By Mike Zwerin
Irvin Mayfield said he'd discussed the nature of the blues
with the Episcopal bishop of New York.
Trumpeter, composer, educator and shaker-and-mover Mayfield
leads several jazz formations in New Orleans,
his hometown, including Les Hombres Calientes, a band
that includes influences from Trinidad, Cuba,
Haiti, Jamaica
and Brazil, as
well as New Orleans. Their debut CD
won the Billboard magazine Latin Music Award in 2000.
``The church got off on the wrong foot with the blues,'' he
had told the bishop. ``Y'all confused the blues, the music, with the word. You
want a good example of the blues? Think `America
the Beautiful,' and now add Ray Charles. You can't get any more modern than the
blues.''
Mayfield, 28, whose verbal chops are spectacular, splits his
time between the Big Easy and the Big Apple. He was in New
York last week for the International Association for
Jazz Education convention.
``People say that Louis Armstrong isn't modern,'' Mayfield
said in an interview. ``They confuse modern with the latest. Armstrong's
concept of expressing yourself and manipulating your instrument like that --
it's still the way you do it. He was the first one to say that this is truly an
artistic voice. But let's not over-conceptualize this stuff.''
Aviation Board
Mayfield sits on the board of directors of the New Orleans
Chamber of Commerce and, according to his Web site, he has also been
``unanimously appointed to the post of cultural ambassador for the city of New
Orleans by the United States Senate, the House of Representatives, the
Governor's Office of the State of Louisiana, the Louisiana State
Representatives, the Louisiana State Senate, the City of New Orleans, the New
Orleans City Council and the New Orleans Aviation Board.''
Aviation Board? Never mind. He
continued: ``What people don't understand is that jazz
is basically celebratory music. When somebody dunks a basketball into the hoop,
everybody cheers. Not in jazz. What a lot of young people have gotten wrong in
the post-Wynton (Marsalis) age is that they don't
think they ought to be enjoying playing jazz. Music cannot survive like that.
Music is too participatory.
``In New Orleans,
people are going to stop and talk to you, ask you who you are. They say: 'Look,
we got a party tonight, so-and-so is playing. Come on over. The drummer's
cooking.' In New Orleans, a serious
musician is expected to know how to cook. Where the food is, that's where we
are going to be playing.''
Along with Delfeayo Marsalis --
who produced Mayfield's self-titled debut CD for Basin
Street records in 1999 -- and local icons such as
Harry Connick, Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Payton and
Delfeayo's brothers Branford and Wynton,
Mayfield is working to help reconstruct the washed-out psychic as well as
physical scene in the post-Katrina New Orleans
jazz community.
`We're Using Big Vision'
``Our job is to make recommendations about how to spend the
appropriations passed,'' said Mayfield, who lost his father to Katrina. ``We
say, `Hey, this is what you should give money to.' And we're using big vision,
not small vision. A lot of times, we don't think big enough for jazz. We'll
have an iconic jazz space where jazz is done 24 hours a day, with a record
store, radio station, clubs, orchestras. Big-time.''
Although the funding is lagging, Mayfield, who also directs
the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, is confident. ``We will do this in the
warehouse district, which is right next to the French Quarter. It's going to
happen. We have already chosen the location,'' he said.
The January issue of the magazine JazzTimes
detected an upside to the Katrina disaster: ``Institutional racism,
bureaucratic ineptitude, political corruption -- these
were things that needed to be dredged up and exposed.''
The magazine said there were ``impassioned performances of
everything from John Coltrane's 'Giant Steps' to a classic rendition of Hoagy Carmichael's `New Orleans''' at the Snug Harbor club
in November and that there has been action in other clubs as well. Sometimes it
has even been hard to find parking spaces.
`Hot Stuff'
Jazz in New Orleans
has long been a center of gravity of its own. Local musicians who didn't move
to New York didn't necessarily
find themselves defined as ``local.'' Those who did move, however, were
perceived, according to Mayfield, ``like we thought we were hot stuff, like we
were better, or something.''
There was that perception. New Orleans
musicians dominated the world of jazz in the 1980s and 1990s and they could be
clannish. ``A lot of people would benefit from knowing more about the New
Orleans scene,'' he said. ``There's a lot more going
on than tourist parades and Preservation Hall. Music is more than just music in
New Orleans, it's
life. We eat a certain way, we talk a certain way, we dance a certain way and
we make a certain kind of music.
``In a way, we are just another poor little Caribbean
island. Like Cuba
and Jamaica --
they got their own cultures too. New York
is also an island, of course. It's much more metropolitan. It's cold and it's
honest. New Orleans is the
opposite. It's hot and it's warm.''
2/6/06
Source: Mike Zwerin at mikezwerin@free.fr.
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