Irvin Mayfield and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra

The
co-founder of Los Hombres Calientes, young Irvin Mayfield has over the years
abetted the impeccable precision of his trumpet lines with increasingly
emotional long-form compositions. How Passion Falls in 2001 was his personal
response to the first time his heart was broken, and Strange Fruit, recorded
four years later, is an incendiary tale of a lynching arising out of an
interracial romance. For the latter, Mayfield assembled a seventeen-piece orchestra
of New Orleans-based musicians. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, they have
become an ongoing nonprofit organization and are currently on tour playing
Mayfield’s latest opus, the as-yet unrecorded Rising Tide, about that epic
storm that flooded New Orleans and took the life of Mayfield’s father and
dozens of others.

8:00 p.m., Orchestra Hall,
1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis; 612-371-5656.