Los Hombres Calientes: Hot new sounds from the northernmost Carribean city
Wednesday 12 June @ 12:27:22 |
 by Dan Emerson
CD store clerks may file Los Hombres Calientes’ recordings in the “Latin jazz” category, but Bill Summers considers the term misleading and inaccurate. What record companies lump into the vague, catch-all category of Latin jazz has African and Cuban origins, he contends. “When you really look at it, most of what is now considered ‘Latin’ was introduced by Afro-Cubans,” says Summers, who founded the New Orleans-based rhythm powerhouse that has become a world music phenomenon. The instruments identified with so-called “Latin” jazz—clave, bongos, congas, and timbales—have African roots, he notes. “Some of it is racially motivated; some people preferred not to put an African description to the music, so they called it ‘Latin.’ I associate ‘Latin’ with Rome.”
Regardless of what it’s called, the driving, polyglot sound of Los Hombres has elevated it to a level of popularity and influence far beyond the “jazz ghetto.” People who wouldn’t normally venture into a jazz club find the group’s polyrhythmic groove irresistible, as it takes listeners on a musical ride through Africa, Cuba, the Caribbean, and beyond. Next week (June 17-19), the sextet returns to St. Paul’s Dakota Bar and Grill, where it has become one of the club’s most popular touring attractions.
The 53-year old Summers, who co-founded Los Hombres in 1998 with rising trumpet star Irvin Mayfield, was previously best known as the percussion dynamo in Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, one of the most commercially successful jazz-funk groups of the 1970s. Summers isn’t a New Orleans native, although both his parents were raised in Louisiana. He grew up in Detroit, where he used his paper route earnings to buy his first set of bongos at the age of 13.
He got his first big career break while a student at the University of California-Berkeley, where his folkloric ensemble opened a show for Hancock. When Hancock returned a year later, Summers sat in and Hancock, impressed, bought him to Los Angeles for a gig at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium with Hancock and Alice Coltrane. After several years with the Headhunters, Summers launched a solo career in pop jazz-funk territory, recording a number of LPs as a leader for several major labels. He recorded a number of LPs as the leader of Summers’ Heat and, later, the more exotic Project Iroko.
In 1991, Summers moved to steamy New Orleans—often referred to as “the northernmost Caribbean city,” due to its multicultural riches—and his educational work with young musicians led to his introduction to Mayfield, then a teenage trumpet phenom. The fiery Mayfield is considered the next great New Orleans trumpeter, in a distinguished lineage that extends back nearly a century to Louis Armstrong.
In combining modern jazz and traditional rhythms from all over the world, Los Hombres hit on a recipe that attracts audiences “from 10 to 80, across every part of society,” Summer says. “You can’t put us in any kind of category because we’re playing everything. You can play very avantgarde-sounding melodies on top of this music, because the rhythm part is very danceable.
Summers’ world-class percussion chops are backed up by a scholar’s knowledge of global rhythms. After years of study, Summers was initiated into one of a handful of select African percussion “fraternities.” He completed a process that involves playing several hundred traditional rhythms, each with its own name, and having the hands blessed by an African priest.
“When people see a conga drum or any kind of percussion, with skin, claves, bells, tambourines... they just consider those things to beat on; they assume there’s no content. They are shocked to find out that, in traditional music, there is no improvisation. In West African music—which most percussion instruments in the ‘new world’ are related to, each instrument has a certain function. You have to learn the traditional applications for each one.”
Los Hombres’ music “is not fusion,” Summers says. Everything we put inside of the music is an unaltered concept; it’s more of a family reunion. Africa is the base, then we draw from where those influences have gone—Cuba, Haiti Jamaica, Brazil...” Over time, “people from the same ethnic group spread across Africa, the Caribbean and South America came up with new hybrids; when the music went to Brazil, (for example) they came up with Jobim. Were not fusing anything; we’re allowing the purity of each expression.”
Summers says the band’s upcoming CD on Basin Street Records, “Voodoo Dance,” will be the fourth in what he hopes will be a series of a dozen or so that will encompass “all of the music that came out of Africa,” stretching far afield to include “fandango, calypso, Celtic jigs...everything from Europe and Australia. That’s our journey.”
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