP BOOTH
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 9, 2000
It has been a short road to the top of their chosen genre for Los Hombres Calientes. The New Orleans sextet is rapidly gaining acclaim for feverish performances, top-shelf musicianship and an intoxicating fusion of jazz, Latin and African rhythms, reggae, funk and Crescent City soul.
The band, organized in 1998 by Headhunters percussionist Bill Summers, rising-star trumpeter Irvin Mayfield and a group of players including drummer Jason Marsalis, debuted that year with a February show at Snug Harbor.
Patrons of the intimate club, the unofficial headquarters for modern jazz in New Orleans, did something not usually seen at the venue: They showed their appreciation by getting out of their seats and moving around.
"People don't dance at Snug Harbor," Summers says by telephone. "The first thing Irvin said to me was, "I've never played jazz where people jumped up and started dancing. I've never had this happen before.' He was shocked. When you're playing some so-called esoteric music like jazz, it kind of works out where sometimes it's kind of intellectual and people don't have that kind of response."
The group landed a gig that spring at the prestigious New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, simultaneously releasing a hastily assembled CD for the independent Basin Street label. That self-titled disc, surprisingly enough, went on to hit No. 14 on the Billboard jazz chart, gain airplay around the country and win Billboard honors for Contemporary Latin Jazz Album of the Year.
The wildly enthusiastic reaction to the group's Jazz Fest appearances, a response also seen at the Clearwater Jazz Holiday in 1999 and last January at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, is one that has come to be expected by the band.
Summers, Mayfield, pianist Victor Atkins, bassist Edwin Livingston, percussionist-vocalist Yvette Summers and new drummer Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez have taken their infectious sound to festivals, clubs and concert halls across America, as well as venues in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, England, France and Israel.
Los Hombres Calientes return to Skipper's on Friday night for a show sponsored by WMNF-FM 88.5. Why have they caught on so quickly?
"We're playing something that's real accessible to the people," Summers says. "We're not doing anything new. But the way that we're mixing it up, the way that we're putting it together, is different.
"You have a lot of jazz groups that attempt to play other genres and mix it up. But that "little Latin tinge' is usually some kind of Taco Bell approach to the music. They're not going to take the time to make the burrito correct. They don't do much study of it."
The band's absorption in the rhythms and textures of Africa, the Caribbean and South America, all filtered through the music of New Orleans, paid off with last year's Vol. 2.
The disc features a three-part Cuban Suite, with contributions by the Louisiana Philharmonic String Quartet, the reggae-tinted Rasta Renegade, and the intoxicating Brazilian batucada of Blues de Enredo. The music of Afro-Cuban drummer Chongito inspired the tune Fongo Sunk, and the brooding call-and-response piece Alabi Oyo E is named for a Nigerian city.
American pop enters the picture, too, with a mellow, Latinized remake of R&B hit Feel Like Makin' Love and a closer that has the flexible outfit laying down soulful grooves for reinventions of Herbie Hancock's Chameleon and George Clinton's We Want the Funk, both concert staples.
The band's plans for Vol. 3, already underway, are even more ambitious: They're slated to record tracks at home as well as in such far-flung locales as Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Brazil. The guest list will tentatively include trombonist-arranger Juan Pablo Torres, drummer and dancer Pedro Martinez, New Orleans brass bands, folk-punk singer Ani DiFranco (who has worked with Mayfield) and maybe even Sean Lennon.
"We're stepping it up," Summers says. "We don't want to be restrictive. As Irvin puts it, we have a jazz format, but we reach out to the world. That includes music from the Middle East, North Africa, West Africa. All the music we're dealing with comes from Africa. It's all fair game to us. It's all worth exploring."
PREVIEW
Los Hombres Calientes, 8 p.m. Friday, Skipper's Smokehouse, 910 Skipper Road, Tampa. (813) 238-8001. $13 advance, $16 day of show.
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