Basin Street Records
October 2000

As Los Hombres trumpeter Irvin Mayfield puts it, you just don't consider yourself "jazz" at all.

"That's not how we market ourselves," Mayfield says. "We approach it like [we're] something everyone needs to check out, so more people my age group come to check it out. So we get 15-25,000 people in front of us during sold-out concerts due to the impact that Los Hombres Calientes has."

In other words, Los Hombres is becoming a crossover success in the same way Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Santana, Nirvana and numerous other musical acts have - by overcoming questions of genre classification and stylistic ghettoization to transcend buzzword status and reach the right ears through sheer force of artistry - and plenty of playing out.

Mayfield, at 22-years-old, is already a gifted musician who performs with two ensembles: the Latin-influenced Los Hombres and his own modern jazz quartet.

Both groups have albums out on New Orleans-based Basin Street Records, the 2 1/2-year-old independent label founded by 37-year-old Mark Samuels.

Samuels doesn't treat his bands like mere product; he focuses on just a few releases a year and tries to promote them as aggressively as possible. So far, according the Mayfield that's resulted in sales of the label's two Los Hombres albums (their self-titled debut and Vol. 2) of over 30,000 units - quite a feat for a start-up indie label.

The band is now preparing to record its third disc for Basin Street, titled simply Vol. 3.

"It should be very interesting," Mayfield says. "Ani DiFranco will be on a track, and we will record part of the album in Cuba, part in Brazil, and another part in Jamaica with guys [from those] regions. It will also have Arabic music and Chinese-influenced music on there; we're really trying to expand and stretch out on this album."

Mayfield is also working on his quartet's second album for Basin Street, titled "Passion Falls." The disc will feature appearances by some of the Big Easy's most celebrated musicians, including Grammy-winning trumpeter Nicholas Payton, saxophonists Branford Marsalis (tenor) and Donald Harrison, Jr. (alto), and trombonist and producer Delfeayo Marsalis.

New Orleans has been synonymous with jazz since the music's inception. Scholars agree that jazz originated in the Gulf Coast city in the early years of the 20th century thanks to a culmination of European, African, Caribbean/American influences and all kinds of hybrids thereof. So the French-founded, cosmopolitan port city has always been a center of grassroots involvement in the music.

Or, as Mayfield puts it, "In North Carolina you have kids with basketballs; in New Orleans, you have kids with trumpets."

While many local musicians learn their craft strictly by playing by ear around town, Mayfield is a graduate of the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a magnet school for high-school students interested various performing arts. NOCCA's graduates include Jazz at Lincoln Center's artistic director and renowned trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and soundtrack composer and trumpeter Terence Blanchard.

NOCCA's alumni also feature the aforementioned Payton and Harrison, Jr., drummer Adonis Rose (who performs with Mayfield's quartet as well as Payton's quintet) and drummer Jason Marsalis, the youngest of the city's musical dynasty sired by pianist Ellis Marsalis.

Mayfield studied alongside of Jason Marsalis and co-founded Los Hombres with Marsalis and master percussionist Bill Summers, who played with Herbie Hancock's 70s fusion band the Headhunters. However, Marsalis recently decided to take a leave of absence from the group. Says Mayfield, "He wants to focus on his work with Marcus Roberts and his own [straight jazz] group."

He has been replaced by Afro-Cuban percussionist Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez, who's worked with bassist John Patitucci, trombonist Steve Turre and Santana.

Marsalis has recorded two albums for Basin Street under his own name. The second, titled Music in Motion, is a quantum leap forward in songwriting and features some of the most well-integrated jazz grooves, rhythmic experimentation, and horn-driven honking to come out of the Crescent City's scene - where music is a way of life.

"To be a musician in New Orleans is no strange thing," says Mayfield. "When I was coming up, I started playing in a school band because my best friend played, and all the girls liked him. Then I started playing in churches, and then I got into the Algiers Brass Band [Algiers is a town just across the Mississippi from the French Quarter]."

It was then Mayfield says he realized a lot of church hymns he played on were really "second-line," or traditional Dixieland brass band, songs. When he later went on to NOCCA, Mayfield says, "That's when I understood I needed to expand my conception of music, to explore classical music and different parts of jazz."

NOCCA's program has a very competitive atmosphere that Mayfield says forces students decide how serious they are in pursuing jazz.

"There's a certain number of people when you start out, then they put out half the people, and by the time it was said and done, there are not many left in the field. NOCCA makes you say 'yes I want to do it' or 'no I don't.'"

Samuels, who created Basin Street Records to showcase an album recorded live at Tipitina's, one of N.O.'s most famous clubs, by one of the city's most beloved performers, trad-jazz quintet Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers, is quite familiar with NOCCA, which has clearly served as a fertile breeding ground for the area's jazz scene.

"I grew up in New Orleans," Samuels says. "I moved away to go to school and work in New York City, but before that I went to Ben Franklin H.S. with Wynton Marsalis, who spent half his day at NOCCA. I made contacts through him, and at a certain point I felt like I wanted to be a part of the music here."

So in 1997, Samuels got the money together to press and distribute Ruffins' first concert album, The Barbecue Swingers Live, which became a top-selling disc at the Jazz Fest.

Soon after, Basin Street put out two more albums: a studio record by Kermit Ruffins called Swing This! produced by Tracey Freeman (Harry Connick, Jr.), and the first Los Hombres disc.

Both became critically praised and best-selling regional favorites, and Samuels never looked back. The label just released a disc of fine trad-jazz by clarinetist Dr. Michael White, which features the highly regarded drumming of N.O. native Shannon Powell (who's worked with both Ruffins and Connick, Jr.), and Samuels says he's signed Bill Summers for a new Headhunters album.

And there's plenty more ahead - both on record and in the hothouse club environment of New Orleans.

In addition to putting out new albums by Los Hombres, Jason Marsalis and Irvin Mayfield in the coming months, Basin Street will surely benefit from the close-knit yet competitive nature of the local music scene. For instance, Ruffins and Mayfield square off every so often for a "cutting heads" contest, where each tries to one-up the other in an alternating battle of the bands.

So far, the contests have all ended in a draw. But the point isn't so much to see who's best as it is for the artists to encourage each other to strive as far as their muse can take them. That's good advice for musicians in any city; jazz artists in New Orleans just happen to live by it.

For upcoming concert information, check out Basin Street Records or call (504) 483-0002. For general information about New Orleans jazz, try Satchmo.com and Offbeat.