Los Hombres Calientes: Irving Mayfield & Bill Summers

Vol. 5: Carnival of this hopefully never-ending series takes the idea of Carnival and fashions an entire lengthy album of fusions of nearly every kind of music at their fingertips. As always, trumpeter Irvin Mayfield, percussion guru Bill Summers and company fling themselves from their home base in New Orleans to all over the Caribbean and clear over the pond into Africa in search of new cross-pollinations of sounds and rhythms. Drawing upon experience from previous volumes, some of the tracks are separated by interludes (such as "Ewesi Para Hevioso" and "Alakati Owo") that delve into the deepest African strains within Cuban music. In the interest of touching as many bases as possible, Mayfield even makes a swerve into New Orleans funk in "James Booker" with heavy-handed piano help from Ronald Markham. The idea might have been to stage a fictional meeting between Booker and Lee Morgan, yet it doesn't quite lift off. But "George Porter" has a more convincing, rolling Crescent City second-line feeling, and "Rojo's Revenge" takes a lighter funk route, with detours into salsa. "The Mardi Gras Second Line" is a deliciously noisy controlled riot, with lots of talkin' and whooping in the background. "Cubacajun Carnival"" leans more toward Cuba than Louisiana, with some early Dizzy-style horn from Mayfield, yet the co-leader generously gives the high-wire act over to trumpeter Bernard E. Floyd on the rhumba-flavored title track. "Mardi Gras Bayou" is a joyously grooving thing that mixes in rhythms from the Brazilian interior -- and that leads directly into "Carnival Kongo," which goes straight into the heart of guitar-driven West Coast Afro-pop. So this turns out to be an energetic journey from Cuba at the start to Africa at the finish -- the historical path of Afro-Cuban jazz music in reverse. ~ Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide